In today’s episode, I’m wrapping up our whirlwind tour of the Cushy CEO Roadmap—my ultimate guide to scaling your business with ease.
If you’ve been caught in the cycle of burnout, juggling too many offers, or struggling to break past the multi-six-figure mark, this is for you! I’m breaking down the final steps to simplify and scale your business without losing your sanity—or your weekends.
We’ll talk about creating a standout group program that does the heavy lifting, understanding your data (yep, it’s a game-changer), and building a lean, mean team that works like clockwork.
If you’re ready to move beyond the chaos and want a strategy that feels effortless and sustainable, grab the roadmap from the show notes, and let’s make scaling fun again.
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00:00
Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale. On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.
00:44
Hello, and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.
And we are concluding the whistle stop tour of the Cushy CEO Roadmap, which is my freebie, which you can find in the show notes. And for those of you who’ve not taken the time to download it, I am being anti poly and force feeding you it, because I’m deeply passionate about helping all coaches, all consultants, all service providers, understand that there is a very simple way to scale your business all the way to seven figures, if you wish, without needing to have a crazy heavy workload, without needing to have an enormous team, without needing to have a gazillion different offers and funnels, it gets to be incredibly streamlined. And the journey when you know what to focus on can happen at borderline hyper speed. But the challenge is, I say, borderline hyperspeed. It’s never at hyperspeed. And you will be challenged along the way. There will be times when you don’t see the evidence immediately and you will want to give up. There will be times when you’ll be distracted by someone who makes it sound easier than the experience you’ve had so far, and you’ll want to go do whatever that is. There’ll be times where you there is an imbalance between your money now and money later, tasks which leave you at some point with a cash flow issue, which can have you emotionally doubting everything. Which is why I’m such a huge fan of data. So just to if you’re like, tuning into this for the first time and you’ve not had the last two, last two episodes, I’m going to get you up to speed somewhat. So firstly, if you’re listening to this and thinking, Polly, have you broken through the multi six figure threshold? I’m going to be very transparent and say, no, no, I haven’t. Have I supported my clients to break through the multi six figure threshold on various occasions at this stage, always bridesmaid, never the bride, although that is changing very shortly. Anyway, I wanted to be transparent about that, so I have supported my clients with their strategy, with their systems, with their processes, with their office suite to elevate what they’re doing already and to get to seven figures. And I will be speaking to some of those case studies as I share some of this with you.
Okay, so that’s like piece number one. Piece number two is where, how do we get to this stage in the first place that you’re out at a multi six figure like, kind of point that you want to break through from, what is the journey to get to there, and get to there in a way that feels really, really great, because there will be some of you who will be at the stage where perhaps you’re overspending on your team. You don’t really know what you’re doing with your ads. You feel like your ads are kind of like just eating all your blooming potential profit margins. But the same time you’re scared to live without them, your office suite may be driving you absolutely crazy. You don’t know what to be promoting when there can be all sorts of things that come up at this stage, and it doesn’t need to be that way. So I talked about this process through the analogy of baking. I talk about the very first phase of this journey being the cupcake where you have all the ingredients, you know you have what’s required to bake the perfect group offer. But up until now, perhaps you’ve not had the confidence to do so. So I very handily, have given you a tiny exercise to help you gain clarity on that group offer is now, obviously I can’t give you everything, because it’s a very deep process that you know when I support my clients through it takes three to four months, but that little exercise alone, I hope, will give you evidence of what’s possible, and if it’s not been enough, I also have a free On Demand training on called How to create a better than the rest group program, which You get access to when you download the cushy CEO roadmap. So if you’ve not looked at that and you’d love more clarity on what your offer is, if you’re feeling a bit stuck at that stage, then please do go check that out. Then Phase two is the phase I call the cherry on top. This is the next phase I see my clients get to where they. They have an offer that has sold, but they kind of feel like they’re struggling to be heard above the industry noise. Perhaps they’re getting a bit bored of their own messaging, or they feel they have outgrown their messaging, and they kind of feel like it’s not representative of them or the offers, their offers, or their clients. Perhaps their business has evolved to the extent that they’re now working with a whole new level of client, and their current branding or messaging doesn’t reflect that.
So the cherry on top is kind of the phase where I’m like, well, let’s make this stand out now. Like it’s kind of the brand positioning phase. It’s certainly the phase that I went through about two years ago, you know, after having sold and made, you know, multi six figures on my core program on how to create an evergreen offer, I knew the next stage to be that memorable, Memorable Person in this industry was to create a memorable brand. And so that has been my focus for, I’d say, almost 18 months now. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and it’s a really, you know, it’s a really important piece of the journey, because there are, you know, like the online business space is a lot of opportunity, which means there’s a lot of people jumping in. And if you want to be heard above the noise, it’s not just enough to say, I help blah Dee blah to blahdy blah anymore. That’s not cutting it anymore. Okay, taking the time to really understand what makes you different is everything. Again, that’s what I support my clients with inside our mastermind, because it’s so intrinsic, and I find it’s often the clients who are fully booked, one to one, or who’ve been reliant on live launching so far, who working on those pieces is really fundamental for them. The other thing that I support them with at that stage is helping them understand rather than get distracted by another real strategy, or throwing themselves into ads before it’s necessarily a comfortable situation for them to do that is helping them get close to their data, to create systems and processes in their business and support in their business, so that when they hire they do it within like Crazy accuracy. They know exactly what they need. They know exactly how they’re going to measure the results. They know exactly who’s the best fit for it, and they know how to market it or advertise it so that the right person comes in, and that already is going to make a world of difference to your tiny business. I say tiny because we are tiny businesses, right? Like we’re a big deal in our little, tiny worlds. You know hiring correctly. Really, really matters, as does understanding, if you are advertising, what kind of advertising, how, when, where, what budget. That’s really important.
Again, that’s something I help my clients with within the mastermind is understanding where your sales are coming from. It’s understanding where your leads are coming from. It’s understanding on the unique opportunities your business specifically has, because let’s be entirely on it, but honest about this, there are some people like, from the day I started my own business, my first ever mentor said Polly, I don’t know when you’re going to do it, but you need to have a you need to have a podcast. Like, now is not the time. And she was entirely right, because I was just starting out. But she was like, I can see you having a podcast probably because I’m an absolute chatterbox, right? You know? But I, likewise with my clients, will kind of say, Yeah, podcasts would be amazing for you, not right now, because podcasts are an investment, right? And there are various things that will help you elevate your efforts and monetize your efforts with a podcast that there isn’t much point putting the car in front the horse, so, yeah, knowing the right time to do what and when is actually like, crazily so boring, but crazily important at that stage. And the best way you can do that, I know my first ever coach talked about understanding our body barometer and tuning into our body barometer as we make decisions. Well, it’s kind of similar with your business. It’s your business barometer when you can truly understand your unique business’s needs and take rinse and repeatable strategies that will get you to the next stage. Oh my gosh, the things you can do are pretty much limitless. They genuinely are because you have become the master of your own ship. Like, honestly, it’s so effing powerful. Like this year,
09:01
I slowed down my growth. I didn’t want to be growing fast. I had a wedding to plan. I had children. Stuff come up that I don’t want to share publicly on here, but there was family, let’s just say there were family things coming up that needed my attention. And being a little bit of the perfectionist that I am, I didn’t want any of the standards in my business to slide while I was dealing with those things, I didn’t want any of it compromised. But you know what was really powerful having a business that’s doing well enough that I knew which gears I could pull back on and which ones I could lean forward on without worrying about the future or the success or the monthly recurring revenue. My business, like, that’s a effing flex in itself. I will tell you friends now I’m all like, oh, like, foot to the gas ready to go again, because a lot of those issues are resolved, and I, in the meantime, actually had time to slowly tied up, tidy up a few back end pieces that have left me feeling more confident than ever and more excited than ever to have more impact. So. But anyway, this is a lot of detail, and we haven’t even got to the part where I tell you how to break past the multi six figure threshold. But I have been sharing these pieces with you because if you are hitting the multi six figure ceiling and not going beyond, and you’re hearing anything I’m sharing right now thinking oof, I never did that bit. Do I need to do that bit? You and I should talk friend, because sometimes it literally is a like, you know, if you think about a building and the foundation stones, if you’re missing a certain foundation stone, like, think about Jenga. If you’ve got one little brick that’s missing at the bottom, it’s always gonna feel wobbly going up, because you haven’t got the foundations you need. Okay, so you know, and ultimately, what’s beautiful about my little cupcake analogy is I love to see it that you know when you’ve got the systems and processes, when you’ve got a tried and tested recipe, when you know how to ice it with a cherry on top in a way that is irresistible, then all you need to do, my friend, is to create the systems and processes and teams that enable you to batch that out en masse without it needing to be any extra work. Because you know the recipe, you’ve got the processes that are automated that do the heavy lifting for you. Now you’re not hand whisking those cakes.
You’ve got a electronic machines are doing all the whisking icing the cakes, putting the cherry on top, maybe two or three pivotal team members, ensuring that there is quality throughout. I mean, honestly, the analogy fits so perfectly, because that’s how it gets to feel when you have a lickety lick seven figure business model. And if it doesn’t feel like that, chances are those initial foundations were never put in place. The good news is it’s very easy to audit a business and recognize where that is happening, and that is why I do offer a number of audits every quarter. But if you’re listening, in August, they are not coming around anytime soon, but you can certainly reach out to my team and see what I have available for the remaining quarter. But anyway, without further, let’s get into the cushy CEO roadmap and talk about sprinkle and scale. Now this is the shortest part of the guide, predominantly because, you know one, one of my beautiful VIP day clients said to me, like, this is me, but there’s not very much in here to help me understand what I should do next. And I responded to her and said, Well, that’s because it’s kind of unsexy at this stage, and it’s because ultimately, it nearly oil, nearly always boils down to, you know, obviously all businesses rely on lead generation, nurturing and sales. Then when you’re getting to the stage where you’re scaling, you should already have mastered that bit. You know, you wouldn’t be at multi six figures if you weren’t good at lead generation, nurturing those leads and selling. But what you cannot be good at is actual day to day operations. It’s not being, you know, it’s not having a streamlined marketing strategy or a kind of slick, lean team who know what they’re doing, who are autonomous, who can get on with things. There’s a risk that you at this stage are still a bottleneck in the business.
Basically, there’s various different things that can be coming up at this stage that could be influencing why things are the way they are. So for example, where you’ve where you’ve scaled off the back of going through the cupcake and cherry on top process, you can, at scale, still be only coaching four to eight hours per week. I mean, and that’s on the high end, like it gets to be a very tiny number of hours that you are coaching per week. It may even be at this stage that you have other people supporting you with your coaching. So maybe you’re only doing one to two hours per week, which gives you more time to be that CEO, gives you more time to write that book, stand on that stage, host that summit. You know, a lot of people try and do all those things earlier on in business, before they’ve actually created the spaciousness to make it actually manageable in a way that’s not going to compromise your income, and actually it’s only going to elevate it. So when we talk about when’s the time to focus on these things, you don’t need to be focusing on those things when you haven’t got that recurring revenue coming in. So, you know, at this stage in business, I want you to be like coaching less, like four hours a week.
I want you to be attracting consistent, recurring revenue that’s totally scalable. I want you to have a lean team of potentially resident coaches, definitely an admin assistant, almost definitely a social media manager, or content repurposed, or whatever it is that you have in that guise and an OBM ideally managing them so that you’re not needing to manage them too, but that OBM reports to you and they need to know you know what You’re talking about otherwise, I’ve seen so many things go heavily, like having a bad OBM can literally, when I talk about being the master of your ship, if they’re being the master of your ship and they’re steering it in the wrong direction, terrible things can happen. So you want an OBM, and you want one that’s literally like your wing woman who knows you inside out. Knows what you want, and can, like, stand up for what you desire. And oftentimes that does mean embodying elements that you haven’t yet been able to fully embody, yet yourself, you know, and I want you to be able to take time off your from your business, without your finances being impacted, like I take the whole of August off and half of December off each year, and I’ve still been able to scale my revenue year upon year because, because I have my systems, my processes, my team, my offer, my funnels, and there’s a lot of work working in the background when I’m not having to work at all, and that’s just a juicy space to be okay. Oh yeah, and I didn’t mention the fact that I also take the last Friday off of every week, and the last full week of, yeah, full calendar week of each month.
So there’s a lot of spaciousness in my business, and it needs to be that way because I have additional needs kids. I did have chronic fatigue in the past, and there’s always a little bit of like, I don’t want that coming back. And I did get burnt out in the past, so me, like, the best way for me to ensure my well being is to literally block off time for myself and booking manicures and booking massages and booking sauna visits and all those things, because I love work, and I could easily do more of it than is healthy. So the best way for me is to literally be like, ah, time off, phone down, time for yourself. So if you want to hit six, seven figures. Pardon me, it’s simply a matter of reviewing your data and scaling the working parts. I mean, I say that as I read that, I’m like, is that entirely true? There’s more than that. We also want to shut down the broken bits too. So your business processes should be delightfully rinse and repeatable. There should be nothing in your business that isn’t a process. If someone has a payment complaint or a late payment, all of these things should be manageable by your team without you needing to intervene. If you’re live launching that should be mapped out. You shouldn’t have to intervene with that. You should literally just be being told by your team as and when you need to be showing up to do whatever it is you need to do. You know, what you want is to be left with ample time for taking up space as the industry leader that you are. Because when you can do that, you will guarantee a constant influx of new leads and new sales coming in all the time. And what I will say is a well positioned group program does 90% of the heavy lifting when it comes to consistent sales. When you have an offer that people want to tell other people about, that they want to be an affiliate for that, you know, they want to stay in, that they want to be buying your next level. Like it honestly becomes so easy. So if you’ve been sitting on, you know, turning your group program evergreen, if you’ve been thinking it only can be run in live cohorts, that, in itself, can be something that’s enormously holding you back. Equally, if you believe you need to have six or seven different funnels, all with different offers running at the same time, that can be holding you back at the multi six figure trying to get to seven figure stage.
So it’s funny reading my guide back, because I reference the whole double down on what’s working. But actually, one of the things I think is most important at this stage is ditching what isn’t. And in this guide, I’ve given an example of one of the easy, rinse, repeatable strategies that we use in my business that consistently attracts in new clients every single month when we send this email and it’s inside the guide, which, if you go to the show notes, you can download and get this amazing email, which, which literally one person back. I don’t know I remember, trying to remember how long ago it was. I think it was easily over six months ago, but she messaged me, and she was like, my god, I’ve had 30 expressions of interest like my and I can’t remember how many calls booked in, but she basically sold five places on her high ticket group program off the back of this one email alone. So it is a potent and very simple email. So go download the guide so you can get access to that. Because if I read it out, it’s gonna sound totally silly, and as I might have already mentioned, but if, in case I haven’t, there’s also inside this guide a bonus training on creating a better than the rest group program.
18:56
So if you’re thinking, does my group program do the heavy lifting? It needs to. If you’re at that multi six figure, wanting to get to seven figures and thinking is the energetic block, one where I don’t entirely believe in what I’ve actually built, don’t worry. You’re not alone. I think a lot of people feel a bit of shame at this stage to admit that they’re not entirely trusting in the process, the curriculum, the experience that they deliver. But honestly, that just tells me you’re somebody that cares. That just tells me that you know that you want more for your clients. So, yeah, just, uh, just go watch that training and see where that begins. Or, you know, reach out to me and my team. Like, that’s exactly what I help people with. Like, I say you would not be alone. I support a lot of very established business owners with overhauling their office suites. In fact, talking of client case studies who’ve got to seven figures, that’s exactly how I helped my client go from a 250k year to a 500 k6 month, by ultimately updating and improving her program so that it was deliverable at a scale without the Ching. Without the complaints, without anything else happening that she knew confidently at the moment, still entirely organically, she was looking at ads. There were things that came up, you know, that impacted things. But honestly, between looking at her systems, looking at her processes, looking at her hiring, looking at her everything, she’s already halfway on track to her seven figure year in a way that hasn’t burnt her out, that has felt incredibly easy. She literally came back and she was like that downsell of yours. You recommended, yeah, made 50k with, like, barely, just a couple of emails. I mean, it’s amazing how simple things get to be when you know what to dial down on. And like I say that, that’s my expertise, guys. So anyway, I hope you have found that little tour of the guide useful. Of course, at the end of the guide, there’s a little invitation to one of my smaller offers that help you go even deeper with this kind of work and create even more. I don’t know how to say enlightenment around where you’re at and what you need to be doing, and how to position your offer amazingly, position your business amazingly, and ultimately make more sales. So if you want to learn more about that again, download the guide. I’m not going to pitch it here. And yeah, I hope you loved it. Next week, I will be back talking about, let’s see what’s on my list, boundaries I’ve put in place to protect my emotional oath. Let’s see you then you.
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