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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.

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Hello, and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.

And today, we’re talking about more funnels more problems, okay? You don’t want too many of them. Now, who is this episode for this episode is for the more established business owner, but also kind of relevant to those earlier on. And this is a common mistake, I see so many people making, but particularly those who are deeper into their business, it’s the mistake people make when they are thinking about how do I create more passive revenue for my business? How do I increase my cash flow? How do I scale and it’s often a reaction that comes about when something in the business isn’t going the way that you want it to.

You think about the the older doors more offers more money and think I’m just going to create another offer another funnel, and I’m going to create it for potentially a different person in my following that I’ve not created an offer for. And what I would say is, you know, from my own personal experience, at the end of last year, and at the beginning of this year, I did a good number of VIP days, and I loved VIP days, VIP days indulge the the side of me that always wanted to be one of the detectives on CSI, you know, it’s coming into your business crime scene and figuring out but in all the pieces together and figuring out how did this happen and, and generally, hopefully, hopefully getting it to the stage before anybody’s died. Okay. So you know, I love it.

But what all of my clients had in common at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, wasn’t a lack of offers wasn’t a lack of funnels, they had too many of the damn things, okay, they had so many of them, that they weren’t really very confident about tracking them. They didn’t really understand the data that was being tracked by them. They were struggling to understand how to promote all of the plumbing things. And they were wondering if their ideal client could understand what the heck was going on.

They weren’t seeing any more sales as a result of having all these additional offers, and you know, funnels, and they were creating a lot of additional work for themselves hiring tech VAs and spending huge sums of money on segmenting their audiences endlessly. And my main job was essentially saying, right, you’ve got all these plates spinning. Let’s see how many of them we can actually put down and focus on the ones that are most profitable. And honestly, the hop, skip and a jump that all my VIP clients have as they walk away from that experience with me is phenomenal. Because I get super duper forensic with people’s businesses, I literally want to know what they’re paying their team, how many hours if they don’t have a team, whether their hours going, what are their funnels? What do they make? I mean, I literally get a right under the hood, I’m practically pulling the chassis apart, to put it back together in a way that’s way more effective.

And yes, I know, I’m jumping around between various analogies. Just keep up with me. Well, yeah, because I can’t help myself. But you know, the main thing here is to understand that these business owners, what’s phenomenal. And why I charge what I do for my VIP days is that they leave already identifying areas where they’re already going to make a return on investment from that VIP day. But beyond that, they leave with a more simple, streamlined strategy to make more money without juggling quite so many things. And isn’t that what we all want, right? But it’s easy to understand how these things happen. Because as I shared earlier on, the reason why people start to create new offers and new Funnels is often because rather than go back and refine what they already have, and make it work better. You know, rather than listening to the data that’s gonna have all the clues they need, they get overwhelmed at that concept.

Potentially, they’ve got, you know, some stuff coming up for them around the rejection and the feeling that has caused, maybe they’re feeling a bit burnt out by putting their heart and soul into a launch. Maybe they’re feeling a bit embarrassed, a bit ashamed. Maybe they’ve been bit embarrassed in front of their team that it didn’t work, maybe they’re embarrassed that they need for their mentor, that they’re gonna have to tell their mentor that actually that big launch they threw everything into didn’t give them what it what they wanted.

Maybe they’re embarrassed that they’re in a program and other people in there are succeeding and they’re not. And what’s the quickest way to get away from that dopamine crash of a failed offer or a failed launch? This creating something brand new You, you start new hope, fresh ideas, new energy, it’s all going to be so much better. It’s easy to recognise how we can tell ourselves a story that, well, this feels so much better. So it’s definitely the right thing to do. Right? Wrong. Got that was dramatic, wrong, just because it feels better. That is not a business minded decision. That is not you operating like a business owner, whose main priority is caring for the business. That is you operating like a business owner whose main priority is your well being your ego, your sense of self.

One of the phrases I’ve been leaning really heavily into since the beginning of this year is evidence over ego. Why? Because earlier this year, I found myself not flogging a dead horse, but really trying to work on elements of my business. Because I liked how it would make me feel to have had those bits working for me, despite having various areas of my business where there was a lot of evidence that I was achieving a lot of easy wins. But I was obsessed with the trickier parts that I just couldn’t quite match. And of course, what was that creating for me, that was creating, for me a sense of I’m not good enough. Despite supporting people with X, Y, Zed, I can’t achieve certain things myself, it was creating really unhelpful stories, where when I purely shifted my focus towards the many elements that were working for me already, and allowed myself to double down on those and see how much how easy that got to be. Everything fell infinitely better.

And so, at the beginning of this year, as I reviewed my business, and I looked at the evidence, which by the way, is the cushy cash flow process, which is like my low ticket offer 97 pounds, which a good number of people have been through already like that is the same process. I take myself through when I want to review how things are going in my business. And I looked at all the evidence on the table, and I was like, hmm, okay, here’s what my ego wanted to see, here’s where my ego wanted me to be. And here’s the evidence. And since working with that evidence, since the beginning of the year, I’ve had my most profitable months to date in over six months, without working any more hours without even live launching. So this stuff is really, really powerful, okay, working with the data, working with the evidence, working in a business minded fashion, is what prevents you creating more work for yourself. Now, let’s play devil’s advocate and let’s pursue the journey of you having more funnels, more offers segmenting, you know, getting really into like all that potential that, you know, these amazing male service providers have where you can segment your audience indefinitely.

What that often looks like, you know, a lot of people say to me, I want to support mothers to be and, and people who, who are something entirely different, like mothers of 10 year old children. And when they say that, to me, my response to them is okay, but you need to understand, that is like running two separate businesses, you’re going to need two separate mailing lists. Unless there is something really cohesive that like binds these two nodes binds this kind of audience, you’re gonna have challenges. One of the easiest ways to make money in your business sooner rather than later is to be really specific. Once your meeting two such different types of kind of clients in your messaging day to day means you’re gonna have to be really broad and broad message messaging isn’t the messaging that hits the heart.

Think about my previous episode where I talked about glucose goddess and how successful she’s been. She probably is interested in fats and carbohydrates and various other elements to what it is to be a human being. I’m sure she is, but she would double down, triple down, quadruple down on glucose and look where it’s got her. Okay? There is so much evidence out there. You know, don’t believe and believe me, there is nobody out there with a really strong niche who’s only interested in their niche, but what they have recognised as a business minded individual, who cares about their business doing well and not being a martyr to their own ego is that when you choose a strong niche and you are willing to be known for something stand out as a brand and have a strong message, you will attract more clients, you will attract more aligned clients, they will get better results because you have been able to attract in the perfect kind of person for your offer. I mean, everybody wins when you allow yourself to be specific. Another thing I like to remind my clients or by the way is if you’re hearing this and thinking, Oh my God, but I’m gonna be so trapping specific, no. And you know, the only like, once you are specific and you’ve made a name for yourself, there was again, so many examples of people who started off being known for a particular thing.

And then later on have generalised okay, because they are now a household name. So, the most important thing is don’t be impatient. And actually, that’s another reason why a lot of people create a lot of offers a lot of funnels do a lot of segmenting want to help lots of people at different levels. They are looking at those established household names, and thinking, Well, if this really successful person can do it, surely I can do it to you, my friend, most likely, although this may not be the case, but it’s highly likely you are not yet a household name. And so no, you are not in a predicament yet, where you can afford to generalise unless you’ve got a super super duper bespoke framework similar to glucose goddess, which enables you to reach a lot of different people, because they are all attracted to your one particular mission, vision promise framework and offer.

Okay, so there are exceptions to the rule in that sense in that, yes, you can speak to a broad audience when you have a super specific solution. But most of the time, particularly when we’re starting out, it pays to be really clear on who it’s for and what you’re solving. And by having lots of offers that speak to a lot of different people. It’s like running more than one business. Similarly, the more you do with your funnels, the more you do with your segmenting, the more things that can go wrong. The more things that you need to oversee, the more hours you need to spend overseeing all these pieces, because there is nothing more frustrating. And again, this is something I found on every single VIP day, broken link after broken link after broken link. Sometimes I’d be discovering a blog post that had 1000s of visitors coming into it monthly. And there was nothing that they were being steered towards. What a huge missed opportunity.

Why was that happening? Because they were spinning too many plates. So do less, and do it really well create one offer for one specific person and do it really well. Then, in terms of an office suite, you can create offers that are offshoots of that you can have the preamble to your main offer as a standalone offer, you can have the an ascension offer for people who have gone through your core offer who wants to continue with you on the other side. But don’t try and stretch yourself into too many different directions. Because while yes, small, but mighty businesses are amazing. It’s still a small business. So please don’t try and operate. That’s the other thing as well as people will look at established household names. And because only that faces on all the marketing, they’ll often think, Oh, he’s just like me, or she’s just like me, or they’re just like me, when in fact, they are not just like you, they have a team of eight, they have millions of revenue coming into the business every year, they have significant more resources at their disposal, chances are they’ve got one cog or their business that’s providing about 80% of their revenue. And they can get a bit experimental with the other 20%. There are many things that we don’t see behind the scenes of other people’s businesses.

So these are why these particular rules around having a funnel to begin with making that funnel work really, really well is a really sensible place to start. So if someone is moving from one to one, for example, I would never say right, go and develop your entire office suite. I would always say start with your core signature transformational program, before considering any of the other elements so that as you transition from one to one to your group program, there is no revenue dip, you still get to be high touch, you still get to create amazing results for your clients.

And as those people ask you questions or express hesitations to joining that group program, and you start to recognise Ah, okay, the common denominator behind why people choose to not work with me is this. I’m going to create an offer that helps that and similarly once they’ve come into your core program, and they go, this is amazing. I don’t want it to stop. You can similarly say to them, okay, so what would it look like for you? Would it What would you like it? What would you like it? Look we’ll similarly you can say what would you like that to look like and create an offer based on that. One of the biggest mistakes we make in our business is trying to get too many steps ahead by creating too many offers. Too many funnels, too many team members, too many things, do less and do it well. So if there’s one takeaway from this episode, do less do it. Well understand every time you create a new offer. Every time you create a new funnel. It’s like having another business. Get your one business working like this Solid coke before you think about adding any other little tiny cogs alongside it, okay?

Otherwise you’re just going to have a clunky heavy cog that is going to be struggling to turn in any direction. And then hopefully you won’t end up being one of my VIP day clients who needs me to help them sort through the jungle of funnels, and jungle of sales offer no sales and offers and processes to help them make sense of the monster that they have built. You don’t need to be that person. Let’s make it and by the way, if you are listening and you are one of these people,  don’t hate yourself. A lot of people have been there. But yeah, I hope that was helpful. Next week. I will be back in your ears talking about how to be a good client. Oh, it’s gonna be juicy