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Your business will keep throwing you curveballs. So the answer isn’t to add more.

In this episode, I share the questions I ask VIP clients to find what moves the needle and add offers that grow the business (not just add chaos).

We talk about growth levers, how to get more out of the traffic and leads you’re already paying for, and why your external environment should not have power over you!

Key Takeaways

• How I find growth levers in 7+ figure businesses
• Why managing your internal state is your #1 job as a CEO
• The gap every strong offer suite needs to create

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Sometimes you’re gonna make a mistake and you’re gonna choose something that either distracted you and took away your focus or it cannibalized another offer or, you know, just wasn’t the best decision, and then you pivot and you adjust. if you have one job, it is literally to manage and own your internal state And I see often because it’s easier to do this

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a great week. I cannot believe it. This week in Austin, it’s, like, 83 degrees here today and raining. And I have a run programmed, and I’m like, “Thank you, God.” Like, this is crazy. In the middle of July, it is literally less hot here than it is in Denver and Boulder, which is wild.

So I’m… I’ll take it, but I can’t believe it. I have been full-on in delivery mode for our challenge, which has been super fun. I’m just feeling so grateful for a business that has so many systems and such an incredible team and, like, a machine, you know? From marketing to sales to delivery, I have poured so much this year in all of those areas, and kind of going deep with one at a time.

And to an extent overhauling it when we redid our offers four, four-ish months ago, that was a big shift. And then went through and, like, in detail looked at every part of our delivery in onboarding, in the steps, in the process, in the communication. And it’s just so dialed. I mean, it’s absolutely incredible what my team accomplishes and the systems and the process that we have.

And so every day I just find myself so grateful. And grateful that I get to spend my time, you know, facilitating this challenge and supporting new business owners. So there’s two things I wanna talk about today that don’t necessarily relate, but it’s one of those things where I’m like they’re not their own episode and they’re both on my heart and my mind and they’ll help you, so we’re just gonna talk about both of them.

We’re just gonna have a conversation about both. The first thing is inspired from a couple of internal conversations I’ve been having. So we have a handful of VIP clients, and VIP clients have me plus a, an success manager managing their marketing. And it’s kinda like having a fractional CMO plus my whole team implementing.

And so I am personally involved in those companies’ strategies. So I help set, you know, what’s the live launches we’re doing? What’s the promotion calendar? How are we gonna hit these revenue goals? How do we align the whole system from the email marketing to the social to the ads to the podcast ads to all the pieces?

And so the last week I’ve had three calls with our VIP clients, three of our different VIP clients, and there’s a theme coming up that I wanted to share. So looking at growth in all of these businesses and looking at and just kinda taking a step back, looking at the rest of the year going, “What are the goals?”

You know, “What’s the revenue numbers we wanna hit?” One of them wants to add 100K of extra revenue between now and the end of the year. And so just having the discussion around, okay, where will we get the most out of the business? Is it a new offer? Is it, you know, utilizing something that we’re already doing?

Is it a downsell? Is it an upsell? Like, where is that, right? And those aren’t always black-and-white conversations because usually you have to weigh pros and cons of every direction that you choose to go or you decide to go. And then ultimately it comes down to this. It comes down to deciding what is going to have the greatest impact.

And I think that is a lotta times what we have to do as CEOs. And sometimes you’re gonna choose the wrong thing. Like, sometimes you’re gonna make a mistake and you’re gonna choose something that either distracted you and took away your focus or it cannibalized another offer or, you know, just wasn’t the best decision, and then you pivot and you adjust.

But I think that the CEO’s job and then hopefully as a CEO and as you grow your company you have strategic advisors around you, right? Like, I’m a strategic marketing advisor to these other companies in the role that I serve as their VIP Or as a VIP client. And no, I’m the VIP client. They s- I serve that role as strategic advisor.

And you know, for me, I have strategic advisors in my team. I have my head of client success. I have my head of operations. I have somebody who weighs in on my own marketing. I’ll all the time ask our sales team. I’ll ask people because I want that weigh-in, and then ultimately I make the final call, right?

But I have people around me. And continuously, your job as a CEO is to go, “Here’s all the things on the table that we could do, and then here’s the biggest leverage. Here is the biggest needle mover that we’re gonna put our resources into in this area,” right? And it could be, you know, sometimes I have one area in operations and delivery that we’re focusing on.

Sometimes it’s in one area in marketing. And really go … Bringing depth to that. So my point being in these conversations, that’s kind of what we’ve been doing, is going, “Okay, we’ve got all of these things.” And as, as I see businesses scale, like, these VIP clients are all multiple seven-figure businesses. And as I see them scale, what I see is it can be very easy to create chaos because over time, as you scale a company, you end up with usually a handful of offers and funnels and different options and directions and pathways.

And it’s like, oh, we haven’t looked at that thing for, you know, six months, and maybe that we’re losing money right there. So it’s constantly what is going to move the needle the most. And the takeaway that I see is more is not always more So in this specific conversation, when I took a step back and looked at the business, and this is true for a lot of my VIP clients, when I take a step back and I look at the business, I look at all the things that we are doing to generate traffic and generate leads, and all the leads that are coming in, all the sales that are coming in, you know, from those leads.

I look at the traffic that we’re building every day, and usually these guys have multi channels. Like, they’ve got a podcast, they’ve got YouTube, they have different places that they’re getting traffic. We’re running visibility ads. They’re growing, you know, an Instagram, whatever. I look at all of the places and my answer is rarely in order to add revenue to their bottom line or revenue to the business more.

It’s usually, how do we take one area of the business and double down and get more out of it? So for this specific example I was looking at and I was going, “We’ve got this one funnel that is, is doing really well.” It’s actually a self-liquidating offer funnel, and it’s doing that. It’s self-liquidating. It’s bringing quality people in every day, and they are converting to the higher offer.

The goal w- in that funnel is to get people to book a call for a higher ticket offer, and they are converting to that. But we looked at, okay, how could we get more out of this existing funnel that we already have? Because we’re already paying for those leads. And so the answer to business growth at this stage is rarely, let’s get more cold traffic.

Let’s launch more top of funnel. It’s usually, let’s look at what we’re already bringing in, what we’re already dialed in terms of organic traffic, paid ads traffic, and sometimes borrowed traffic, so like going to, you know, other guest speaking opportunities. And let’s go, how do we get more out of that?

How do we get a higher sales conversion, or how do we capture people? In this case, their offer is higher ticket, so it goes book a call, higher ticket offer. And so the discussion we ended up having was, how about the people in between? They go through the self-liquidating offer funnel. They’re offered to book a call and they don’t buy.

Is there an offer in between that, that if we added in, we’re already bringing in those leads, it would add revenue And then the discussion became, okay, in order to do that well, you have to be really intentional with that because here’s where people make a mistake. They go, “Here’s my higher ticket offer where there’s coaching and there’s all this support and guidance, and it’s this whole process, and I’ll just give you the DIY version, and that will be my down-sell.

That will be my in-between offer.” The problem with that is the person who’s considering buying, here’s what happens. Somebody, when they’re considering buying, if th- if that offer is, let’s say $3,500, and you’re like, “I’ll give them a DIY version, no live support da, for a thousand.” Okay, now they’re going in their head, “Well, I could get the same result as long as I do it myself for $1,000.”

And do you know what people think when they go to buy? They think they’re gonna do it themselves. Like, they do believe that will be successful. We know as experts and as people who deliver, like I know if I was to give a DIY marketing course, I could make it sound amazing, right? Like, I could have an incredible DIY course, and I could say, “Here’s the DIY version of our scale program.

It’ll teach you all this,” and I could sell it. For sure, I could sell it. I know people aren’t gonna implement it, and the thing is, I can’t confuse that in my offers and actually cannibalize the core offer. So I see this mistake a lot where people create this down sell as this natural next step.

They’re like, “I wanna get more revenue. I have this big offer. It costs this much. I wanna capture the people who can’t afford the higher ticket offer, so I’m just gonna make a down sell and I’m just gonna make it a DIY version of my h- what I have. I’ll just give them the recordings.” People are going to think, “Oh, I’ll just choose the cheaper option.”

Right? Like, most of the time if someone said, “Here’s two options,” i- as long as you do the work, then choose the cheaper option because you’ll get the same result. Here’s two options with the same result. One is support, one is DIY. Unless someone has been through it and knows themselves and says, “I know I’m not gonna do the DIY, I need coaching,” they’re gonna choose the DIY because they’re, in their head, they think they can do it and save money.

So instead, we look at, okay, what is the biggest problem or desire? This is what I asked on the call, so I’m giving you the behind-the-scenes. What is the biggest problem or desire that somebody has when they are in the point of considering buying our bigger program, the main offer? And so we d- talked about that.

Okay, now, how could we on a micro-experience level fulfill that biggest desire or problem while creating a gap for the main offer? So you still have a natural lead in, right? So, I, if I were to look at my offers right now, we do this. So our first tier… Mine are more tiered based, but our first tier of our offer is around making your sale, right?

So the biggest pain point that somebody has when they come to work with us is usually they wanna make more sales. Like, it boils down to that, right? And so if you’re not ready or at the business level where you can build the whole system out that we do in our scale program, then we’ll put you in activate, where we just focus on making three to five sales.

And then there’s a natural gap because you make those sales, but you have to work for those sales because they’re not being done by an automated funnel and ads, and now you need the next step. So any good offer suite, any good strategy around that has to scratch the itch and solve the problem of the biggest, most prominent problem or desire that you know your ideal customer has, and then it also simultaneously has to create a gap for the next step.

And the better you do that, the better it’s gonna sell. Second point on this being For most of you, not all of you. Some of you probably have a traffic problem, right? Like, some of you probably could look at your marketing and go, “The biggest lever is I need more leads and I need more traffic. And if I got more leads and traffic, I’d probably make more sales.”

But once people have ads going and content going and they’ve got the system going, the opportunity to scale to the next level is usually not in more funnels and more top of funnel strategy. It’s in how do we constantly re-engage and get the most out of the traffic and leads we’re already paying for.

And we might be paying for them in the paid ads, but you’re also paying for them if you’re investing in organic, if you’re investing in content, if you’re putting out a podcast, right? When you look at an ecosystem that is working and you’re like, we are growing our audience and our leads every day,” and you are converting some of those, now to get to the next level in the business, it’s not about more audience and leads.

It’s about more conversion to the existing audience and leads. Because you will consistently have people who sign up for something, they sit on your list for three months. I mean, I’m running the challenge right now, and there’s people in the challenge that have done this three times. Hopefully they convert this time.

I hope for their sake that they make a different decision and they stop participating in the free challenge and get a different result. But when they’re ready, they will, right? And so it’s constantly about that re-engagement. So all this to say, in your business, I want you to think about, depending on where you are, m- more is not more.

And if you were to sit down and look at where you want to be by the end of the year or in a year from now or in three months from now, what are the biggest needle movers? And could you break down, is it top of funnel? Is it you need more traffic, you need more leads because you don’t have consistency there?

Which I would say a lot of businesses in the under six figures and the six to seven figures, that’s probably what it is. Usually you’ve got something that worked on a small scale. You made a handful of sales, but you don’t have consistent leads. You don’t have a system that’s bringing people in and going audience, lead, convert to sale.

So is that the biggest lever or is that happening and you don’t have a good ecosystem constantly re-engaging people? So if you’re growing your traffic and you’re growing your leads, how are you constantly bringing those people back to solving their problem, to your offer, to how you can support them? And then as you grow, you know, saying, “Okay, is the gap from how someone comes in and what we offer them,” especially if you’re high-ticket, like this client’s high-ticket, is there a middle offer that will not cannibalize the bigger offer, but instead creates a gap while scooping up those people who don’t have the revenue for the big offer yet, or don’t have the money, the investment for the big offer yet?

You know, in our Activate program, my goal is literally to make somebody money so they can take that money and invest it in our next level program. And that is what we successfully do. Like, get these handful of sales so that you can take that money that you got from the sales and then invest it in your next level.

I want to literally grow your business with you so that we can also continue to grow with you as you grow your business, and that’s a beautiful offer is, like, the moment someone finishes one offer, what problem do they have? What desire do they have then, and how can you fulfill that? Now, that takes time, right?

You’re not gonna launch with multiple tiers and multiple offers out the gate. But if you have had one for a while, that could be an option for adding a revenue stream and adding something to your business. So that’s the first thing that I wanted to talk about. The second thing I wanted to talk about came from an audio that I put in our Obsessed membership.

This is my $7 a month, like, super cool, I do an audio every week, a monthly workshop, just container for community, bodymarketing.com/obsessed if you wanna check that out. But I put an audio last week in there, and I really liked it, and I was like, as I was writing the audio and the prompts, I was like, “I’m gonna talk about this on the podcast.”

And the topic of that, which is, like, totally like, we’re gonna just, we’re gonna totally steer to a different topic, but it’s okay. It’s all good. I wanna give you both in this episode. The topic around that was your external environment And inviting you to think about what in your external environment right now has power over you?

Meaning it could be your house and it’s cluttered and it’s a mess, and when you come home or you find yourself, you know, in your room that you get stressed. Or it could be a relationship that is also our external environment, different friendships, relationships that are… They, the other person is doing something and then that has power over your energy and your state of being.

It could be, you know, your business. It could be an employee. It could be a client. Okay? Now, people mistake this where they say that has to change. Now, I’m not saying sometimes it doesn’t, right? But if your external environment is, has more power over you than your internal state, you now are out of control over how you show up.

And so the invitation in this audio was to take inventory of the things in your life right now in your business that were like you show up and you’re in a good mood and you’re in a good energetic state and you’re grateful and you’re, you know, abundant and happy, whatever. Joyful. I don’t really like the word happy.

I do like the word happy, but I think joyf- joy is different. You can be joyful and experience other things. Anyways, side conversation. You’re in that state and something externally has the power to shift that, and taking note of those things. I think for a lot of us, that could be like you open Stripe and the number isn’t where you want it, or your bank account and the number isn’t where you want it, or you know, a close relationship where that person is doing something, is showing up in a certain way, and you are allowing that to have power over you.

And the first thing is to have that awareness. Because if you have that awareness, then you realize, oh, I’ve given my power away. I’ve given my power away to this person, this circumstance, you know, this… the bank account number, the office, whatever, the coworker, the employee, the client. I’ve given my power first and now I have awareness on that and can I take it back?

Can I choose to say those things just are what they are, right? We somewhat don’t have control over that. Obviously our bank account number we have a little control over, but still it’s like when I log into my bank account if it’s not what I want it to be, and I think for a lot of people that is what can change their internal state, is they put in their face a goal that they’re not meeting and then that results in the thoughts and the beliefs of I’m failing, I’m not enough, I am in lack, you know, all those things.

And so If you instead look at how that person is showing up, the fact that your house is cluttered, the number in your bank account, and you just go, “It just is. It just is what it is.” That person and the way that they’re showing up is completely 100% them, right? It’s actually has nothing to do with you.

And then same with the house clutter the business reality, the leads that aren’t growing enough the numbers that you don’t want, whatever it is. If you r- make that neutral, and you just say, “It just is, and it has nothing to do with me,” and then realize that the only thing that you do have power is in how you show up.

And I think that taking the power back and the control over your internal state is such an asset for everyone, but especially business owners. Because that internal state, that frequency, like whether you’re woo or not, that frequency, it matters. It matters in terms of your business success, what you’re going to attract, the number of sales you make, the success of your b- like, all of that, you are literally going to be saying, “I attract at this level.”

So if something in your external environment is taking away from that, you need to put awareness on it. And in some cases, it does mean making an actual change to your external environment and saying, “Maybe I need to limit contact with this person.” Or, you know, if there’s a team member or a client who every single day is having power over your internal state, you either have to figure that out yourself and not allow them to have that power or make a change.

And so in this audio I told people to take inventory of this. Because if you can take the power back around these things… And I seriously think i- in business, it’s like all the time are we gonna be rocked with things. We are gonna have massive, you know… And the bigger you grow your business, the more these things happen, where it’s like this happens to me all the time, right?

I- I’m thrown a curveball. I’m thrown something that I wasn’t expecting, and the more I’ve played this game, the more I have learned how to just roll with it, how to not give it the power to impact my internal state. ‘Cause the moment I give it the power to impact my internal state, I have now created chaos.

I’ve… And that is going to impact, as a leader, my team, my clients, my audience, my content, everybody. And so if you have one job, it is literally to manage and own your internal state And I see often because it’s easier to do this where people go, “Well, you know, my kids did this and so did this, my client did this, somebody made a negative comment on my social media, blah, blah, blah.

And so therefore I’m mad. I’m not gonna show up. I’m da.” And it’s like, well, you can feel those things, but you can not… You can also realize you don’t have to become those things and allow it to change your state. So this is your invitation to take inventory and just think about like the last week, what in your external environment has had the pow- has been powerful enough to shift your state?

And what are those things that have happened multiple times? Because they might have become a part of your day that you don’t even recognize now. Like, oh, when I log into my email and see that email from that one client who drains me and makes me feel blah, blah, blah, like I go into this state of lack of self-worth, whatever it is.

And you might not even realize that’s become a part of your day-to-day. And so consistently you know, Dispenza says this, I don’t know exactly how he says it, but he talks about we are consistently trying to become more powerful than our external environment and overcoming our external environment and allowing us to be in that power.

Because if you can do that day in and day out, you will change your whole life. So I wanted to bring that to the podcast. I really liked that audio that I stuck in and obsessed. I think it’s a really powerful m- message and that’s what I have for you today, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will be back next week