Nicole Munoz

How I Saved My Client 12+ Hours Per Week With A Quick 30-Minute Fix

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I would like to share with you how I was able to save one of my clients 12+ hours every single week just by automating one small area of her business.

 

I just started working with a new client, someone who was just on the brink of breaking seven figures. My work with her is geared around trying to get through that seven figure barrier together. So, during my second call with her, she started sharing that one of her biggest frustrations in her business was spending over 12 hours a week doing this one specific thing over and over again. She couldn’t figure out how to automate this one thing. Now, this client already knew how to leverage Infusionsoft; she had built most of her campaigns inside of it. Because of this system and her understanding of marketing, she was able to grow her company from six to almost seven figures in less than three years.

 

But, this one thing kept getting in her way.

 

What was happening is that her team of coaches needed to have access to new customers’ information. Every time a new customer came in and signed up for a coaching program, this new customer would need to get assigned to a coach and, then, their information needed to be shared. And, because she couldn’t figure out how to automate this, she needed to manually do this herself every single time somebody signed up.

 

And, as soon as she said it, I knew we could automate this with Infusionsoft. I told her not to worry and that I’d have a fix for her ASAP. Of course, she didn’t believe me. She really didn’t think it was possible.

 

 

So, that weekend I got together with my tech team and we made the fix in literally thirty minutes. This one small tweak made everything possible. As her fractional CEO, I was able to see the problem and, instead of viewing it from her “in the work” perspective, use my different angle to quickly find a solution — something that she was never able to see herself because she was convinced it wasn’t possible.

 

When you allow someone else to help you in your business, someone who isn’t as focused as you on every detail, then things get done and problems get solved.

Simple Is Scalable

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I’d like to talk to you about the idea of keeping things simple so that you can scale

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Are you currently working with clients? There’s a good chance a lot of you are. Personally, I find that a lot of times my clients come to me with ideas about a funnel that they want to build so they start a conversation. They’ll start talking about a webinar they just saw or a course they just bought or a workshop they just took and, from there, they’ll dive into some extremely complicated marketing strategy. When this happens, most of my clients are actually in the process of scaling. They have a successful course or program and, now that they do, they’re thinking about how they can take their business to the next level. They want to go from $500,000 a year in revenue to seven figures. And, in the process, they start making things complex.

 

 

 

They hear all of these people talking about the need to do split tests and to have a funnel that will automatically open and close; how you need to be able to segment your marketing so that you can send different people different emails based upon their interests. All of these things are, of course, complicated. And, for the most part, I’ve realized that these advanced strategies aren’t necessary. Even my clients that are doing eight figures a year can keep their launches simple and super successful. In fact, one of the reasons they are successful is because the campaigns they use are easy to implement and duplicate. With just an email sequence, designs for the landing pages, and copy for the thank you pages, we’re up and running. That’s it. It’s very straightforward.

 

When we use these simple strategies, we actually become more effective and more profitable because we can launch something in less time and with less energy. It’s false to believe that the more complicated something is the more success it will have. My eight figure clients who continue to use simple strategies for their launches know this.

 

The problem, of course, is that people assume that making money with a successful launch, for example, can’t be this easy. It can’t be this simple! Believing that you can just build a funnel and then send out emails in order to sell a product goes against what so many entrepreneurs believe — that it needs to be super complicated, and way more difficult, than this.

 

But here’s what’s going to help you: If you want to scale and grow your business, then you have to simplify everything.

 

Why? Because simple is scalable.

 

Simple means that, when you have an idea, you can get it to launch in two weeks. And, when that’s possible, then you can get from A to Z faster, and more times, than you ever thought possible — and that’s when you can build a seven or even an eight-figure business.

How I Went From $47,000 Per Month To $6,000 Per Month … Overnight!

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Failure is part of success today.

 

I’d like to do something different today.

 

I’d like to share with you, not about my biggest successes in business, but about my biggest failure. That’s right. I’d like to share with you about that time in my business where I went from $47,000 per month to $6,000 per month, practically overnight.

 

I know, that’s pretty amazing, right? Here’s the story.

 

 

Back in 2012, I was running my search engine optimization company that helped my clients get top rankings in the search engines for their websites. It was actually very easy because I had built up a network of over 80 different websites, and I had a large team of content producers and link builders who worked overseas. We would mass produce content around specific keywords, publish this content on my privately owned network of websites, and, anyone that came on as a client, we were able to get them rankings on demand.

 

But in June of 2012, Google got a little smarter. Google figured out how easy it was to get SEO rankings, and they changed the algorithm. The “algorithm”, for those of you who don’t know, is what Google uses to decide if a site should rank high in the search engines or not. Up until this point, my company had survived many different algorithm changes. But this time, when they changed it in June of 2012, it was a larger change. And then it changed again and again, almost immediately one change after another. When this happened, we saw all of our clients’ rankings, rankings that were previously #1 for all of their keywords, rankings that were getting them hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month, completely disappeared.

 

Now I’d like to say here that all of my clients knew exactly what I was doing to get their sites ranked high in the search engines. And they knew exactly the risks of Google changing their algorithm. Most of my clients were also very good friends of mine, people that I had known for years and been working with for years. So, when this started to happen, when all of a sudden Google changed the algorithm and rankings started dropping, my phone would ring. And, inevitably, it would be one of my dear clients informing me that they had to fire me because they had just basically lost their entire business. No rankings, no sales. They simply couldn’t afford to pay me for our services because their business was no longer making any money.

 

They would tell me that, as soon as we could figure out the new algorithm so that we could get rankings again, maybe in the next three to six months, they’d be back. They had loved working with me. But, right now, they had to leave — and take their money with them.

 

This continued to happen again and again, clients leaving left and right. And then, while in the middle of a church event conference in California, I suddenly realized that our income had now dropped from $47,000 a month to $6,000 a month. It had all happened within a span of just two weeks. And it was devastating.

 

I had a large team at the time, which meant I had to start letting people go. We had a lot of recurring services to support our network of domains. We had a lot of different software tools that we were using. A lot of them had 12 month contracts, and so just because we lost the revenue doesn’t mean we lost our expenses. So, we still had the same amount of out of pocket expenses, but we no longer had the revenue to be able to pay for all of those different tools, network of domains, and staff that we had.

 

And it was a very, very, very low point because at that time I was very plugged into the search engine optimization industry, and pretty much all of the people that knew how to get top rankings were my good friends. They were in my circle. And when that algorithm change happened in Google, nobody knew what to do, unlike all of the previous changes we managed to survive. Normally we were able to spend a week or two figuring it out. But, in June 2012, it didn’t just take a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months, to figure out how to get our clients ranking in the search engines again.

That experience was devastating because all of a sudden I went from being able to provide value and be helpful to my clients, to feeling like I was the cause of them losing their businesses. And even though I was able to help them make hundreds of thousands of dollars for years, I couldn’t help but feel like a failure in that moment.

 

How could I ever recover from this?

 

I was used to charging large amounts of money on a monthly basis. Now what will I do? How can I even charge $20 an hour? For what? What can I offer now?

 

It was because of this complete devastation, however, that I managed to make a big pivot in my business. I knew that I no longer wanted to offer search engine optimization services — and I never have again. I never again wanted the service I was providing to be the reason a client loses their business. So, I never again took back that roll of offering search engine optimization services. We ended up pivoting so that we started to offer funnel building services and marketing consulting. This eventually led to becoming a certified partner with Infusionsoft and us building out marking automation funnels.

 

But, of course, there was a transition time when that was happening. And I tell you this today, because since then, my business has recovered. Since then, I’ve been able to launch multiple six figure

 

businesses. Since then, I’ve had clients that have paid me over six figures to help them with their marketing. One client alone, paid over $250,000 a year for almost three years for me to consult with them on their business. But, at the time when I was going from $47,000 a month to $6,000 a month, I felt like a complete failure and I wondered how I was ever going to recover from this.

 

 

And so my message for you is that you can recover. In fact, when something like this happens to your business, you have to recover. It may take a while, but failure is part of success. If you’re not trying in your business, if you’re not putting yourself out there, if you’re not taking risks, then you’re not going to fail. And failure is absolutely part of success — it needs to happen in order for you to move forward.

 

Today, I am very protective of my business. My clients think of me as the one that keeps their company safe. And that’s the job I want. I want to protect my customers’ businesses, and that is a result of the experience that I had back in 2012. Without that experience, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.

 

My life right now has changed significantly because of the experience that I had when my business went from $47,000 a month all the way down to $6,000 a month. And I’m so grateful for it. If you’re in a situation where you are failing right now, remember that you don’t have to stay there. You can always pivot.

Ask yourself: How can I turn this around? How can I learn more or different things? How can I invest in myself so that I can provide even greater value?

 

And above all remember, failure is a part of success!

Live By Your Calendar

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I want to share with you one of the ways that I’m able to get so much done. A lot of people ask me, “How in the world do you do it all? You are a business owner. You are a mom of seven kids that are all still living at home. You are a pastor’s wife. You are a principal of a small Christian school. And, you go on speaking events. You travel with your husband and speak at ladies’ conferences. How in the world do you do it all?”

 

I’d like to share with you my number one tip for how I’m able to get so much done in a day — and it’s actually very simple: I live by my calendar.

 

I know you were hoping for something bigger and different. Maybe a big, red “easy” button that you could just push. But, I live by my calendar, literally live by my calendar.

I recently went back in my Google calendar and was reviewing how far back I started and I’ve been doing this since at least 2010. I found that, since 2010, I have consistently scheduled my time on my calendar in great detail, which is pretty cool, because now I can go back all the way to 2010 and know what I was doing on January 17 at 3 p.m., because it’s all right there on the Google calendar.

 

 

 

Here are a few tips on what “living by my calendar” actually looks like: 

 

Number One: The first thing I do with my Google calendar is block off all my church and family events. This includes any time driving to and from a location and time to get ready. For example, every Wednesday night we have church at 7 p.m. My calendar is blocked off from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. to drive to the church. This also makes sure that I don’t have any meetings either, because it’s very difficult to have a meeting at 5 p.m. and then leave exactly at 6 p.m. Church is blocked off from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Then, I also include time for the drive home from church.

 

In the mornings, I have blocked off every day Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. for the drive to school. And since for the last few years I’ve been the principal of our Christian school at our church, I have also blocked off time from 7:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. to have a meeting with all the teachers. Then I teach English as a second language so I have blocked off from 8:15 a.m. till 9 a.m. every day. So, as you can see, all of these times are automatically locked up.

 

We drive home from school at 3:30 p.m. That means I have automatically blocked off from 3:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. And then we have lunch really late here in Mexico. So I’ve blocked off from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. for us to eat together and spend time together as a family.

 

While blocking off all of this time every single week might seem excessive, the problem is that if you don’t block these hours off, you might be tempted to think, “Oh, I can fit in this meeting. I can do this at exactly at 4 p.m.” But, then, you’re not going to be eating with your family.

And I actually have two calendars. One where all of my personal and church events are blocked out like I’ve mentioned above, and then one where I schedule all of the time that I’ve scheduled to work.

 

I like to schedule every single thing that I’m going to do. If I’m going to check my emails, if I’m going to shoot a video, if I’m going to write a blog post, if I’m going to map out a marketing strategy — every single thing is mapped out as to when I plan to work on those projects on the Google calendar.

 

One big problem I discovered when I started living by my calendar is that I wasn’t leaving any spots open for appointments. So, I created another calendar just for appointments. These two calendars are synced so that my activities can be overwritten by the appointment calendar.

 

So, number one, make sure you block off all of your time for your family events. So, for example, if you go to church for church events, consider the time it takes to drive to and from places. Get all that blocked off and then fit everything else in from there.

 

Number Two: Here you’re going to block off all new projects that come up during the week, scheduling exactly when you’re going to work on them.

 

Remember, several years ago I was extremely busy. I had a lot of phone calls. I was getting 20 or 30 leads every single week, and each of those resulted in a 30 to 45 minute consulting call. Plus, I had calls with clients. So, yes, I was very, very busy. If someone asked me to do something, I would always look on my calendar first. Sometimes I would have to say, “Well, I could do it in three months,” because there were literally no free spots on my calendar, and what they were asking me to do was a favor.

 

For me, it’s so much easier to understand what my days actually look like when I see everything visually scheduled on the calendar. If I don’t work on those things, they get moved to the next day. That is not good, however, because you don’t want to form a bad habit of moving things over and over and over and over. They never actually get done. You need to do what’s on the calendar. This is very important.

 

Number Three: It doesn’t make any sense for you to be scheduling everything in a calendar if you’re not going to be living by your calendar. Your calendar is basically a secretary that is right behind you saying, “Hey, this is what you have to do today. This is what you have to work on. This is your reminder.” Your calendar is what you need to be accountable to because, if you don’t live by your calendar, then you’re just creating it. And, sorry, but just creating the calendar doesn’t work. Actually doing the work is the only way to get it done.

 

 

So, block off your family time schedule and when you’re going to work on things. Then, follow your calendar. That is absolute. There is no magic bullet. There’s no secret. There’s no “easy” button to push. It is literally that simple.

What about when you don’t know how long a task is going to take? Usually, everything takes longer than expected. So, if I account for that, I will block off more time. If I think it’s going to take 30 minutes, I’m going to block off 60 to 90 minutes. As a result, I might have some padding, which gives me the freedom to move on to the next task or move other things around. And, of course, sometimes things take longer and you absolutely can’t push other things around on your schedule. This gets tricky because, if your days are scheduled like mine, you really can’t move unfinished things from one day to the next — there’s just no wiggle room. So, for example, I have to get this done in 30 minutes.

 

There is a principle that says the time it takes to get something done always expands to the amount of time you have. So, if you only have 60 minutes to study for a test, then you do what you can with that

60 minutes. But, if you have all day, then you’ll usually find a way to spend all day working on studying. Why? Because your work will always expand to whatever amount of time that you give yourself to do it.

 

Learn to schedule your time and say, “I only have an hour to work on this, so I need to get us as much as I can done in this block of time.” This forces you to become more productive. If you say, “Okay, I have all day to work on this,” you’ll never get it done. If you say, “I have 30 minutes to work on this, because after that, I have this. And after that, I have this,” then you’re mentally telling yourself that you don’t have a lot of time. And when you do, the pressure’s on to actually get it done in the time you have.

 

What happens when someone asks you, “Can you do this for me?” There’s a good chance that, because you’re a kind person who likes to help, you don’t want to say no. So, when someone says, “Take this and do this for me,” you’re like, “Yes, of course.” And you think, “I’ll get my stuff done later.” But, if you look at your calendar, you can see, “Well, if I don’t get these 18 things done, then I’m going to have to do them the next day. And there’s no free time the next day, because that day’s already scheduled. And this is Friday, and I have this other activity.”

 

So, when you’re saying, “Yes, I am going to do this for someone,” then you have to figure out what you’re going to say “no” to. You’re going to say no to the work that you already have scheduled for the day. You’re going to say no to something, and, unfortunately, usually it’s the family that you end up saying no to.

 

This is why it’s so important to follow these steps:

1. Block off your family time first.

2. Schedule when you’re going to be working on things.

3. Once something is on your calendar, live by your calendar.

You Can Make More Money, But Not More Time

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How many of you have ever started to create an online training course or an educational program and said, “I’m going to build this thing. It’s going to have 18 modules. It’s going to last three weeks long. It’s going to have 100 videos and have 19 different hand outs…”? (I’m, of course, exaggerating a little bit. Most courses are about six modules long and have about five or six videos each and each module has a few handouts.)

 

Usually I tell myself, first I am going to build the course, then I’m going to put together all of the marketing material, and then I am going to sell it. What happens, however, is that I end up building all or most of the course, but never get around to creating the marketing or sales material! The reason is because the demon of doubt always seems to show up when I am 80% done building the course. I start to think, “Who is going to buy this? This is not good enough. There are a lot of other courses out there better than mine.“ And then I stop with the project altogether.

 

 

Anybody else out there like that? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think I have sitting in my desktop at least three courses that I have started to build, but that I never finished building, and, therefore, I never sold.

I built one course a couple of years ago and it was beautiful — a 27-page, graphically designed PDF mapping out all of the nine different modules that were going to be included. I had every single one of the video titles prepared, even the website. And that website had a waitlist! I had created the first four modules of the nine modules for this program, but at some point, I got really busy with my business. I kept thinking I would build and launch this new membership site soon, but then I would get a good client and the launch would get delayed yet again.

 

This is always what happens, especially if you’re a service provider and you’re trying to transition into coaching. So, like so many of you, my course continued to be put on hold because it was potential future revenue, and the clients I was getting were always immediate revenue, and a lot of immediate revenue at that.

 

I had another course in the works once, a great, super in depth technical course all about the ins and outs of Infusionsoft. I had it up to 300 slides with six different modules. I even had a group of beta testers that went through the course live. This course, unlike my other ones, actually made it to the selling phase. Unfortunately, I realized that people don’t like to buy vegetables; they like desserts. People like the stuff that tastes good, and this course was the broccoli on the side of your child’s plate. Yes, people need it, especially if they use Infusionsoft, but nobody actually wants to buy it.

 

So, now I have two courses sitting on my desk gathering virtual dust on my computer, one that never got finished because I got sidelined with other projects and another one that is just something that nobody really wants. (It’s a great bonus, however, and it’s something I’m going to add to my coaching program.)

 

What’s the point of both of these examples? Sell first, then build (again).

 

This isn’t always easy to practice, even if you can understand the theory behind it. If you’re a planner like me, selling first and then building goes against everything I want to do. But, no matter how difficult it is, sell first, then build it. If you have an idea for a course you want to sell, build out the first and second modules, and then stop. Build your sales page and then throw some Facebook ads at it and try to actually make some sales. If and when those sales come in, you can deliver your course live. You already have the first two modules done, which means you can deliver the next modules in the following weeks, giving yourself time to create them and your first customers time to go through the first modules.

 

The beauty of this is that you’re going to get immediate revenue for work you haven’t even done yet. This will let you know concretely if this course is something you should invest your time and energy into or not. Not to mention, the clients in the course can give you feedback so that you can make the remaining modules meet their needs and expectations.

 

When you follow this method of launching a course, you make money and save time. And, of course, if you don’t make money from your course, then you haven’t spent near as much time — so it’s a win-win.

Choose A Mentor That Has The Life You Want, Not Just The Business You Want

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One of the best tips that I got about how to choose a mentor was to choose someone that has the life that you want and not just the business that you want.

 

A little while back my husband and I were attending a live event for entrepreneurs. At this event, there was a very well known speaker, someone who is admired by many and has written several, best-selling books. In fact, if I said his name, you would probably know him. This person has a coaching program where he teaches other entrepreneurs how to grow and scale their businesses

— and I was very excited to hear him speak. Although I’d never met him in person, I had read all of his books.

 

 

The morning of his talk, I got up really early and made sure that I sat near the front so that I would be able to hear him. But, as he began to speak, I got really discouraged. Almost immediately after he started speaking, every other word out of his mouth was a curse word. If you know me, I am very conservative. I prefer professionalism. I like things to be done in the right way and, in my opinion, littering a professional talk with curse words is far from appropriate.

 

So I’m here sitting in the third row thinking, “Oh my goodness. What am I going to do?” As soon as there was a break in the speaking, I made for the door. I didn’t want to stay there and be subjugated to cursing for another hour.

 

After the break, I was speaking to others who were there about what happened and what their opinions were about the speaker’s language. They agreed that it was unprofessional. It was surprising because this coach was a published author, a household name among entrepreneurs, and very successful. He has a coaching program and thousands of students. And, obviously, he had a problem with cursing. As I was talking, another person said, “And you know he’s on his fourth wife, too.” I was like, “Wait, what? He’s on his fourth wife?” I couldn’t believe it.

 

That’s when I began to understand that, when choosing a mentor or a coach, you don’t want to choose someone that is only successful in business.

 

 

There’s a popular word: hustle. You know where you need to be working, seven days a week and weekends. You don’t have time for a break. You should be working 18-hour days. If you really want to grow and scale your business, then you need to hustle. The truth is, you may at times need to hustle in your business. You may need to put in those extra hours. I’ve done it. But, it’s not a lifestyle that builds a successful life. Life is much more than being successful in business.

There are many people out there that have successful businesses. They’re wealthy, have big houses, and go on dream vacations. But, look at their life, the cost they’ve paid to have this. Look at their families and their children and the toll it took on them. They have paid dearly to be able to have success.

 

So, when you’re looking for a mentor or a coach, don’t only look for skill and results. Don’t only look at their business to measure if they are successful. Look at their life and ask yourself, “Does this person have the life that I want? Or, are they working 50, 60, or 70 hours a week? Are they always stressed? Do they yell at their team?” If so, they’re not good managers. They are focused on productivity and results and are not concerned about people – those they hurt on their path to success.

 

When looking for your mentor, find someone that has that life-work balance, who has figured out how to build a successful business. Successful may not mean seven figures or eight, but he has built a business that allows the freedom to spend time with his family.

Why did you get started with your business in the first place? The majority of us say, “Well, I got started because it means more time with my kids.” And yet, what do we do? We end up working at home, and the only thing our kids see is the back of our heads, staring at a computer. Mom is always too busy, and Dad is always too busy, because there’s always something. There’s always one more thing that has to be done.

 

When you have a traditional job, you get done at 5 or 6 p.m., go home, and that’s it. You don’t work while you’re home, usually. When you’re an entrepreneur, there’s always something new to be done. The list never ends. So, when you’re looking for a mentor, look for someone that is not only going to give you the advice you need for your business, but also, their life needs to align with where you want your life to be.

How I Went From Charging Fifty Cents An Hour Teaching English In A Third World Country To Charging $500 An Hour As A Marketing Consultant—In Only 5 Years!

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I want to share with you a little bit about what my life was like before I started working in online marketing.

 

As you may know, my husband and I are missionaries in Puebla, Mexico. We live here with our seven kids and our dog in our dream home. My husband is the pastor of our church and we also have a small Christian school where we teach kids the Bible, English, and entrepreneurship. On top of that, we also run a college that offers night classes for people who want to become pastors, go into the ministry, or become Christian school teachers in Mexico. And on top of that, we have an online Bible college. We also have a website for our church that has around 60,000 unique visitors every single month. Of course, it’s taken almost a decade to achieve all of this — it certainly wasn’t where we started!

 

My husband and I got married in 1999 and immediately moved to a small town in Guerrero, called, “Iguala, Guerrero”. It’s a very small town. Back then, the town didn’t even have a grocery store. The roads were all dirt and it would get very, very hot.

 

A lot of people had dirt floors in their homes, cement floors if they were lucky. It was a very poor town. And did I mention how hot it would get? It’s hard to believe, but my hair was so long it was past my knees. I used to always have to wear my hair up in a bun. I came from California where I always dressed nice and wore makeup. But, here, it was so hot that my makeup would literally melt off my face.

 

 

So there I was, my hair piled on top of my head, no makeup, and sweaty. We lived in a small apartment and we didn’t have any money at all. We’d gotten some money from our wedding and were able to buy a refrigerator and a small stove (we still have both in our church!) and a mattress that we had on the floor because we couldn’t afford a bed frame. Even though it was SO HOT, we did splurge on a new air conditioner.

 

Our income was just a couple hundred dollars a month. The rent for our apartment was $70 a month, and car insurance cost $25 a month, which meant there wasn’t a lot left after we paid our bills. It was hard for me because I was so used to working and being able to give to others, and all of a sudden I wasn’t able to do that.

 

If there was someone who had a need, I wasn’t able to help them. If someone was hungry, I wasn’t able to buy them a sandwich because we didn’t even have money for ourselves. I hated feeling helpless, and knew I needed to figure out a way to generate a little bit of revenue. But, back then there weren’t a lot of opportunities. So, I did the one thing that I was able to do, which was teaching English.

 

I started teaching at a small Christian school where they paid me $1.00 an hour, which meant I was making about $30 a week. I was teaching second graders which was fun for me because I was still learning Spanish. I would tell the kids, “Speak slowly and enunciate your words or your teacher will not understand you!”

 

The school didn’t have the money for proper school supplies, which made learning basic things, like handwriting and math, even more difficult for the kids. They came to school with holes in their shoes and pants, I wanted to be able to do more for them than I was able to.

 

But again, at the time we did not have any extra money; we were barely scraping by ourselves. So, I decided to offer English classes after school. I charged five pesos for a lesson, which back then was about fifty cents, and I would teach two to five students. That’s about $2.50 extra I was making each day after school. But if a student did not come and I only had four students, I only made $2.00. If only three students showed up, I’d make only $1.50. Every day after I finished teaching, I would take the little money I’d made and go to the little market store to buy our food for the day, we could only afford the very basics, eggs, tortillas, and, of course, coffee.

 

And even though I was only earning fifty cents an hour teaching English, it was the best time of my life. It was fun and exciting. I was working with kids and helping them and teaching them many different things.

 

So that is where I started from. Fast forward about a decade to 2009 and I was charging $500 an hour for a marketing consultation, helping people create a strategic marketing plan for their business.

 

What’s your origin story? Where did you start? I’m going to bet that you have more resources than I did back in 1999 in that tiny Mexican village.

 

Today, if you want to learn something you can pay to learn it faster. You can pay for a coach. You can pay for a mentor. You can pay a consultant, or you can just go on YouTube and learn it for free. There is enough free information out there to help you to grow and scale your business. Of course you have to sort through it to figure it out and put all the pieces together yourself, but you absolutely can do that. If you are wondering if you can make money online, I don’t think it’s going to take you ten years to scale like it did for me. Wherever you are today, you have something to offer others, whether that’s a product or a service.

 

 

If you can figure out how you can provide value to someone else, then you can start an online business and you can be successful. You can fulfill your dream, whether that means giving back to your family or your community — or both.

 

When I first started my business back in 2002, I wanted to achieve two things. I wanted to go to Starbucks every now and then for coffee, and I wanted a little extra money to buy a new dress every once in a while. I thought if I could make an extra $200 a month to contribute to my family and to treat myself every now and then, that would be absolutely amazing.

 

Maybe your desire is to pay your child’s (or children’s) tuition for a great private school. Maybe your goal is to pay your mortgage payments each month or to pay off your house completely. Maybe your goal is to save up money for that dream vacation. Or give your family a great Christmas.

 

Whatever your goal is, it is possible. And it makes no difference where you’re starting from today.

How I Went From $10,000 A Month And Working 50+ Hours A Week To $25,000 A Month And Working Only Part-Time

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I would like to tell you a story about how I went from making $10,000 a month and working 50+ hours a week, to making over $25,000 a month and only working part-time. Does that sound good? Would you like to hear that story? I thought so.

 

So, this was back a few years after I had started my consulting agency. I found myself working 50 plus hours a week. We had a lot of clients. We had a large team. (At one point, we had over 60 staff members in the Philippines.) We had created an army of content creators and link builders, which basically allowed our clients to get rankings on demand. But, even though we had these teams, we still were not able to be very profitable as a business, which meant that I wasn’t taking home as much money as I should have been.

One day I found myself talking on the phone with my mentor. And it was this phone call with my mentor that actually changed the direction of my business — and literally changed my life. I was speaking to my mentor, explaining to him how frustrated I was working so much, how I had all of these clients, and they were paying us anywhere between $500 and $1,500 a month. As I was explaining this to him, he asked me a simple question. He said, “Well, what is your long term goal?”

 

After a bit of a pause, I replied, “My long term goal is that I’d love to have five clients that each paid me about $5,000 a month.” If that happened, I thought, then I would be able to really focus only on these five clients, and I would be able to dedicate myself to making sure that I could get them really good results. I wouldn’t be pulled in 18 million directions. I wouldn’t have 20 or 30 different bosses in the form of small clients, each with different needs and different activities. I’d also be able to reduce my team because, with just five clients, I wouldn’t need so many different people doing different things for different clients. I wouldn’t have to continually build our team and build more clients, which was what my life felt like at that moment.

 

I was explaining this dream of being able to have a bigger impact on my clients, being able to provide more value, and being able to perform at a higher level. He interrupted me and asked me, “So, why is that your long term goal?” I didn’t know. I wondered, “Why is that my long term goal? Why do I think that I need to work another year, two years, or three years to be able to play at this level?” I didn’t know. He says, “Well, this is what I want you to do. I want you to call up your top five clients, and I want you to tell them what your new goal is. Introduce a new program, a very select program, and have them each make the $5,000 a month investment you’re looking for.”

 

And then my mentor told me, “And, after you say that, I want you to stop talking. Just be quiet. Don’t say anything else. Because,” he continued, “the first person to speak after you make an offer always loses.”

 

I promised my mentor that I would make this commitment and follow through. I wanted to win and I didn’t want to wait any longer. But, even though I managed to be confident on the phone with my mentor, inside I was dying. How in the world could I ever have a phone call with these clients, asking for $5,000 a month, when the most they ever pay me is $1,500? To say I was terrified to have these conversations is an understatement.

 

The thing was that I didn’t have any doubts about being able to provide value to them. I didn’t have any doubts that I was going to be able to perform for them at a higher level. I didn’t have any doubts that the service I was going to be able to provide was going to help their businesses make a lot more money.

 

There wasn’t a doubt that I could perform for them, but there was a lack of confidence on my part to ask for the sale, and to ask for what I knew would be good for me, even though I knew it would be good for them, too. I knew these clients were already in pain; it wasn’t just me not enjoying our relationship. I knew these clients were currently paying other vendors to do the same type of work that my team and I could do.

 

I started to think, “Well, why are they paying all those extra people? I can do a much better job than those people, and, if they cancel their services with these other people and they give it to me, then it’s all going to be under one house. We’re going to be able to work more cohesively together. We’re going to be more efficient. We’re going to be able to get results.”

 

Right then I realized that, yes, they had the money.

 

I knew they had the budget, and I knew that I could provide huge value to them. But, I was still terrified about getting on the phone and asking them for the sale. But, my mentor pushed me, and I had already made a decision a while ago that when you have a mentor, you’re paying them for their advice. You’re paying them to teach you what you need to learn to grow your business. The only thing that you need to do is just follow their instructions.

 

The next time I spoke with my mentor, he asked me when I was going to actually take action, when was I actually going to get on the phone with these clients and close the sale? As much as I wanted to say, “A month from now”, I forced myself to tell him tomorrow, I was going to get this done tomorrow.

 

Well, something happened. I didn’t do it the next day, which was a Thursday. I did it on the day after, which was Friday. And it was very scary. I got on the phone. I got on with the first client and I followed the script. I reminded this client of the results they had been getting with us. I reminded them that I would only be taking on five clients from now on — and that it would be $5,000 a month. Basically I was saying, “You’re either in or you’re out.”

 

Then, I stopped talking and you could just hear the fear in my clients.

 

They began to become fearful because they knew how much I was helping them with their business. They knew they didn’t want to lose me — or the rankings, or the traffic, or the sales, or… I could literally feel their fear of losing out on the business relationship and they began to think, “What can I do to make this happen?” And, after the conversation that followed, I made a deal with that client. And I made a deal with the next client, and the next client, and the next client. In fact, I became so confident as these calls continued that I actually had a client agree to $10,000 a month!

 

So, within just one day, and with only a few phone calls, my sales went from $10,000 a month to over $25,000 a month. And the best part was that it didn’t require expending more money to get those new sales. What it did require, however, was confidence. What it required was asking for what I knew I was worth, knowing that I could provide value to my customers, and knowing that they wanted a higher level of service and results, too.

 

So, first off, my advice to you would be to take a look at your existing clients. Are there any that could be paying you more? Could you put together an offer for them where you can say, “Look, I want to provide more value to you and here’s how I’m going to do it.” Have those challenging phone calls and get what you really want from your business by giving your clients what they really want!

That’s my challenge for you today: It’s time for you, especially if you’re in a service based business, to finally start charging what you’re worth. It’s time for you to ask for that next sale.

How To Be Profitable From Day One

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I want to talk about something that’s a little taboo in the business world, a mistake that many new business owners make. And a mistake I made when I first opened my consulting agency.

 

The mistake is building your business and expecting that, someday in the future, you are going to be profitable. Sounds harmless, right? Wrong. Instead, you should be focusing on being profitable from day one!

 

Many entrepreneurs start a business so that they can have freedom. So they can set their own schedules. So they can spend more time with their families. So they can finally be rewarded for their hard work in the way that they should be rewarded.

 

Before you know it, you are “investing” 12 to 18 hours per day in your business so that one day you can finally make money from your business. If you calculate out how much you are actually making, you realize that you make less than minimum wage. You could make more working at a fast food place!

 

In 2006, when we first started our marketing consulting agency, we had an offer called “Services for Stompers”. Our target audience included fellow members of the membership group “Stompernet.” The idea was that I would find people who could execute the tactics and strategies that were being taught in the membership program and create a system around it. I created operating procedures and videos so that basically anyone that we hired could come in and start doing the strategies immediately. I then made those people available to the members of the Stompernet community to help them to grow their businesses, as well.

 

Back then I thought, “Well, if I’m paying these people

$5 an hour and I charge $10 an hour, that’s huge! I’d be making 100% profit.” But what I didn’t count on was the long list of operating expenses that comes with growing and scaling a business.

 

As our consultancy agency grew, I learned about how you should have different departments in your organization, even if you are just a one person show! That way, you can allocate a percentage of your revenue to each of the departments and then designate each of your expenses to one of those departments.

 

There are six main departments:

 

1. Administration. Administration includes anything for the CEO, such as ongoing training, professional dues and fees. If you are a small business with less than five employees, you could put your salary in this category as well.

 

2. Marketing. Marketing includes anything that is done to acquire a lead or prospect, including things like paid ads and building an email list.

 

3. Sales. Sales includes anything that is done to close a sale.

 

4. HR & Finance. HR & Finance includes any bank fees, bookkeeping, CPA or anything that is human resource related.

 

5. Operations. Operations includes anything that is related to the cost of keeping the doors open, including internet and phone services.

 

6. COGS. COGS stands for the “Cost of Goods Sold”. If you have a team, then this would include all of the salaries of W-2 or 1099 team members.

 

An example of how you might allocate your revenue could be:

 

Administration 20%

Marketing 10%

Sales 20%

HR & Finance 5% Operations 20%

COGS 25%

 

When I first started my consulting agency, I had no idea about any of this. I was oversimplifying things. All I thought was that if you pay somebody $5, sell for $10, then you make 100% profit — and that’s huge. But you know as well as I do that there’s a lot more that goes into a business than that!

 

Some of what goes into a business is very nuanced. For example, how do you handle quality control in your business?

 

If you assign your employee a client project and pay them $5.00 an hour to complete it, and then pass it back to your client without checking their work first, there’s a very high possibility that there will be some important details that were missed. Spelling mistakes, broken links, broken funnels, etc. — all of this makes for unhappy clients. There’s a lot of middle management operating costs that are often overlooked and unaccounted for when you first price out your product or service.

 

I hope now you understand what I meant when I first said that a big mistake business owners make is expecting their business to be profitable over time – but not from day one. If you focus on profit from the very beginning, you can be one of those businesses that starts generating revenue well ahead of the competition. It’s actually a lot easier than you think to start generating six figures of revenue.

 

But now, as a business owner, you find yourself working twelve hour days, working 60 or 70 hours a week. You can’t go see a movie, much less take a vacation. You can’t escape from your business because everything is dependent on you. You have clients that need help, team members you need to train and work to review. You’re the link between your clients and your team and that takes up a lot of time and energy. And at the end of the year, your company may have generated six figures, but because of all of the expenses we outlined above, you’re not seeing a lot of that money.

 

You might be lucky if you’re able to take home a

$20,000 salary. (That number is pretty standard for service based businesses — the profit margins are about 20%.)

 

So let’s lay it all out on the table. You’ve just earned

$20,000 working 60 – 70 hours a week, every week, for an entire year. You thought all of those hours would be worth it…was it?

You say to yourself, “It’s going to work. It’s going to scale. I’m going to get better clients. My team’s going to get better.”

 

But your team is probably made up of contractors, and as you train them and their skill level increases, they’ll start taking on other clients and get busier. They might increase their rates. They might not be available to work the amount of hours you need them to. The bottom line is: their goal isn’t to help you grow your company.

 

Or maybe you’re doing the actual client work, but because you’re trying to balance it all, sometimes your work isn’t the best you could be producing, especially if you had more time and energy to put into it. So your clients are frustrated and they don’t want to keep paying you for subpar work. There’s been too many bumps in the road and they don’t want to keep working with you.

 

It’s a never ending cycle of losing team members and clients, and hustling to get new clients and train new team members.

 

 

We need to stop this cycle TODAY. We do not want to have a creative business where we’re working ourselves to the bone only to take home a couple thousand dollars in revenue. It doesn’t make sense because, statistically, your year two in business isn’t going to be any different. Neither is year three.

 

It’s time to figure out how to make your business profitable right now, immediately, or at the very least within the next 90 days. I personally don’t even start new projects unless I know they can be profitable from day one.

 

So, figure out what you need to do to make your business profitable within these next 90 days. You might need to take a step back to look at how you would structure your company if you had departments.

 

If you had to pay someone to do the job that you’re doing, what would that look like? Your job as the business owner is to work yourself out of a job. What I mean by that is that your business should be generating enough revenue so that if it was necessary, you would be able to hire someone to replace yourself in your own business.

 

In other words, your business should be able to pay you the same amount of money that it would cost to pay someone else to do the job that you are doing in your business today. Now that’s probably not the amount of money that you’d ideally like to be making as the business owner, but, at a minimum, figure out the amount of money that you would need to pay someone else to do your job.

 

So, for example, if your business is not able to generate $60,000 of profit, which is about $5,000 a month, the average salary that a business owner takes home, then something is wrong with the structure of your business.

Don’t let your business take over your life, especially if you’re not generating a living salary back from your efforts.

 

Don’t base your decisions in the belief that, one day, maybe in the future, your business will be profitable. Structure your business correctly today so that it is profitable from Day One.

How Much Is Your Time Worth?

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I’d like to ask you a question, “As a business owner, have you ever felt like your to do list is never ending? That you simply don’t have enough hours in the day to get things done to grow your business?” I know that I have.

 

The other day one of my kids was asking me if I had a time machine. The reason she was asking me is because it’s Christmastime and she couldn’t wait for Christmas morning to happen so that she could open up her presents. And I said, “Yeah, of course I do.” And, of course, she knew I was joking. But I said, “But if I did have it, if I did have a time machine, what I would do is I wouldn’t actually make time get faster. I would make time go slower because I have so much to do right now.”

 

There never (ever) seems to be enough hours in the day.


Does your business sometimes make you feel stressed and overwhelmed because you’re trying to figure out how in the world you are going to get everything done that you need to get done? It’s a never-ending cycle. Sometimes you are really stressed because you’re trying to get new clients for your business or new sales for your business. And then, all of a sudden, you have new clients or you have new sales, and now you have to fill all of the orders.

And so you’re stressed, either because you need more sales or you’re stressed because you’re trying to fulfill all of those new products or services that you’re trying to deliver. Maybe in your business you feel sometimes that you’re stuck on how to figure something out, that you know that you want to launch a new product or service online, but you’re not exactly sure how to do it.

Or maybe you’re trying to build your website for the very first time and you’re eager to launch it. Or maybe you want to set up an automated webinar or send out automated emails? You want to automate tasks. I had one client and we went round and round. She was getting all of this conflicting advice about how to set up her merchant account correctly so that she could connect it with Infusionsoft (Keap), which was her marketing automation platform. She had gotten a merchant account, but it was a “card present” account and not a “card not present”, which is the type of merchant account you need to get when you’re doing business online.

She had called up her merchant account, because she called up her bank and tried to explain, and nobody believed her when she said, “What I really need is a ‘card not present’ account”. I finally convinced her to just go into the bank, sit down, talk to the manager and make them fix this.

Maybe you are getting stuck with something in your business, and you’re not even sure how to figure it out. And people are giving you conflicting advice and you don’t know what the next steps are. Maybe you are telling yourself: “I just need to figure out this one thing and then I can get my business to move forward.”

Well, I want to ask you a question: How much is your time worth?

The reason I’m asking this question is because way back when we first launched our consulting agency, one of the things that I learned early on was that if I could pay someone $5 an hour to do something and I chose to do that one thing, then I was literally making or saving $5 an hour. When I learned that principle, it kind of blew my mind. At the time I was still doing everything myself.

Here I was trying to figure out how to update this page of my website using HTML, learning Dreamweaver… and I wasn’t really good at it. I was good at other things, but that was not my area of expertise. And it is taking me literally hours to figure out how to do this. And I could literally go at that time and maybe even today to Fiverr.com or other freelancing websites and find someone very easily and pay someone just $5, and they would have it done for me in probably 15 minutes. They wouldn’t even take them an hour to do those kinds of things.

And then it hit me. I realized, “Wow, I’m trying to save $5 by doing this thing myself!”If I hired

someone and gave them that job and assigned it to someone else, I could pay them $5 to do it — and they’re going to get it done faster than I ever could. They’re going to do a better job than me, and then I’m going to be able to free up my time to focus on where I should be focusing on. As a business owner, you have two jobs and only two jobs.

 

And those two jobs are to increase sales and to implement systems. If you don’t have systems in your business, you’re not going to be able to scale. You’re going to create this big thing where you are the bottleneck of your business and without sales, your company is going to die and you cannot delegate getting sales for your own company.

 

So, for example, when you’re first getting started, you may have zero revenue. That’s how we were when we first started our e-commerce business. And when we first started building that website, I did everything I could and then and pulled in my husband to help me with whatever I could not figure out. We didn’t have older kids at the time. They were all babies. So, there’s the two of us doing everything ourselves. We did not have any money at all to delegate to and even

$5 an hour was way too much to hire someone else at that time.

 

About eighteen months after we started the business, our sales skyrocketed to $30,000 a month! I finally realized that it did not make sense for me to do all the work myself anymore.

 

At the time I was still making all the edits to my website myself, creating all the graphics myself, writing all of the product descriptions myself…. on top of processing orders, taking customer service calls, and more! And it made sense when we were getting started. But once the revenues were at 30K per month, it did not make sense anymore. My time was better spent doing profit generating activities.

 

For example, let’s just take editing a video. I don’t know how to edit a video. I’ve never even tried to learn how to edit a video. But, let’s say I decided that I wanted to be the one to edit the videos for my business. Well, I’m going to have to first off, take a course or watch some videos about how to do editing. I’m going to probably have to buy some type of software tool to figure out how to edit the videos. I’m going to have questions. I may have to hire a consultant to teach me just so I can learn how to do it myself.

 

It’s going to take me hours and hours and hours to learn that new skill! Unless video editing is my core business, I literally have no business trying to learn how to do it! The time that I would take to learn that skill is not time invested. It is time that is wasted because it is not time that I can use to leverage that skill to increase the profitability of my company. My time needs me to be focused on two things which are increasing revenue and implementing systems in my business, so that the business can scale.

 

It’s time to buy your time back.

 

If you are a consultant and you charge $200 an hour and you choose to do something that you could easily pay someone $50 an hour to do, then at that moment in time, you are making $50 an hour. If we drill that down a step further, you are actually losing $150/hour because of the lost opportunities you are letting slip by.

 

This does not mean you have to go out there and hire a full time employee! You can hire a virtual assistant or a marketing consultant for only five hours per week and you’ll be amazed at how much they’re able to get done! You’ll be amazed at how different your own life will be by just giving yourself five extra hours!