My name is Caitlin Bacher, founder and CEO of Scale with Success®, and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing revealing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from, and the learnings that emerged every step of the way.
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All right. I was feeling a little bit actually really excited, not a little bit excited. I was feeling really excited to dig into these, because I feel like everyone talks about feeling stuck at 20K per month. And that for sure is a place where a lot of people get stuck. But the other one that a lot of people don’t talk about is that 50K mark. In between 40K and 50K is another opportunity to really start changing the way that we’re thinking about certain problems so that we can jump over that and get to 60, 70, 80K per month.
I’d really challenge you if you’re at that 40K per month level to not think about it in terms of, what do I need to do in order to get to 50K per month, but more like, what do I need to do to get to 80K per month? Because that’s really going to stretch your thinking. We have this hump where people come in and they’re making like 200K, 250K a year, and the other hump is that like 500K a year mark. We want to get you past that quickly. We want to talk about some of the things that are standing in the way of that.
How free, quick, and easy blocks exponential growth and will keep you under 50K per month forever. A lot of people when they’re stuck at, sorry, 250K a year, or when they’re stuck at 500K per year, these are the people that are focused on tactics and they’re always on the lookout for free, quick, and easy. What’s a free, quick, and easy way I can increase traffic? What’s a free, quick, and easy that I can get a few more extra sales to meet my sales goal this month?
While having some extra strategies and things like that in your back pocket is always helpful, it’s not the thing that we should be focusing on. Spending time and energy on researching that kind of stuff and also on implementing that kind is keeping you stuck. One of the things that you may have seen on the internet before this is like a super popular meme, which is like you have free, quick, and easy, pick two. There is no such thing as all three. You can have quick and easy, but it’s not going to be free.
It’s going to be expensive. You can have quick and free, but it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of skill. Or you can have easy and free, but it’s not going to be quick. It’s going to be super slow, right? There is no free, quick, and easy. When the problem is, I am not on track to meet my sales goal this month, right?
When you have that particular problem, whether you are stuck at 40K per month or if you are scaling past 40K per month, so you’re already making like 80K a month, 100K a month, something like that, there’s two different ways that you can think about this problem. The first way is to think what I really need is to find a free, quick, and easy tactic to increase revenue for this month, right? What is that free, quick, and easy tactic? I’m just a few sales behind. I really want to meet and my goal, right?
You’re super focused on meeting that narrow range, that monthly sales goal, right? The other way to think about things is, I need to identify the root cause and eliminate it so I can move past 40K per month and never go back. And that never going back is important, because what happens a lot is that people are not solving the real problem and they’re having their 50K month or maybe they get to 55K, but they did that by implementing a few last minute free, quick, easy tricks.
And the next month they snap back to 45K a month, right? It’s not real and it’s not sustainable. And what we are looking to create here is real sustainable growth, right? It’s not about getting to, what do I need to do to get to that 50K per month? It’s like, what needs to happen so I can get to 500K per month, to get to 80K per month, 100K per month, all of that. If you can get to 80K per month, you can definitely hit 150K. 80K to 150K per month, you’re going to be good to go.
There is a shift in thinking that needs to happen once you’re making 80K per month. But your goal right now is not to hit the 50K mark, but to just blow past it, right? If we think about it, which person would be thinking… If they’re not on track to meet their sales goal for the month, which person would be thinking, “I need to find a free, quick, and easy tactic to increase revenue for the month?” Is it someone that’s making 80K month, or is it someone that’s making 40K per month?
Who’s really thinking that? And as far as the thought, I need to identify the root cause and eliminate it so I can pass 40K and never go back, who’s thinking that? You’ll start to notice as your business grows, you can go into any group. Once in person, things come back together, you’ll be in a room with a variety of people who have online course businesses at all different levels of revenue. You can almost pinpoint exactly how much money they’re making based on the way that they are thinking about solving problems.
Because as we grow, we all have the same problems, right? We have all been in a place where, you know what? We’re not on track to meet our sales goals this month. What do we do? What you want to start doing is solving it the way someone who’s already making 80K per month is going to solve it. You have this thought, which is, “I need to find a free, quick, and easy tactic to increase revenue for your month,” and the reason why that doesn’t work is there’s an invisible wall, right?
Invisible wall is the hump that you have to get over, and it creates a cycle. You keep putting band aids on stuff. You keep trimming the dandelions back instead of pulling them off by the root. And because you’re doing that, that’s what’s keeping you stuck. And when you think about it, solving new problems and making more money as a result is fun, right? At whatever revenue level we’re at, we always have problems, right? It’s hard. It’s challenging, but it’s also fun.
It’s fun because they’re new problems to solve and because we also have something to show for it, which is making more money. However, solving the same problem over and over while making the exact same amount of money is exhausting. Show me someone who’s at 500K. Show me someone that is making 250K. They are burnt out. People spend years at those kind of revenue humps. What we really want to do is get you out of that thought loop.
If we think about it, I always really like to stretch the goal. Because if you’re at this revenue hump, if you’re in the 40K range and you’re just only thinking about it in terms of getting past 50K, it’s not a big enough stretch. There’s not a big enough gap, so it’s hard to determine what that change needs to be.
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