Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Welcome to her Empire Builder show. I am Tina Tower and this is part two in my three part series of making money online. So the first episode that just went out was how to get your first dollar. This episode is to go from $1 to your first hundred thousand dollars. And then the following in the three part series is how to make your first million in online courses. So let's get started with the one to a hundred thousand how to SC course business. Now you've made the first sale, so you know the thrill of seeing money hit your bank account. Yay.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:00:39]:
Like you did it, that is a massive, massive milestone and it's from something that you created. But now the question is how do you turn that into a real business that can build, like, bring in that consistent and scalable revenue? And today we're going to talk about how we can go from 1 to 100,000 in your course business. And this is where things start to get exciting, right? So I, I always think like the first dollar is definitely the hardest, but it's still a hard road to get to that first a hundred thousand. Like I'm really selling the dream to you, right? But I don't want you to have false pretenses. I want you to go in eyes wide open and know that getting to that hundred thousand dollars is like, once you get past that, life gets so much easier. You've got enough money in the pie to then go to team assistance, to go to marketing, to go to yourself. When you're on that like zero to a hundred, there's not quite enough there for everything that you need. And so we sprint through this part as quickly as we possibly can.

Tina Tower[00:01:39]:
And in this episode, I'm going to tell you how.

Tina Tower [00:01:44]:
Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. I'm your host, Tina Tower, business strategist, course creator, best selling author and unapologetic champion for women chasing big, audacious dreams. Since starting my first business at 20, I've built and sold multiple companies, traveled the globe and discovered the magic of online courses. A business model that has changed my life forever. Building a business is no easy feat. It's a long road filled with sometimes challenges. But with the right strategy and consistency, your success is not only possible, but it's inevitable. Here on the show, I'm bringing you candid conversations with extraordinary humans, practical strategies and a whole lot of inspiration to help you scale your online business, create wealth, freedom and impact that you deserve.

Tina Tower [00:02:33]:
This is where bold dreams meet proven action, where we ditch the limits and go all in on business building. And we get to live lives full of fun and freedom that light us up. If you're ready to play bigger, earn more and step into your power as a fearless empire builder, you're in the right place. Let's make it happen.

Tina Tower[00:02:54]:
Okay, so our hundred thousand dollar game plan, what got you here will not get you there. We now have to change our mindset a little bit and you know, work out that while getting to a hundred thousand and scaling any business at any stage is not necessarily working harder, it is about working a lot smarter and using a lot of systems and using a lot of automation and using a lot of strategy in saying that you do need to work hard. And so, you know, I'll hear people say you can build a business on 10 hours a week and you can. It just depends on, on what type of business and how quickly you want to be able to grow that. So I want to go through the four steps to getting to that a hundred thousand in your business. Now step one is to create a scalable offer and price it for growth. So if you're looking at your office structure, you really want to look at your pricing and make sure that you have that right. Pricing in an online business can be one of the trickiest things to get right because, you know, I started my, my first business was an educational toy store.

Tina Tower [00:03:59]:
I sold educational toys and then we developed a tutoring center after that. Both of those things really simple in pricing strategy. So for example, in the toy store if I bought something for $2, you'd sell it for $4. With the tutoring center, we would charge $80 an hour for tutoring and I'd pay the teachers $40 an hour. Really terrible in terms of profit margin because 50% is going to the delivery. But that's just the way it worked. And so it was very clear cut with how to do it with pricing inside an online business, it's not as clear cut and I've got a whole episode just about pricing that we did a while ago. So I'll link to that in the show notes.

Tina Tower [00:04:40]:
But when we are looking at how to price things you really want to in an online business, it is all about value. It is all about the transformation promise. It's all about the roi. If you are serving business to business, there's some programs that are serving, you know, there's no financial return so it's a little bit harder in terms of how you can price that. But you really want to make sure that the value proposition is reflective of, of that price and vice versa. Um, so A course priced at $500. To get to that hundred thousand that you're aiming for, you need 200 sales. A $2,000 program needs 50 sales.

Tina Tower [00:05:17]:
So always when I'm looking at things, I go, which is easier to be able to sell and deliver. And often in my experience it's been the higher price. The $2,000 program for 50 sales. Way easier for me to sell than a $500 program and sell it 200 times. Like in terms of effort versus reward, I would pick the higher price program every single time. And so you've got to look at like your skill set, who you're serving. For me, fewer high value clients is always a better idea. But that is because of the tendencies that I have, who I like to work with and how I like to deliver at more of a higher, higher touch point and higher price point with that as well.

Tina Tower [00:06:01]:
If you are selling at a lower price, what you can do. So say you go, you know what, I don't want to do high touch points. I don't want to do that high price point. I want to do low price point and high value. And that is cool. Like so many people build their businesses very, very scalable using that strategy. But if you are going to do the lower price point, what I encourage you to look at is adding on some higher priced things that can get you there faster. Because like I said, we want to get to that hundred thousand as quickly as we can so that your business becomes more viable and more sustain.

Tina Tower [00:06:33]:
And so with that you can add upsells so you can have things like group coaching. You could have one on one coaching, you could put a membership in there. What you're looking at doing is how do you increase revenue per customer? So it is much more expensive to buy a new customer than it is to sell to an existing customer. And I know that that can sound a little crass, but if you look at it from a purely business marketing point of view, a customer costs a lot of money to acquire. The acquisition cost of a customer is, is going to be anywhere depending on how you're acquiring them, anywhere from like 20 to $200. Generally when you're looking at the online course space. And so if you're looking at an acquisition cost more around the $200 mark and you're selling them a program for $200 or $300, you're going to have to do a lot of volume before you start to break a profit, before you start to really see some money being left over at the end of the day. And so what you want to be able to do is increase that revenue per customer.

Tina Tower [00:07:34]:
Because once you've acquired that customer, if you give them a really, really great experience and then you can get them into that next level and that next level and keep solving the problems for them, they're going to love you and you're going to love running the business. So you want to look at that and like I said in the previous episode, make sure you're not underpricing due to fear. Okay, Step two is to build an evergreen funnel. Excuse me. So this sounds funny, me talking about this because I am obsessed with live launching. Like, I think live launching is the way to go. It is what gives you the big results. It, in my experience has always worked better than running Evergreen.

Tina Tower [00:08:15]:
So you may be saying, well, Tina, why are you talking about Evergreen? And this is because when you start out, you have a small audience and you have a small following. And so when you do a launch, you can't launch again. Like, I know in the first two years that I run ran online programs, I launched every 12 weeks for two years. That is a lot. And you can't really go any more than that. Now I do two live launches a year and that is perfect. I would rather do two bigger concentrated launches than do smaller, like many launches along the way. And so the reason I say Evergreen in your first year or in your first a hundred thousand is because if you run a live launch, even if you're doing it every 12 weeks, say you run your first live launch and you're like, I got 10 people.

Tina Tower [00:09:01]:
So 10 people is great for a first live launch, but it's probably not enough to sustain you for the next three months. You're like, okay, doors have closed. Oh my gosh. So I'm not going to earn any money between now and in three months time. Like, I kind of need some money coming through the door. So this is where you can have your Evergreen offer that is there so that people can be coming in while they wait for your signature offer to be opened with the live launch. So have that evergreen sales funnel so you're not relying on live launches alone. And you'll get there much, much faster.

Tina Tower [00:09:31]:
So you need to have a consistent lead flow and not have just those like one off sales. And so your three must have pieces into that Evergreen sales funnel is your lead magnet. So you're inside her empire builder, which by the way, is opening very, very soon. So if you are not on the waitlist for her empire build builder, the link is in the notes below, but you can just go to her empire builder.com and jump on the waitlist there. We are opening that soon. And if you want to know how to do all of this stuff, like everything is there for you to know how all of your templates, all of the things that you need are all there so that you don't have to like overthink and overcomplicate. You can just get it and run with it and focus on what you're really good at. But so lead magnets, what I talk about inside her empire Builder is a new lead magnet every month because you don't quite know which ones are going to like hit the most.

Tina Tower [00:10:20]:
So when you're doing that lead magnet, you're giving something really valuable that's going to like stop the scroll that people are going to want to opt in for. They're going to give you their email address, you're going to give them the lead magnet, then you can put them on a new friend sequence. So we call the email sequence that follows that like new friend in going, hey, like welcome to our world. Here is here is all about it. And that is generally going to be, depending on what market you're serving. Anywhere from like 4 to 7 ish emails we did back in the early days of us running in online, we were building a lot of people's kajabi sites for them. And I remember like once we had someone with a new friend sequence that did 70 emails in the follow up sequence going after that, which is by the way, if you're wondering, too many. But we want to stick with that.

Tina Tower [00:11:08]:
Like, like 4 to 7 is perfect for that nurture. And what that does is it allows people to get to know you, it builds the trust there and then it's going to position your offer so that when you then go to sell that evergreen program, they're like, great, I've been waiting for this. Like, this is exactly what I wanted. And so that gives you like an automated sales process from that email funnel that you've got going out. You're then going to put people into a prerecorded webinar or maybe you've got a challenge coming up or you've got a really highly converting sales page that has a good video on it. Anything that could go in there and then get those sales coming through when you're in that off season. So you're not just relying on those live launches is going to work. Okay, Step three to getting this going is having leveraged organic and possibly paid marketing.

Tina Tower [00:11:55]:
So I have talked a lot on the podcast about how I got to the first million dollars Inside Her Empire Builder without spending any money on ads. And that's something that I purposely did because I wanted to have organic growth. And so what you want to be able to do is to start building organically. I'm reluctant to encourage anyone to throw money at Facebook because I've seen too many people spend too much and not get that return on investment. And so if you were going to start with paid marketing, what I'd advise is starting off with like a $5 a day lead gen ad. Again, that's something that we teach Inside Her Empire Builder. It means that you're getting leads coming in and you're not spending so much that you're not going to get that roi. Because sometimes if you pump up that ad spend too quickly, it doesn't give you the same result as if you had kept it small.

Tina Tower [00:12:50]:
So what you want to do is if you want to be really consistent. Consistency over time is the key to growth. Let me tell you that hands down you will beat everyone if you just stay in the game and stay consistent because people will drop off and you will still, still be there. And so if you can have an organic consistent strategy, it, you know, you may be too impatient for it, but if you can keep going with it, you are going to get those results. So that is looking at like Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook and wherever your audience hangs out and then using a mix of content. So one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is just like sell, sell, sell, sell, sell or not sell it all I see people like it either one of the spectrums, they're either they're like every post is buy now I've got this or they're just like non stop engagement posts and fun posts and never selling anything and no one knows how to buy from them. So you want to have that beautiful combination of educational posts, thought leadership posts, fun and engaging posts, promo posts, customer spotlights. Like having that content mix in there so that you are getting both growth on your social media accounts, but also conversions into sales as well.

Tina Tower [00:14:03]:
Talk about your course all the time. Like wherever you are, whatever you are doing, make sure you're talking about it all the time. Like I have said previously, a secret does not sell. So you need to be talking about it all the time. Uh, and now paid ads when you are ready to scale. Like if you're coming in and you're like, you know what, I've got more money than time. So I'm going to spend money on the ads. If you've made your first 10 to 20k, that is when I'd say, all right, start investing in some paid advertising.

Tina Tower [00:14:33]:
So again with that like $5 a day lead ad is a really good way to start. You could then pump it up to like 10 or $20 a day and you're really playing the game to see at what level that conversion or that cost per lead starts going up. So you want to have a good cost per lead that you're willing to spend. I know for some industries that can be as low as 3 to $5. For some it can go up to $10. So you're going to decide what is that cost per lead that you are comfortable with and what is the volume that you can do that that's going to stay sustainable in to give you those leads. And not only give you the leads because you know, the worst is if you were spending money on ads that were giving you leads of not the right people, you want people that are going to convert. You want your people.

Tina Tower [00:15:19]:
So don't go too wide with those audiences. Like, don't worry about vanity numbers. You don't need 5,000 people on your email list. It's way better to have a thousand that are super highly engaged annual people that want to buy from you. Okay, step four is focus on customer experience and like I said before, repeat buyers. So your students and the graduates of your programs will be your best salespeople. I remember like when I grew my service based business, everything was word of mouth. So much of the business, I reckon three quarters of the business that came in was word of mouth.

Tina Tower [00:15:55]:
When I came into online, I truly underestimated the amount of word mouth would work because I thought, you know, we're a global business, most of it's just going to be online, it's going to be by people we don't know. What I have found is people that have joined my programs, they have been listening to the podcast for a really long time and or they've been told by a friend and that is the majority of people like 65% will come in because somebody has had a really great experience and they want the same result that their friend got. And so don't underestimate the power of word of mouth there with your current clients. So what you have to do for that is obviously deliver an incredible transformation with your course, which we all know. Like that I think is the easiest part because you're going into this because you're an expert at what you do because you love what you do, because you care about what you do. I actually think for most people, like, you've got this part down, um, because that's the thing you're going to be best at. But then it's using those testimonials to grow the business even further. So putting it out there in the public domain so that people can see it and go, all right, like people like me do business with people like her.

Tina Tower [00:17:03]:
Maybe I want to get on that as well. Um, the other thing you can do is introduce like a referral or an affiliate system with your current client. So if you've got like your first 10, 20 people that have gone through and they're like, that was amazing, I loved it. Look at doing an affiliate program for future. So the way we build a lot of our evergreen courses is with affiliates. So we do 40% commission for our affiliates, which is quite high. And what that means is say our course is a hundred dollars, they get $40 straight away. So it's really, really incentivizing for someone to be able to recommend that to their friend.

Tina Tower [00:17:42]:
But it's also great for us because it means that that's marketing that we don't have to do. And so really great way to be able to get those runs on the board. Sometimes people will say like, I don't want to give away that much of my pie. That's a decision that you have to make is going, if it's a higher priced product, it is easier to do a lower commission because there's still enough like reward for the person that's referring. But you want to make sure, like say you're running a program that's $200 and you're only going to do a 10% commission. Is anyone really going to bother sharing it for $20? So you've got to make sure that it's going to actually work and be a win, win situation for both of those sides. And then you can upsell and cross sell, which we, which we kind of talked about before. Okay, I want to go through common mistakes that keep people stuck and not going over that six figure mark.

Tina Tower [00:18:30]:
Because this is where I see a lot of people do get stuck in the weeds here. Once you get over that a hundred thousand, it's actually, I think way easier getting from 100,000 to a million than it is getting from 0 to 100. So these are the things that I see people getting stuck on. One is not tracking your numbers. So you need to know your numbers. You need to geek out on your numbers. Do not ignore them. We have, like, key metrics sheets inside Home Empire Builder, which has, like, measurements of all of the key levers inside of your business.

Tina Tower [00:19:02]:
So you look at things like your cost of acquisition, your lifetime value, your monthly recurring revenue, your account growth on social media, like, all of the key numbers that we need to know, and then you're recording them every week. I am always disheartened when I ask people, all right, who's got their key metrics? And, you know, we'll have half the people's hands go up and the other half of the people just like it was. I didn't do it. It wasn't me. Oh. I will tell you, the people whose hands go up, their businesses grow faster because what is tracked and measured grows because you're focusing on it and you're trying to influence those numbers in the right direction. And so you need to know things like your conversion rates, your cost per lead, your ROI on your marketing activities, because what that does is it gives you that knowledge. You don't have to guess, you don't have to go with gut instinct and intuition.

Tina Tower [00:19:51]:
You can just look at the raw data and go, okay, this is what's working, this is what's not. I'm going to be really pragmatic about it. I'm going to change these things and I'm going to make these decisions so that we can grow the business and get it to where we want to go. The other one is waiting for everything to be perfect. The faster you launch, the faster you can optimize. So don't wait for everything to be perfect. Your butt will be kicked every day by people that move faster than you. So if you can go as fast as you can to market, if you can fail fast.

Tina Tower [00:20:19]:
Even now, I know failing feels horrible. I have failed many, many times. And I know everybody who succeeded at anything is very accustomed to failure. It sucks every time and it never gets better. But what does get better is our ability to know that we can fail forward, that we can fail and it's not a dirty word. And we can learn lessons from that and then implement those things into our business so that we can do better and better and not make those same mistakes again. And it means that as we level up, we're going to try new things that we haven't done before, and our chances of failure at them are probably still a 50, 50. And so we're going to win some, we're going to lose some, but it means that the ones we win are going to escalate our businesses massively.

Tina Tower [00:21:02]:
So if you can go faster, it means you can get those problems out of the way and you can move your business onto like the easiest street, which definitely comes after the hundred thousand dollar mark. The other is relying only on launches, which I spoke about before. And this is why I think it's really important to have an evergreen funnel or something that's building, bringing in money. One of the ways that I see people do this other than an evergreen funnel, is you might have that evergreen funnel built. But another really good way, especially if you've already come from consulting or service space, is to keep one on one consulting going. It's something that I see people let go of too early. So when I started, for example, I was doing one on one business coaching with people and I kept that going until we reached over a million dollars a year. Most people I see give that up very, very soon cause they're like, I want all my energy to go in this direction, but because I've been the breadwinner of my family, I can't let that money go.

Tina Tower [00:21:59]:
And so for me it was going all right. Well, I know I want the more scalable activities to take over so that it's not so laborious on my time all the way. Um, but you can't just cut that and hope it's going to grow or what are you going to eat? You know, how are you going to pay your mortgage? And so it's the real balancing act in going okay, so if we're doing one on one consulting, we're going to keep it there and we're going to have to put energy and effort into growing our online courses. But we're not going to get paid as much for that at the beginning. Like it's, it's an overworked and underpaid until you're under worked and overpaid. But you've got to do the effort until you can get there. And so it's this balancing, acting going, putting all the effort into here, but still keeping this going until your course sales overtake your one on one consulting. And then that is when I'd start to taper that off.

Tina Tower [00:22:47]:
But I wouldn't do that anytime before or you're going to leave yourself shortchanged. So really not only relying on those launches so that you can keep that cash flow flowing through the business. And then the other mistake that I see people make is ignoring audience growth. So the more leads you bring in, the more potential buyers that you have. And it can be really Hard because at the, you know, in that first six figures you're being pulled in many, many different directions, you're wearing many, many hats and you can't afford all of the assistance that you need. You know, you are in any given day, you are working on your accounting, you are marketing your business, you've got your phone in your face, being an influencer, you're creating course curriculum, you are designing new products, you are doing some care work, you are replying to emails, you are customer service. Not to mention for a lot of women, they're also primary caregiver of their children and looking after their households like it is, it is a lot. However, if you can handle all of that, the rewards are going to be far better.

Tina Tower [00:23:56]:
And so if you can focus on audience growth and when you are doing everything, not dropping the ball in other areas, so what I mean by that is because you have to do so many different things. I'll see when people are delivering, say you've launched your first course and then you get into delivery mode. This is something I see all the time is you ran your first launch, you've got your first 10 clients, you're running people through and then you plan to launch again in another 12 weeks. But because you were so focused on the delivery, it gets to like two weeks before the next launch, you're like, oh crap, I forgot to build my list, I forgot to build the audience. Like there's no one new there to launch to. And so you have to always be focused on the big picture and on delivering right now, always future focused and in the present. It's one of the skills that are just essential to being an entrepreneur. And so what I would like you to really remember is always, always, always be focused on new audience growth at all times and simultaneously serving the socks off your current clients.

Tina Tower [00:24:58]:
If you can hold both of those things at once, you're going to build a big and beautiful business. So scaling to a hundred thousand and beyond in your business is totally, totally possible. In fact, if you do all of those things and you do them consistently, it is not just possible, but it is absolutely inevitable. And when you focus on those high value offers, on automation, on starting to get some help and some team in there, and of course consistent audience, consistent audience growth, then it's going to happen. It's just, it's on its way. So if you are serious about scaling and you want to have all the strategies for that and all the help to get you there faster, check out her empire builder. We are opening soon. Go to her Empire builder dot com.

Tina Tower [00:25:42]:
Get yourself on the wait list when we. When we open. Like, we have people in there. This is. This is what I do. This is the whole thing. And we teach everything step by step, so that every single thing that you have to do, there is a template for, there is script for. It just gets you there much faster, which is, you know, what we all want.

Tina Tower [00:26:01]:
Because then you're left with the business that you can feel really good, it's sustainable, it's consistent, it's running, and you can love what you do, which is what we all want. All right, I'll see you for part three. Making its way to $1 million.