In this episode, I’m sharing the five simplest (and most overlooked) profit levers you can pull in your business to make more money – fast.
No massive launches, no reinventing your brand, and definitely no burning it all down. Just smart, strategic tweaks to what you’re already doing. Think: better conversions, higher prices, more sales from existing clients, smarter lead gen, and streamlined execution.
And yep, there’s a garden metaphor. Because like your lawn, your business doesn’t need to be torn up and replanted every quarter – it just needs regular care. If you’re ready to stop overcomplicating and start seeing actual results, this one’s for you.
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00:00
Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.
00:37
Hello and welcome to the show. I don’t know about you, but right now, it is springtime in the UK, and I have found myself getting in to the garden more. In fact, this is probably my most enthusiastic year. We’ve got a propagator going. We’ve got seeds down. I’m learning about how to make your lawn the best lawn ever. I am fully committed. And one of the things that’s really incentivized that is the fact that my 10 year old daughter is also really interested and really motivated to get in the garden. Now you might be thinking, Why? Why is Polly talking about gardening? This is a business podcast, and here’s why I’m talking about gardening, because not only is it something that actually I find very regulating, very, I mean grounding, for obvious reasons, and a beautiful way to kind of decompress after work. But beyond that, it also inspires me, humbles me, and very much reminds me of how cyclical life and business can be, and how many kind of transferable lessons there are from nature to business. And one of those things is, you know, how we can treat our garden, that if we obsess over one patch of your garden or business, if you’re over watering it, like obsessing over content or your offer for the 19th time, but ignoring the rest of the garden, this episode is your sign, because I’m going to be sharing with you the five leanest, meanest profit recipes to make sure your entire business is being watered with cash.
Obviously. Now these aren’t complicated things at all, because if we’re going to take this analogy even further, what I see in businesses, if the cash flow ain’t flowing, we can be tempted to go and make some very stretchy investment in a new coach or new mentor, hoping they have the secret recipe. No, there’s no clear analogy with that one, but that’s this one we can do. Maybe that looks like buying a new lawn mower, when actually what you needed was the seeds. You know, we can start focusing on the bits that come more easy and just try and ignore all the weeds at the back of the garden, hoping that they won’t kind of catch up with all the lovely new flowers we’re potting. But guess what? They start to catch up and they start killing the thing that you’ve been focusing on. We can get very distracted, and we can assume that making money has to be complicated, that most likely it is miles away from what we’re doing already, because if it was nearby, surely we would have noticed it by now. Surely it would have landed more easily. And here’s the thing that I think I know I see, you know, I’ve obviously got a lot of clients in my world, between my group program and my one to one mentorship. And I do see a commonality in that a lot of people can be they can struggle to believe making money can be simple, that they could just be a few tweaks away from making more money. They can feel very tempted to want to over complicate it when I say to someone, look, you can just make 10 sales to make six figures this year. Let’s focus on that people can find themselves, distracting themselves, creating other offers, other things, because they struggle to believe that it could be that easy. And a lot of the work I do is around helping somebody not only have the strategy, but actually have the kind of commitment to it to themselves, to develop that level of self trust that the Yes, yes, they do get to have it all, and yes, it does get to be cushy. Okay, so let’s start focusing on one plant, maybe lead gen, maybe launch planning and watering the hell out of that and leaving the rest of the garden dry, because that is not how you’re going to make money. And this is where these five profit levers come in. These are areas that you can just tweak, test, refine, turn up the volume on without burning out or building from scratch.
You know you don’t need to burn your business down like honestly. I. Oh, bringing a personal story into this. This is the first year I said to my husband, you know, every year you dig up the entire back lawn and you say how exhausting it is and how it really puts you off, like sowing a new lawn each year. I mean, anyone who’s a gardener, please forgive our amateurness, like we don’t know. We don’t know. I met him, and his nickname was actually garden Mike, so I thought he knew about these things. He doesn’t Okay, and I don’t either. We don’t even, I mean, as a child, we didn’t even have a lawn in our back garden. So I know nothing about lawns, but this year, I was like, you know, there’s actually quite a lot of grass still there. How about, you know? And I looked it up, and I realized we didn’t need to pull up the entire lawn every single year. And actually, you know, even my daughter came out, she was like, How about what would happen if we came into the garden, you know, like, every few days, every week, because Mum, you seem to only do it about once a year. And while once a year was a bit of an exaggeration, she wasn’t far off. I was coming into the garden a few times a year spending about a day weeding, therefore being really put off by gardening, because all I associated it with was endless weeding. And she was right. In the same way that going to the gym, you can’t just go three or four times a year and expect to develop abs, in the same way that going into the garden, you can’t expect to go in three or four times a year and have a lovely garden. Your business is the same. It requires regular tending to regular tweaking, regular refining and regular failure, regular things that don’t work out. But if you have enough things on the go, it won’t really matter. And every time there is a failure, it’s a redirection, like as my garden has evolved, I recognize, oh, that’s a shady patch. Certain things will not grow in that area because it’s too shady, and I need to find a plant that can, you know, anyway, I will not take this analogy too far, because you’re not interested in my garden. You’re interested in making money, as you should be. I mean, this podcast is called make more money without selling your soul.
So let’s get into it. Okay. So there are five simple levers, five simple recipes to generating more profit in your business that you can work on today. I actually share these inside my 10 days to speedy sales. This is lesson number one, and I’ll be sharing more why I’m sharing this with you in just a moment. But if you’ve done 10 days to speedy sales, consider this some revision, because this is the kind of thing that we can slip away from, forget about. But every quarter, it’s worth doing a little kind of analysis as to how well we’re doing in each of these five areas to ensure that you’ve got your business as optimized as can be. So the number one way to make more money in your business, or at least option number one, is to increase your sales conversions more, yeses less, chasing, so you don’t need more leads if you’re losing a high percentage of those that you already have, it may well be that a few simple tweaks to how you present your offer or handle objections or even follow up can shift your conversion rate overnight. So sometimes it’s as simple as actually taking the time to look at anyone who’s booked a discovery call within the last six months, and following up with those that you didn’t close, or looking at those people who engage most with your stories and actually reaching out to them and having a conversation, or following up with existing clients or clients who are about to finish their contract with you to see if there is, you know, a way to make more sales, actually.
So I realize I’m getting ahead there, because that’s actually another lever. But essentially, how can we increase our conversions? If you have a funnel, if you are running ads, sometimes something as simple as changing your ad creative or changing the color of the button on your sales page to make it more enticing, tiny little tweaks like the color of a button can make all the difference to your sales. Like, really, honestly, sometimes I see people with really good funnels that are doing okay, you know, they’re not doing amazing, they’re not doing awful, and they’ll say to me, like, oh, I want to make more money, so I’m developing a new funnel, new offer. And I’m like, Do you realize how much more money you’ll be making by the end of the this year. If you channel that energy into optimizing the funnel you already have. Because every time we create a new funnel, we are starting from scratch, and we’re having to learn so many different pieces to get it working optimally. If you can just tweak one part of your funnel to make it convert an additional, I don’t know, one to 2% by the end of the year. I mean, obviously, is for you to do the math when you’re in business, but that can make a huge difference in sales. If, like, one in 100 people that come into your world buy from you, rather than the one in 100 that aren’t currently what difference would that make? As in like, if you’re already converting, let’s say, two in every 100, or one in every 100, and you change that to. Double the amount, what difference would that make? Would that be double? That would be double the sales by the end of the year, if you’re converting at 1% what would double the sales mean to your business, and how much extra effort or work would that require? I mean, it wouldn’t require any extra manpower, right? And it gets to be so simple.
So number one is actually looking at your existing funnels, looking at your existing sales calls, looking at your follow up process, and seeing where there are opportunities for you to increase your sales conversions. And like I say very often, it could be something like in the case of gardening, simply moving your pot to somewhere where it’s going to get more sunshine, and boom, those flowers are coming out with so much more ease. Similarly, just changing the color on a button, or adding extra buttons, or simply just, you know, reviewing your sales page and seeing is this really clear, maybe doing a bit of market research, sharing with people saying, you know, like sharing with ideal clients of and seeing how they respond to it, you know, be live with them and have them review it live, and they can show, well, that bit doesn’t make sense, and what does this bit actually mean? And I’m still not clear if this is for me, like get direct feedback. You never know that could be your next client who’s also giving you that direct feedback. Okay, so that’s number one. Number one is increase your conversions. That’s one simple way to make more money this quarter, this year. Get on with it.
Number two, simple as hell, so obvious. Increase your prices. Come on, guys, we are in cozy lifts. Everything is more expensive right now. Software’s shot up. Groceries have shot up. Everything has shot up, and it’s not showing any sign of slowing down. So you know, don’t leave yourself behind, my friend. Okay, it may be painful to add to those expenses, but you know, you are worth it, my friend, you are worth it. So if you’re not charging enough, you need to be charging more, and if you think you’re charging enough, you’re probably not. So you know, this isn’t about being greedy. It’s about getting paid properly for the transformation you’re delivering. There’s usually a whole bunch of mindset junk around all this kind of stuff. I recommend going to some very expensive food hall, or going going anywhere where people are spending money decadently to remind yourself that, yes, people have more than enough money. They’re willing to spend 50 pounds on a watermelon. They will definitely spend money on you, my friend. Okay, I think sometimes we can be very limited by our personally lived experience. And if you are not around people who are ready and happy to invest in themselves, we can tell ourselves a story that there aren’t many of them around, but there really, really are. They are everywhere. My friends everywhere. So, you know, like I was walking through Brighton the other day, looking at the shops selling some stuff that’s super questionable at crazy high prices, and people queuing up to pay for it. And I was like, people are still spending. They are. So don’t let the headlines freak you out. There are people buying. You can keep on selling. And yes, you can increase your prices. You need to increase your prices. They’re probably increasing theirs. So, yeah, don’t hang about. So that was number two, increase your prices. Number one, increase your conversions. Number two, increase your prices.
Number three, this is why I jumped ahead slightly on number one, a pulse. A pulse. Can you say a pulse? For apologies anyway. Sell to more existing clients. Okay, so that’s why I jumped ahead, because I was thinking about conversions, and I was like, Oh, that’s a conversion, but yeah, it took away from point number three. But I hope you forgive me, sell more to existing clients, your best clients, they want more from you. I don’t know about you, but personally, in this world of information overwhelm, I really had a moment recently where I was like, I think one of the reasons why I feel more anxious than usual is not just all perimenopause coming and knocking and all those hormone things going on my body, but I really had to evaluate what’s going on in my life. And I was like, I think some of it is just information overwhelm. So I turned off a bunch of app notifications, and I actually started thinking about who are the voices I genuinely want to tune into, who I just resonate with, and let’s just allow myself to actually tune out a lot of other unnecessary voices and opinions, because we Yeah, it’s just too much for the average human brain. We can’t cope with that that many different ways that we could be turning and and, and the people I see who succeed the most in life commit and go all in on one, on themselves and on what they want to achieve. And if we have too many different people pulling us in different directions. Honestly, the clients I have had come into my programs who have succeeded the least are the same ones I see constantly commenting on other people’s posts, signing up to other stuff like there isn’t there’s a clear, clear correlation between those two activities.
Why? Because that person is enjoying being in that realm. Possibility of what that other person might be promising, rather than fully committing to the process and going all in on what they desire and themselves and the journey that they’re already on. That doesn’t serve you, my friend, if you’re listening and you’re feeling called out, take a moment to shake that off and think about what you need to do moving forward. You needed to hear that. But anyway, moving on, sell more to existing clients, your best clients, they want more from you, because, like I say, we are overwhelmed, friend, if we found you and you’re amazing and you’re helping us, we want more help. We want that journey to continue with you. One of the easiest ways that we get to make more money is by having a client journey that people can come in and can work with you for months on end and still grow and still evolve and still develop in the way that you support them. That is one of the easiest things. I regularly share the stat, because I think it’s so important and so relevant. But 70% of seven figure coaching businesses is BA is like that 70% of that revenue is recurring revenue from like, it’s repeat clients. Essentially, it’s from repeat clients. So to get to the stage where you could even be thinking about having a seven figure coaching business that requires you to have an offer suite that allows that to be a thing. Now, if you’re thinking, oh my goodness, Polly, I’m nowhere near seven figures an office suite like I barely have an offer. Don’t worry, that’s not the point here. The point here is thinking about, are there upsells? Are there add ons? Do you see someone in a group container where you’re like, you’re doing great, but I feel like you could do better with more hand holding, or, you know, you keep on reaching out to me in a certain way that indicates you want more of a personal touch, like, I can give that to you. And that could look like, I don’t know, Voxer coaching alongside the group program. Or that could look like, you know, the one to one who almost wrapped everything up, but not quite there. Does that look like an additional VIP day together where you literally go deep for one day and make sure that they are well on their way? Does that look like saying, Would you like to stay on for another three months? I’ll only charge you for two you decide, right? It gets to be really simple. And when we lead with what we see they need. A, the likelihood of them turning it down is like, next to none, and B is going to be great for you to deliver, and they’re going to get so much value from it. So, like, it gets to be really simple. I think the most important question we always have to ask ourselves when we start doing these things is, like, is this scalable? Like, is this like hurting my ability to work with more people, and if it’s not, then it’s probably a good decision. Okay, so if you’re only ever selling to new people, you’re working way too hard. And there are a lot of people who’ve already enjoyed working with you, who’d come back to working with you in a heartbeat, but again, are living in this day and age of overwhelm, where we have all the WhatsApp pings or the news app pings, or the things we have to do on our own business. And you know, we’re not necessarily going to think to reach out, but if you reach out to us and say, based on my experience of working with you and how well I know you, I feel like this could be a really good opportunity for you, they’re going to listen and they’re going to pay attention, and because they already have that established trust with you, their desire to jump in could be very, very immediate. Okay? So number three, sell more to existing clients or previous clients, right?
Number four, this one’s also really important. And by the way, if you listen to all these going, oh my goodness, like, number one sounded okay, but I’ve got to think about 2345, like, no, no, no, no, my friend, don’t worry about doing all of these all at once, because if you did all of these all at once, you probably would feel very overwhelmed. I would look at I would listen to all of these, and I would write down the three most obvious opportunities you can hear. Because every single person is going to be different, right? Like, one person may hear this and go, yeah, that funnel of mine slightly under converting that’s an obvious opportunity. They’re reaching out to people who work with me before or working with me now. Easy to do increasing prices. That’s not something I feel I can do right now, or it’s something that I want to delay until whenever, whatever. Okay, the beauty of this is, you get to make it work for you. And like, even if you did one of these things. So like, if you double your prices, you’re going to make double the revenue this year, right? Like, I’d never see anyone making their sales because they’ve increased their prices. FYI, so, you know, double your prices, you’re going to make double the sales. You know, if you sell so that twice the amount of like, clients, then you’re going to get twice the amount of sales. If you double your sales conversion rates, you’re going to make twice a sale. So any of these things as and by themselves, can do a lot of heavy lifting, right? You don’t need to do all of these, but I wanted you to know the breadth of opportunity there is that doesn’t require you to build out a whole new funnel or do a whole massive launch like things that are immediately available to you right now. Okay, so number four, you’ll have heard me talk about this before. Get more leads. Okay? You don’t need more followers. You do need more qualified people who want what you sell. Okay, so lead gen doesn’t have to mean dancing on reels or building a funnel for the 900th time, but it does mean think. You about how you are growing your list, okay, I’m not interested in like, the number of people that have liked your reel. I see, again, no correlation between my most successful clients and the number of likes they get on their reels. None. Okay, you only need to speak to a few people in your following to make a few high ticket sales to have a really profitable month. Remember that. Okay, if you’re ever feeling wobbly around those things, please remember, like my Instagram engagement has never gone viral, ever, and I’ve still managed to create a multi six figure business. So please don’t feel that you need to have those things. They can help. Don’t get me wrong, they can, but you don’t need that, okay, but what you do need is to be growing your list all the time. Okay, ain’t no one coming to save you. If you’ve got a small mailing list, my friend, you need to be growing it. And there are really easy ways to do that. You could come on my podcast as a guest. If you got something interesting to share, you could come on my podcast be a guest. That would be a way to grow your mailing list if you simply said at the end, yeah, if you found today’s conversation interesting, download, my freebie. It’s all about voila. The thing we just talked about easy way to grow your list. You could do a freebie swap with someone who’s got your relevant, like, irrelevant audience, but a non competing offer. There are so many simple ways to grow your list. Please do not ignore them. And again, just because it’s slightly, you know, like, again, I will see so many people spending a month building a lead gen funnel on Facebook. Not the worst thing to do, by any means, if you’ve got money coming in and you want to, you know, make it passive, like, there is a time and a place of for that kind of activity. But I see people doing that before they’re making any money. I see people doing that before they’ve explored many of the free ways to grow their list and therefore putting pressure on themselves for it to work immediately, and a lot of the time with messaging that isn’t validated, which is then putting pressure on the funnel to succeed immediately. Now it can, in some cases, do that, but more often than not, it doesn’t, and that can leave a really, real sour taste in your mouth and a real urgency for things to work. So don’t neglect the free ways you can be making Well, be growing your list. I mean, it comes down to a simple principle, actually, if you’ve got more time, focus on the free things. If you’ve got more money, focus on the passive funnel, you know, like, like a Facebook ad lead gen funnel, right? But, um, do consider which you have more often, focus on one or the other, right, and that will support you well number five. Okay, so we’ve already covered. Increase your conversions, increase your price. Sell more to existing clients, get more leads.
And finally, we have a really practical one, which is executing faster and better. Procrastination is expensive friends. It’s pretty much the main reason why I’ve always had a coach or a mentor to ensure that I’m consistently a momentum, so that when those little mind set Gremlins come creeping in around my strategy, that they are there to remind me you got this. You can do this now. Keep on doing the thing you said you were gonna do because ADHD friends need, I say anymore, okay, as execute faster and better. Okay, you don’t need a 12 week plan. You need a 12 minute decision making system. Speed matters, especially when it comes to cash flow. And it comes back to, you know, I’m not going to go into it, because I think at this stage, you probably already know about the importance of delegating, ditching or automating. But when we review how we are doing things, if we are doing repeat tasks in the business and we’re doing them manually, it’s time to review if that thing needs to be automated or delegated or ditched where it’s not necessary. Honestly, the more we fine tune this as a process. You know, the only thing you can’t get back is time, and time, genuinely is money, and that doesn’t mean we want to be spending I mean, the other thing that you guys will know by now about me is I don’t believe anyone needs to be spending eight hours working on their business every day. The amount of times people have come to me and said, I’m a mom, I can only work, you know, the hours my kids were at school, or maybe even less because of nursery. And I’m like, guys, that’s how I learned to run such an efficient business, because I only, as a single parent, in the early days, when I was starting out, had like, about three to four hours a day to work in. And actually it’s one of the reasons why now it feels like I have a significantly cushier business, because my kids are at school now, and I can still run my business efficiently in three to four hours. It is doable, but you do need to have a laser sharp attitude to wanting efficiency in your business and coming down hard where it’s not there, okay, and making sure that you have, you know, a minimal kind of but lean team that can do the things that you don’t have to be doing. Okay?
So that is it, friends, to summarize, increase your sales conversions, increase your prices, sell more to existing clients, get more leads, and execute faster and better. It really is that simple, and I wanted to share with you, if you found this episode helpful and you’re like thinking, hmm, yeah, it’s approaching. The end of April, and you are very aware that we have got all this summer bank holidays coming up. We’ve got another if you’re a parent like me, you’ve got another half term coming up, and then we are in the summer holidays, which for me, I don’t know about you, but it’s not harvest time in the business at all. My higher ticket sales and high ticket investments usually come up until the end of June, and then July and August is, generally speaking, well, particularly August, a slightly quieter time. I mean, I also like to take August off. So maybe that influences that too. But what I do really like to do is, you know, like Harvest, harvest during times when there is the most opportunity to make sales, and straight after these Easter holidays is a wonderful time to harvest so that you can have that laid back summer ahead, really confident in your business’s ability to attract and make sales. Okay?
And I want to help you with that I do so I’ve actually decided for the first time in a very long time, in fact, if ever, ever, actually, I’ve never done a live challenge before? I’m running a live challenge five days to speedy sales. Yes, kind of unoriginal, considering my original course was called 10 days to speedy sales. Why five? You may ask five because I’m incorporating AI prompts, which take my very same frameworks and help you implement them with more ease. Now, AI doesn’t solve everything. You’ll know that, if you know anything about me by now, that I love AI as a tool, but it’s not going to replace your brain. So that’s why you also have access to daily lives, five days of daily lives with me, a little group where you can ask your questions, and if you want a real high touch experience, you can even upgrade with Voxer, and get a week to essentially be in this intimate group with me on Voxer and ask any questions you have as you go through this process.
So we’re doing a lot more than what I’ve discussed above. But essentially, no, we’re not creating any brand new offers. No, I’m not asking you to create a funnel. No, we’re not mapping out an evergreen funnel in one week. What we are doing is we are creating a way for you to magnetize more sales, not just today, not not just next week, when we do the process together, but well beyond, you will feel so much more confident in your ability to make sales. In fact, I was listening to, we should all be millionaires, I think is the name of the book by Rachel Rogers. And she shared something where she kind of said, I realized at some point in my business, I couldn’t, like, have faith in, like, I could never entirely trust what money was going to come in, but I could trust in my ability to make money. And that landed, and that landed so heavily for me and that my friends, is a real ethos behind five days to speedy sales, because nothing makes me sadder than seeing someone in a space of overwhelm and confusion and lack of self trust in their ability to make sales, because that, my friends, will put you in fight or flight mode and will literally repel opportunities and sales from coming your way.
So the whole idea of the next five days, five days to speedy sales, starting on Tuesday, the 22nd of April, is to help you feel really confident. So it’s for coaches, creatives, consultants, anyone who’s got an amazing offer that they’re selling online, but who’s feeling ready to package it better, sell it faster, and finally, start seeing consistent sales from the audience they already have. Okay, so you’re going to walk away with a repackaged offer that’s easier to sell a simple system to activate your followers, your list, or your past clients, AI powered prompts that make implementation fast and fun and yes, a whole new vibe. When it comes to making money daily, it’s gonna be such a blast, and I’m really hoping that a good number of you, my podcast listeners can come and join because it’s so nice to actually connect with you. Those of you who’ve been tuning in regularly to these episodes, so it’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be fun. If you’ve ever been in my world, you’ll know that I don’t do anything seriously, and yet, still, we generate some pretty serious results. So I hope to see you there, and that’s it.
I’ll be in your ears next week with a another guest. I cannot wait for that to drop in. And if you’ve been interested in being a guest, do DM me on Instagram. We are pretty much fully booked all the way up until October now, but there will be space. So if you’ve been thinking you want to get on this year, don’t hesitate reaching out to me, because we are running out capacity for guests this year. I should speak to you then. And as always, if you found this episode helpful, if you’ve got anyone in your life going, I’m just not making enough money right now, please share this episode with them. It’s really gonna help them feel way more empowered, way more confident about their ability to make money moving forward.
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