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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 are continuing our exploration of the Cushy CEO roadmap, which yes is also the steps to creating seven figures in a way that feels great. So apologies, friends, if you came back for part two of the storytelling and wondered why it wasn’t named anything to do with Cushy CEO roadmap that’s just keeping you on your toes. But you know, the important thing to recognize here is, I can imagine, maybe some of you may be thinking, I’m not interested in some figures. Thank you very much. And that’s fine. That really is fine money mindset, work is enormous. I would say I probably spent about 2021, spending a lot of time, kind of working on my own. And there’s always, always, always more work to be done. Sure, right? Always more work to be done. So let’s just not focus on that too much, because what’s really important to me when it comes to creating a business that could create seven figures is that seven figure businesses are Uber do bullying. I know a lot of people have that complicated they think, do more, make more. It’s not how it works. Do less and do it well, okay? And that hopefully, my friend, you can be on board with so don’t jump ship if you’re like, seven figures isn’t on my horizon right now, or even something I’m aspiring towards, that’s totally fine. You don’t need to be desiring it if you want a simple, streamlined, profitable business, this is still something you want to pay attention to.

So without further ado, get your cup of cocoa. Get cozy, because I’m about to dive into part two of the Cushy CEO Roadmap, where I share with you what to be focusing on at each stage. And we are starting with the cupcake stage. So let’s talk about phase one. So phase one, which is also the cupcake, is where you can make decent money as a one to one service provider, but it’s all too easy to find yourself stuck in the cycle of onboarding new clients, looking after new clients, and existential dread, as you suddenly recognize, oh gosh, that client’s contract is about to finish and I don’t have anybody else lined up. How am I going to pay my bills next month? Oh, do not miss those days. Do not miss those days. It’s the kind of cycle that can leave you creeping back onto LinkedIn like you would an ex lover’s bed. And while it’s equally a bad idea, you’re wondering, how will it ever get easier? I want you to know that you’re far from alone. If you’re feeling really seen by that comment, it’s because you are one of many who have felt that way. You know, the majority of earlier in business clients I’ve worked with have experienced have experienced this, and they’ve escaped it once they have learned better. But it’s really, I mean, I almost feel like it’s a rite of passage in online business, like there are certain things we just need to get through, which is why it’s just such an incredible feat to be self employed for a number of years that, in and out of itself, is a success in my books, because that first year is, oh my gosh, anyway, but the truth is, you know, as I often refer to, there will always be some push before the cush. I’m not here selling you overnight success. I was about to say it doesn’t exist. Actually, I know a few people it has existed before, but in the majority of cases, it isn’t overnight, and the majority of cases, we do need to keep on showing up for ourselves, even when there isn’t any evidence. And that is not easy, okay? But there is also a point where the push is actually taking you further away from the cush, where we’re assuming everything has to be hard.

Everything has to be a hustle. And if you believe that, you will create everything in alignment with that belief, if you want a sustainable business, you need to create recurring revenue in a way that doesn’t require you to be on all the time. Okay? So in other words, what got you here won’t get you there at some point you. Got to break that slightly toxic pattern that the majority of us throw ourselves into earlier on in business, to recognize, if you want to be that Cushy CEO, you need to treat your business and yourself like a Cushy CEO would okay. So what you need is to create, mostly, and I put in brackets passive income. And by passive, I don’t mean switch on some kind of funnel and doze in a hammock indefinitely. What I do mean is I want you to be waking up to unexpected sales notifications, and yes, you need an offer that allows for that to happen. Most people earlier on in business don’t have an offer that even makes that possibility. They’ll say to you, that’s what they want, but they’ll quickly recognize they don’t have any kind of offer that enables that to be a possibility. They want to be welcoming new clients into their world without increasing their workload. So we don’t want to be doing everything manually or making things up client to client. It needs to be systemized, and you want to create foundations that you can grow and scale from. And the truth is, this is the most challenging part of the journey, but when you nail it, your opportunities are limitless. So this, my friends, I want you to pay attention to this, because whether you are at the cupcake stage or the cherry on top, there is a very acute risk of you falling into any of these two or three traps? I think it’s three traps, three traps that you can fall into. So I’m really excited to be sharing these with you.

I feel like I couldn’t talk about these enough. You may have heard me allude to these before, because honestly, I’ve spoken to too many burnt out business owners purely because they don’t understand what an online business model is, how it works, how they can make it work, and put themselves in a situation that what they’re building isn’t viable, and then they’re beating themselves up, being like, Why isn’t this working for me? So let’s without further ado, let’s get into it. So let’s talk about the problem with memberships. When I think about burnt out business owners, nearly all of them had a membership. Some of those memberships were making five to 10k a month, still burnt out, still not very profitable, still crazy, high churn rate, still having to put in all the new content, month on month, to ensure people are engaged, still endless. People wanting to have conversations. I think I need to leave. Can I have a break? That’s a lot of people to be admitting, right? So, but let’s add some context there. You know, I love numbers, so let’s get into numbers. A 47-pound membership requires you to have a mailing list of 21,000 to create a 10k month if you have the average 1% conversion rate so and obviously, to get to the stage where you are making that many sales, chances are unless you already have a really big following. So let’s say you’re an influencer. You’ve got a million followers. You’ve been really clever and been growing your mailing list since day dot, and you’ve got, like, 1000s of people on your list, then, of course, you are in a fantastic position to have a membership. However, the majority of business owners I speak to have somewhere between, I don’t know, 500 to 3000 maybe 5000 followers. I say the majority, the majority of business owners at the stage where they’re considering what to be doing. Don’t have an enormous following. They don’t have an enormous mailing list, okay, which leaves them in a predicament that they either have a really tiny trickle of members joining, or they have, like, I don’t know, a really unsustainable number, where they’re making, let’s say, 1000 pounds a month with the number of people that’s in there, but it’s a lot of work for them. It’s taking up a lot of their time, a lot of their energy.

And their case studies aren’t amazing, because it’s a low-ticket investment, so people aren’t showing up to it the same energy, and it’s just a bit of a disaster. Nearly all the seven figure business owners I know have at some point shut down, like they probably launched at some point in membership, and then equally, shut it down. I’m one of those, not the seven-figure part, but I have had a membership, and yes, I shut it down. And you know, it wasn’t entirely due to a lack of love for it, because I did kind of enjoy it, but it was amazing to see exactly the same input, exactly the same amount of work. And actually, I think when I started out, my group program almost exactly the same curriculum, but better curated, was attracting 1000s and 1000s of pounds a month rather than the, I mean, there was, I think I was making one to 2000 pounds a month with my membership, but when I moved to high ticket, I suddenly was making 10 to 20k a month, working less hours. Make about math. Math anyway. So that’s my issue with memberships. Okay, just just pay attention to the memberships you see succeeding, and look at the commonalities between them, and I can almost guarantee you, they nearly always are led by someone who’s got extreme brand authority, a book, an enormous following, and all of those kind of things, so that they can continuously be filling that membership. It, and often that membership is part of a funnel to a higher ticket program, and they have a team to help them be churning things out at the rate they need to to make that membership engaging. My second problem, the second pitfall you can fall into, is trusting that, oh, I can be this fully booked, one to one service provider, and what I’m going to do is create an online course, then anyone who can’t afford to work with me one to one, or where I’m at capacity, can go and buy my online course. Sounds like a great idea, right? No, okay, so there’s a few things you need to understand about online courses. One, most people would much rather have a group program where they get to get x access to you.

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You know, actual specific feedback to them. You know, if they just wanted information, they could chat GPT or google it, right? There’s so much information out there online and you know, the problem with online courses is, even when they buy into you, and therefore buy your course, 97% of people, on average, do not complete online courses. So the case studies you get are usually pretty poor, and very few of them two the refund rate’s really, really high, because, by law, with any passive offers, you need to give a refund within 14 days if they request it. And so refund rates can be really high in online courses. And so essentially, if you don’t already have really established brand authority, I mean, even when I look at some of the biggest coaches in the online space, very few of them have online courses. And if they do, they are super low ticket offers, which they can sell en masse and make good sums of money because they’ve got a really big following.

And again, those offers are there strategically to funnel people into their high ticket offers. So an online course in and as of itself, by itself, as a way to scale your business is just very rarely viable, you know, and particularly the low ticket ones, if you’re running ads to it, it can be very hard to see a profit margin on it. It needs to be part of a tiered offer structure, which most people early on in business do not have the capacity for, and you don’t need to give yourself that heavy workload. And the other thing that can be a challenge for you is if you rely on your one to ones and getting fully bit with one to ones. And the reason for that is there is a ceiling. There is only so much you can keep on increasing your rates until it no longer is a market demand fit and you will find it increasingly challenging to sell now again, of course, as with everything you know, there’s always people who you know have their own way of making it work. It’s never, none of these things are ever entirely impossible. But why would you want to go the hardest route to succeeding when you could simply create a group program. Group programs are, you know, you can have a tiny you can have a tiny list, tiny following, and still have really profitable months, because your group program is a relatively high-ticket offer, which doesn’t need to be far removed from your one-to-one prices, because people are still getting, particularly in those early stages of launching your group program, they’re still getting a lot of access to you. In some cases, some of my clients have called their group programs hybrid one to ones, because that’s what they are. There’s only up to five people in there to begin with, but they know those people are still paying them what their one to ones used to pay them. So essentially, working with five times the clients in a fifth of the time, like every client I work with has a slightly different approach, but I loved that approach. I was like, amazing, and that just then gave her the option to keep on scaling from there, which was just juicy.

Now, what is the biggest objection that people have at this stage to, you know, moving forward with this idea, it’s not knowing what their group program will be about. So let’s have a quick talk about this. So this roadmap that I share with you comes with its own individual exercises, and I’m going to share with you this exercise before we wrap up and go into phase two next week. I know I’m doing that. How naughty Am I, but I’m recognizing, again, this is turning into a long episode. It turns out I like to add a lot of detail to what I’m sharing, and sorry, guys, you’re just going to have to ride with me, but next week, I will be talking about the cherry on top stage for now, let’s talk about how you can decide on what your group offers going to be. So the problem is, for most people, they’re too good at too many things. How do how on earth do they choose what to package up. How do they choose who to sell it to do you lead with the thing that you think is going to make the most money, or do you lead with the thing that you love the most? Or is there a way to make both of these work? And let’s face it, the business that feels the best to run is also the one that makes the most sales, and it’s the one that leverages your strength, your strengths, so as a multi passionate entrepreneur, newsflash, we all are, I totally get that you could do a vast number of things, and that niching exercises probably either terrify you, bore you, or have you left more confused and clear.

So here’s one really, really, really simple way to approach. Research, deciding on what your group program is going to be, and this is actually working with and this is why I talk about, you know, when you are the cupcake, you’ve got lived experience, you’ve got expertise, you’ve worked with people, and that means you’ve got the ingredients to lean beautifully into these prompts, which are when you reflect on your Oh my effing God. What is this? Magic clients? Who were they? What drew them to working with you? What problem did you solve for them? What did they love about working with you? Think about it in their own words. What did they say to you? What about your values? Did they love about you? Did they say there was something particularly about you as to why they chose to work with you? And what about their values? Did you love about them? Did you have shared values that you really liked about them? And we can also flip that on its head. So you know, there’s clients who leave you wondering if you even want to do this work anymore. Who were they? What drew them to work with you? What problem did you solve for them? What felt yuck about working with them? What about their values? Did you not love about them? What about your values did they not love about you? Which of their bound of your boundaries did they try to push, and what of your sparkle did they not see or appreciate? Because we don’t want any more of that moving forward, okay? And we can repel those kind of people by thinking about that. When you design your offer, a lot of people think about their marketing, and then they think about their offer. I really believe you should reverse engineer that start with your offer. Be really clear on who it’s for, really clear on who it’s not for, and your marketing will just drop into place. Everything is going to feel a million times easier when you know what you’re inviting people into. So as I share in the roadmap, you see we can have a tendency to get in our heads about our niche, which doesn’t make make much sense. When we start out some traditional market research and Avatar exploration does make sense. But once you’ve got decent experience under your belt, you don’t need another spreadsheet if you want a heart bursting business that feels good.

Why on earth would you seek the answers in your head? They’re hanging out in your heart. So when you can be clear on what differentiates you from the competition, what differentiates your clients from everyone else, and why the work you do is so needed, you’re ready to be making your brand you know your brand and your signature offer stand head and shoulders above the rest to those who matter, your ideal clients, and don’t worry if you’re not clear on all of this, immediately start striding in that direction, and the path tends to reveal itself. So one of the things you can do is, obviously you can download this this guide, and you can take these prompts, and whether you do it on your phone, whether you do it in a G doc, whether you sit down and journal on these prompts, you could literally even just spend a week coming back to these prompts every day and just letting it flow, just getting really, really clear, allowing yourself to be uncomfortable, levels of true with yourself, allowing yourself to be crazy, levels of specific as to why you really like them, even down to the tiniest details.

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Were they cat lovers like you. Were they really, like, honest like you where they did they have similar priorities in life like you? Did you? You know? Like, is there a certain, I don’t know, like Pedro Pascal crush going on like you? Do? They like getting their nails done like you. Is there parts about you that when they see you, your big fat permission set for them to claim more the areas that you have stepped into that they haven’t yet, but they’re so close, and you are the stepping stone. Your offer is a stepping stone for them actually claiming that identity they’re so desperate to jump into. I encourage you to reflect on all of these things. We have an amazing tendency to overcomplicate how we build offers, but when we lead with genuine I mean, people talk about making data driven decisions. This is, in and out of itself, a data driven decision. This is working with experience. This is working with truly spoken words about you and your offers. This is about genuinely looking at your experiences in work and life and applying them to what you’re looking to build. Because when you recognize what you’re building is going to be what this is on steroids. Moving forward. This is the thing you’re going to be talking about all the time. This is the thing that people are going to be introducing you as as you step on stages. Moving forward. This is the thing you may be thinking about writing a book about later on. By God, you want it to be something that you actually feel lit up about, that you actually feel excited about, and I don’t also want that to feel like a pressure on you. I want you to also recognize that it is inevitable that this will evolve, that you will be expanded in ways that you never could even even imagine right now that you will attract in clients and create case studies that are beyond your wildest dreams, and as those drop in, they will help you recognize even more potential for what you’re doing. But I promise you, the strands you work on today will still be there in everything you do, like when I look back when I started my business. Business.

My first ever free Facebook group was called the really unsexy, boring name of digital marketing made simple. Now that was the blandest name ever known to man, but cushy business, yeah, I found a more sophisticated, original way to talk about the same themes I’ve always, been talking about so to other people, to people in my world, I still symbolize the same thing, because the values haven’t changed. The packaging on the outside has and the packaging has helped. But don’t feel the pressure to have everything all at once. You know start where you are, and know that you are building the most amazing foundations that can and will get you. Should you desire two seven figures, and genuinely, it starts with this industry leading offer that you could be building today. So crack on, my friends. Download the guide. Link is in the show notes, and next week, I will be back talking to you about the cherry on top, phase two, what to do when you are either that service provider who is fully booked one to one, or in a really toxic relationship with live launching and wanting to find a new boyfriend to run away to in the form of a business strategy. It’s coming. I’ll see you then. And if you enjoyed this episode, please help it reach as many ears as possible by reviewing it, or, you know, sharing it, any of those things. I would love you to do that. Thank you so so so much, and I’ll be in your ears next week.