She Makes $1M a Month: The Strategy That Changed Everything
A 96-minute interview with a digital-product seller who went from $63 in year one to $1M months on a four-step Instagram funnel, then a host breakdown of the ten principles underneath it.
Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
12.8K
436 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Most entrepreneurs do not have a leads, sales, or marketing problem, they have a traffic problem, and the fastest fix is one simple offer under $97 pushed at volume straight to a checkout page.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You sell or want to sell a low-ticket digital product and are unsure how to price it, where to send traffic, or whether to build an email funnel first.
You run a service or coaching business that is profitable on paper but eats your whole week, and you are wondering whether a simpler model could pay the same.
You post on Instagram inconsistently, burn out after two weeks, and want a posting ramp that actually holds.
You have spent months on a product and days on marketing it, and suspect that ratio is backwards.
You are a parent or solo operator who needs a business that runs on two working days a week.
SKIP IF…
You sell physical products, software, or anything where impulse checkout under $100 is not the buying motion.
You need help with the creative side of content. This is about the plumbing after the post, not what to film.
You already run a scaled low-ticket funnel with ads at 2.5x return. The tactics here will be familiar.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Traffic is the real bottleneck, and the interviewee solved it with the simplest possible machine: an Instagram reel, a comment keyword, a single ManyChat message with a link, and a checkout page, then relentless volume at the top of that funnel. Her rules are blunt. Price between $27 and $97, avoid the $197 to $997 dead zone, run ads the moment you have made your first dollar, send buyers straight to checkout because email nurture sequences cooled leads in a six-month test, and use email only to resell existing customers. She got to seven figures by following the rule of five ones, one problem, one market, one offer, one platform, one year, and got to eight figures by cutting a 30-person team to three. The host closes with ten principles from her story, from recruiting superstars to leading with values.
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Montage of the interview's biggest claims, the $63 to $22M reveal, and the channel's subscribe bit.
02:29 – 05:08
02 · The most expensive mistake: a business you work for
Building a business that needs you versus one that works for you. Working Tuesdays and Fridays while paying herself $500K a month. The hustle meme and why growth feels heavy when the model is wrong.
05:08 – 07:23
03 · The early system: time audit and two sales calls a day
The one link that made the money is unsexy. Identify the one or two things making money, cut 80 to 90 percent of the rest, and book two sales calls before any other work.
07:23 – 09:11
04 · Sponsor: Granola
Ad read for the AI meeting notepad.
09:11 – 12:34
05 · Traffic is the real problem
Do the money-making thing first even when the business is on fire, or stay in feast and famine. Most people fear the traffic problem and optimize a thousand other things instead.
12:34 – 15:26
06 · The $22M funnel: reel, keyword, ManyChat, checkout
Three traffic levers: content, ads, email. Track revenue per post. Then the whole funnel: a reel, a comment keyword, a one-line DM with a link, a checkout page. Thousands of comments a day.
15:26 – 16:59
07 · Sponsor: ManyChat demo
The hosts set up an auto-DM-from-comment automation on screen.
16:59 – 21:54
08 · Volume, the 90-day ramp, and auditing content
Simple process, brutal volume at the top. Beginners post once a week for four weeks, then two or three times, then daily, restarting on any miss. Track views-to-followers before views-to-sales. Level one, two, and three posting schedules.
21:54 – 24:55
09 · Pitch versus nurture and the daily schedule
Stories are always pitch. One pitch reel at 7am PST, a carousel at 9am rotating pitch and nurture. Emotions as carousel triggers. Identity-based content as this year's tactic, not a principle.
24:55 – 26:44
10 · Straight to checkout beats the email funnel
A six-month experiment: straight to checkout out-earned email-then-checkout decisively. Warm-up sequences, webinars, and VSLs cool leads down. Interest peaks the moment someone finds you.
26:44 – 28:51
11 · Run ads at one dollar and what makes them work
No organic-first medal. Elevator ads pay for themselves at 2.5x. The creative is easy; the landing page must answer what do I get and why now, and AOV must cover acquisition cost.
28:51 – 32:11
12 · Urgency, flash sales, and integrity
Nine urgency angles, with flash sales and coupons the most underused. Brand perception is a luxury you do not have yet. Deadlines are never extended. Service businesses should book and close within 48 hours.
32:11 – 34:24
13 · From $5 a day to $10K a day
Start at $5, reinvest each $27 sale, scale to $300K a month at 2.5x. The plateau means the warm market is gone; now you sell to Siberia with better creative, pages, and AOV.
34:24 – 39:45
14 · Email to a million subscribers and subject lines
Email is the top revenue line but acquires almost no one; it resells existing customers. Three emails a day: 7am nurture with a photo and no pitch, 1pm and 5pm pitches under four sentences. Subject lines get more effort than anything else.
39:45 – 42:53
15 · Pricing and the dead zone
Sweet spots at $27 to $57 and $97. Dead zone from $197 to $997. Products should be worth ten times their price. Price for volume like Sam Walton. High-ticket movers at $97, $497, $897. Leads who could not afford high ticket bought low ticket.
42:53 – 45:19
16 · The first 30 days of a new offer
Build the product in two to five hours on one hyper-specific problem. A hundred customers will tell you what is wrong. Two days to set up on a checkout page, 28 days on traffic.
45:19 – 51:21
17 · Where it started: $63 and keeping your word
Working for her dad, graphic design school, hundreds of Odesk applications for $20 gigs. $63, then $350, then $8,000. She kept going because she kept her word to herself everywhere else, so her brain believed the millionaire promise.
51:21 – 52:53
18 · Starting with no money and your true hourly rate
Sold her camera and clothes for a $1,500 coach who taught packages, niche, and sales scripts. Cancelled Netflix to hire two hours a week. Scrolling and gossip are negative-dollar activities. Know your real hourly rate.
52:53 – 57:06
19 · Seven figures with high ticket and the rule of five ones
Booking two calls a day built a waitlist for logos, friends asked how, and she pivoted to teaching client acquisition. The rule of five ones took her to a million-dollar run rate in seven months. Cutting offers is what unlocks seven figures.
57:06 – 59:47
20 · From 30 people to a team of three
Thirty people on a Zoom call and abysmal margins. She let most go and hit eight figures with three. Every role now must tie to at least $300K in annual revenue.
59:47 – 1:04:08
21 · Rock bottom and the pivot to low ticket
Divorce at three months postpartum, naps after daycare drop-off, holding her daughter in the back seat. She let the seven-figure coaching business go to make $8,000 a month on low ticket. Month two hit $80K; December brought the first million-dollar month.
1:04:08 – 1:08:48
22 · Principle: recruit superstars
Coaches, mentors, and hires as a sports team you own. She hired a coach at $8K a year. Every hire should draw a direct line to revenue. Eight figures with three people.
1:08:48 – 1:13:15
23 · Principle: strategic focus
Three ways to apply it: simplicity (the five ones), attention (the time audit and income-generating work first), and niches (new female founders, then moms, then pond up).
1:13:15 – 1:17:12
24 · Principle: build a personal brand
Pitch content makes money today; nurture content builds trust. A screen-recorded scroll through her Instagram shows diary posts that double as proof the method works.
1:17:12 – 1:18:12
25 · Dream shoutout
Subscriber product shoutout for a skincare line.
1:18:12 – 1:19:35
26 · Principle: evaluate the right metrics
Measure the number that proves you are closer to the dream, not the one that looks impressive. Decide the outcome before posting and log intention against result in a spreadsheet.
1:19:35 – 1:21:51
27 · Principle: the volume principle
Success becomes predictable with more high-quality attempts. Volume only has to beat last month. The 90-day ramp, and slow to build, slow to break.
1:21:51 – 1:24:31
28 · Principle: find the bottlenecks
The founder is usually the bottleneck. Hand off the lowest-leverage tasks first and work up to the magic in a bottle. She kept the writing and changed the model instead of training coaches.
1:24:31 – 1:27:45
29 · Principles: know when to pivot and lead with values
Three signs to pivot: no momentum, diminishing returns, new information. Hers was realizing the life the business gave her was not the one she wanted. Values decided it, not strategy.
1:27:45 – 1:31:27
30 · Principle: resourcefulness
Build with what you have. James Clear's 3-2-1 newsletter, the broken Jaws shark, and the hosts' own founder walk that replaced a big event they could not afford.
1:31:27 – 1:36:05
31 · Principle: mindset and sign-off
The host admits how far her own unscalable show feels from the guest's model. The dream is on the other side of deciding you can solve the problems. Let the successful version take over.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Most entrepreneurs think they need more leads, sales, or marketing when the only problem worth solving is traffic.
A four-step funnel made $22 million: Instagram reel, comment keyword, one ManyChat DM with a link, checkout page.
A six-month split test showed sending people straight to checkout out-earned a well-written email nurture funnel, hands down.
The things you think warm a lead up, nine-day sequences, webinars, video sales letters, are actually cooling them down.
If you have made one dollar in your business, it is time to run ads. Nobody hands out a medal for growing organically.
Start ads at $5 a day, reinvest each sale, and scale at the pace of returns. That is how $5 became $10,000 a day.
An ad is easy to make. Profit comes from the landing page answering what you get and why now, and from average order value at 2.5x acquisition cost.
Price at $27, $37, $47, $57, or $97. Everything from $197 to $997 is a dead zone: too expensive to impulse-buy, too cheap to justify sales infrastructure.
If sales are not moving at $27, you do not have a pricing problem. You have a packaging, messaging, or traffic problem.
A good low-ticket product solves one hyper-specific problem and takes two to five hours to build, not thirty videos.
Spend two of your first 30 days building the product and 28 days sending traffic to it. Most people invert that ratio.
A million-subscriber email list produces the most revenue every month but almost no new customers. Email resells buyers, it does not acquire them.
Three emails a day added two to three thousand dollars daily with no change in unsubscribe rate.
Pitch emails are four sentences or less. Dragging out a pitch signals you are scared to ask.
The rule of five ones, one problem, one market, one offer, one platform, one year, took her from $80K months to a million-dollar run rate in seven months.
Diluting energy across three or five offers is the thing keeping most businesses under seven figures.
An eight-figure business ran on three team members, and every hire now has to be tied to at least $300,000 in annual revenue.
Track views-to-followers before views-to-sales. A post with 5,000 views and 500 follows beats one with 100,000 views and 100 follows.
Post once a week for four weeks, then two or three times a week, then daily. Miss a slot and you start from zero.
Flash sales and coupons do not cheapen a brand you do not have yet. You are not Louis Vuitton, and you need money coming in.
A deadline is a deadline. Making exceptions is disrespectful to every customer who bought when you said it was time.
The ad plateau is not failure. It means the warm market is exhausted and you now have to sell to cold traffic with better creative, page, and order value.
The written word, captions, carousels, subject lines, is the last thing a founder should outsource.
Keeping your word to yourself in small things is what lets your brain believe you when you say you will be a millionaire.
Takeaway
Solve traffic, price under $97, sell one thing.
WHAT TO LEARN
Everything in this interview reduces to one machine: a cheap, specific product, a comment keyword that drops people on a checkout page, and relentless volume at the top, with ads and email reselling the buyers you already have.
02The most expensive mistake: a business you work for
A business you work for and a business that works for you can earn the same revenue; the difference is whether growth adds hours or removes them.
If landing a client gives you a sinking feeling instead of excitement, the model is wrong and you will subconsciously sabotage your own scaling.
03The early system: time audit and two sales calls a day
Run a time audit, find the one or two activities that produce money, and cut the 80 to 90 percent that do not.
Do income-generating work before anything else each day. Early on that meant booking two sales calls before touching client work.
A system is any repeatable recipe that moves you closer to money. It does not need to be an automation.
05Traffic is the real problem
When client work and sales compete, sales wins, even with a deadline two days out. Letting that fire burn is what breaks the feast-and-famine cycle.
Most new entrepreneurs do not have a capacity problem. They have two clients a month and are solving problems they do not yet have.
Leads, sales, and marketing are symptoms. Traffic is the disease, and it is hard, which is why people optimize everything else instead.
Track how much money each piece of content makes. A reel with 30,000 views and 50 sales beats one with 100,000 views and 3 sales.
Every post needs a call to action tied to a tracked destination, whether that is a checkout page, a booking link, or an inquiry form.
The funnel that made $22 million has four steps and one automated message. Complexity in the back end is wasted when three people are walking through it.
08Volume, the 90-day ramp, and auditing content
Beat a simple process to death with volume at the front rather than polishing a back end nobody reaches.
If you have never posted consistently for 90 days, start with once a week for four weeks and never schedule it; the goal is trained trust in yourself.
Ramp to two or three posts a week, then five, and restart from zero on any missed slot so the muscle builds slowly and breaks slowly.
Audit posts by views-to-followers first. A high-view, low-follow post is not working no matter how good it feels.
09Pitch versus nurture and the daily schedule
Stories are always a pitch with a call to action, and every day starts with a 7am pitch reel so revenue lands before anything else.
Nurture carousels come from a felt emotion, shame, joy, fear, rather than from guessing what the audience wants to hear.
Identity-based content is working right now, but it is a tactic with a shelf life, not a principle.
10Straight to checkout beats the email funnel
A six-month test found straight-to-checkout out-earned a well-executed email nurture funnel; pitch carousels no longer collect emails at all.
Nine-day warm-ups, webinars, and video sales letters cool leads down because interest peaks the moment someone finds you.
Send people straight to the conversion point, whether that is a checkout, a booking page, or an inquiry form.
11Run ads at one dollar and what makes them work
The moment you have made one dollar, run ads. Organic-first is a slower road with no prize at the end.
Start at $5 a day and reinvest each sale so the ads pay for themselves, targeting 2.5x return.
The creative is the easy part. Profit lives in a landing page that answers what you get and why now, and an order value at least 2.5x acquisition cost.
12Urgency, flash sales, and integrity
Flash sales and coupons are the most effective urgency levers and the most avoided. Brand perception is a concern for later.
Deadlines are never extended and policies have no exceptions, because bending them disrespects everyone who bought on time.
For service businesses, book the call within 48 hours and close on it; a week-and-a-half delay kills show-up rates.
13From $5 a day to $10K a day
Scaling from $5 to $10,000 a day took years of gradual reinvestment, not a big budget.
The ad plateau means the warm market is exhausted. Cold traffic demands better creative, a better page, and a higher order value.
Once you can convert a cold stranger in two minutes, spend is the only limit left.
14Email to a million subscribers and subject lines
A million-subscriber list is the top revenue source but acquires almost no one. Collect customers, then email them.
Three emails a day, one nurture and two pitches, added thousands per day with unchanged unsubscribe rates.
Pitch emails are four sentences with an assumptive close. Nurture emails build to a pain point and then withhold the pitch.
The founder writes every email, caption, and carousel because the written word drives the traffic.
Subject lines get more effort than any other content and are harvested from pattern interrupts in daily life.
15Pricing and the dead zone
Price at $27, $37, $47, $57, or $97. Avoid $197 through $997, where objections rise but margin cannot fund a sales process.
Start at $27 if unsure. If it does not sell there, the problem is packaging, messaging, or traffic, never price.
A product should be worth ten times its price. Sell for volume rather than for what it is worth.
Leads who could never afford a high-ticket offer are the ready market for a low-ticket one.
16The first 30 days of a new offer
A low-ticket product solves one hyper-specific problem and takes two to five hours to build.
A hundred customers will find the flaws faster than the founder ever could; ship, then fix what many of them flag.
Spend two days setting up the product and 28 days driving traffic, the opposite of what most people do.
17Where it started: $63 and keeping your word
Years one and two paid $63 and $350. What kept her going was keeping her word to herself in every other area of life.
Flaky self-promises do more than cost money; they erode the self-trust needed to attack the real problem instead of avoiding it.
The $1,500 coach taught packages, a niche, and a sales script, and more than doubled revenue twice.
18Starting with no money and your true hourly rate
Cutting Netflix and the gym paid for a two-hour-a-week hire, and those two hours went to sales calls that covered her pay.
Scrolling and gossip are negative-dollar activities. Cutting them is the first hire you can afford with no money.
Know your true hourly rate, even when it is humbling, because it changes every decision.
19Seven figures with high ticket and the rule of five ones
Two booked calls a day produced a waitlist so long that clients paid in February for logos delivered in November.
The pivot from doing the work to teaching client acquisition came from friends asking how she was booked out.
One problem, one market, one offer, one platform, one year took her from a plateau to a million-dollar run rate in seven months.
Multiple offers dilute the micro-decisions in your marketing. Cutting them is uncomfortable and is exactly what unlocks seven figures.
20From 30 people to a team of three
Thirty people on a Zoom call with thin margins became three people and eight figures.
Every hire must connect to at least $300,000 in annual revenue or they are costing you time.
21Rock bottom and the pivot to low ticket
Rock bottom was holding her daughter in a car seat, not a bad quarter. She let a seven-figure business go to make $8,000 a month.
The downsized low-ticket model hit $80,000 in its second month and a million-dollar month within two years.
Lifestyle did not change with revenue: same apartment, same paid-off car, the rest invested toward a number that ends the pressure.
22Principle: recruit superstars
Treat your dream like a sports team you own: recruit players and coaches, and get a coach before you are successful, not after.
Before hiring, draw a direct line from the role to revenue. If you cannot, it is not the hire you need.
Three superstars can outproduce a large team that lacks them.
23Principle: strategic focus
Focus has three applications: simplify the model, direct attention to money-making work first, and start in one niche before ponding up.
Needle-moving work feels boring or risky, and busy work is how founders avoid it while feeling productive.
Niching to new female founders did not cap the business; it grew to nearly 200,000 customers.
24Principle: build a personal brand
Pitch content is measured in money today. Nurture content is measured in trust and engagement.
Diary posts about single motherhood are proof the method works, because they show the customer the life they want.
Share what is authentic to you and relevant to the buyer; a Starbucks order is neither.
26Principle: evaluate the right metrics
Measure the number that proves you are closer to the goal, not the one that looks impressive.
Decide the intended outcome before posting and log intention against result in a spreadsheet.
27Principle: the volume principle
Volume does not need to match seven posts a day. It needs to beat last month.
Quality comes with reps, so early on the honest priority is more attempts.
Build volume in one area until a system holds it, then move to the next.
28Principle: find the bottlenecks
The founder is usually the bottleneck. Hand off the lowest-leverage tasks first and keep the magic in a bottle.
Understand a job inside out before delegating it, then build the system and let it go.
A bottleneck has more than one fix. She changed the model rather than training coaches to replace her.
29Principles: know when to pivot and lead with values
Three signs to pivot: no momentum, diminishing returns, new information. Realizing the life the business gives you is wrong counts.
Pivoting away from something that works is harder than leaving a failure, especially with a family to support.
Values decided the pivot before strategy did. Knowing what you will not compromise makes the choice obvious.
30Principle: resourcefulness
Resourcefulness means building from what you have: knowledge, an audience that could not afford you, and two free days a week.
Constraints improve the work. A broken shark made Jaws scarier, a newborn made a shorter newsletter that reaches three million.
A big event the hosts could not afford became a park walk with 27 founders and deeper conversations than a venue would have allowed.
31Principle: mindset and sign-off
The dream is not on the other side of having the answers. It is on the other side of deciding you are capable of finding them.
Looking at a scalable model from inside an unscalable one is humbling, and the fix is trusting yourself, not more information.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
ManyChat
A messaging automation tool that watches for a keyword in Instagram comments or story replies and automatically sends the commenter a direct message, usually containing a link.
Low ticket
Digital products priced roughly under $100, cheap enough to be bought on impulse without a sales call and scalable because the product is made once and sold to thousands.
Pricing dead zone
The range from about $197 to $997 where a product is too expensive for an impulse purchase but not expensive enough to fund the sales process needed to overcome objections.
Rule of five ones
A focus rule for reaching seven figures fast: solve one problem for one target market with one offer on one platform for one year before adding anything else.
Pitch content
Posts whose job is to make money today. They carry a direct call to action such as a comment keyword or a link to buy, and are measured in sales, bookings, or inquiries.
Nurture content
Posts whose job is to build trust with people who already follow you, often personal or diary-style, measured in engagement rather than sales.
AOV (average order value)
The average amount a customer pays at checkout, including any upsells or bumps. Ads become profitable when AOV is comfortably above the cost to acquire that customer.
ROAS
Return on ad spend. A 2.5x ROAS means every dollar spent on ads brings back two dollars and fifty cents in revenue.
Elevator ads
Running ads so they pay for themselves from day one, reinvesting each sale into the next day's spend and scaling only as fast as the returns allow.
Views-to-followers ratio
A content metric comparing how many people saw a post to how many followed afterward. A high ratio means the post attracted people who wanted to stick around.
Assumptive close
Ending a pitch as if the sale is already made, with lines like see you on the inside, so the reader is nudged toward the yes.
Identity-based content
Posts that call out a specific self-description in the label, such as high-functioning anxious women or plumbers in one county, so the right viewer instantly recognizes themselves.
Flash sale
A short, hard-deadlined discount used to create urgency. The interviewee runs them roughly monthly and never extends the deadline.
“If I feel an emotion of shame or I feel an emotion of joy or I feel an emotion of fear, that emotion in my body is a signal that it should be a carousel.”
“People think they're Louis Vuitton. They think they're Gucci. It's like, you're not there at all.”
roasts the never-discount crowd→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
32:18
“you start with $5 a day because that $5 might make you a $27 sale.”
removes the budget excuse→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
33:53
“You know how to turn a cold person who's never ever seen you before into a paying customer in a matter of two minutes.”
the skill that makes you unstoppable→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
34:46
“We do not get many new customers from email. So no one is reading our email and turning into a customer. Our customers are reading our emails and buying from us again.”
reframes what a million-subscriber list is for→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
35:12
“No one should be focusing on collecting email addresses. They should be focusing on collecting customers and then emailing their customers later.”
34:24 – 39:45denseEmail marketing and subject lines
39:45 – 45:19densePricing and launching a low-ticket offer
45:19 – 52:53steadyOrigin story, first coach, hourly rate
52:53 – 59:47denseSeven figures, five ones, shrinking the team
59:47 – 1:04:08steadySingle motherhood and the low-ticket pivot
1:04:08 – 1:36:05steadyHost breakdown: ten principles
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I went from making $63 in one year to over $22 million. And I realized that most entrepreneurs have no idea the actual problem they need to be solving in their business. They think they need more leads.
They think they need more sales. They think they need more marketing. They don't.
They actually need more, which is what I teach my students to do. So this is the funnel that's made me $22 million. Meet Maria Wendt, business expert and mastermind behind one of the biggest digital product empires in the game.
And today, she's going to reveal her money -making secrets. I would disagree that you should focus on organic first. I tell people if you've made $1 in your business, it's time to run ads.
But it's not so much about the ad itself, it's what comes right after the ad. So what we do with our ads, the ones that get us sales right away, is... And the exact playbook she would use to grow any brand.
How do you figure out pricing? So we actually have a pricing formula that we teach our students. I'll just tell you the price points that are good and the price points to avoid.
Wait, hold on, hold on. The thing that got me to a million dollars was I followed the world of the five ones. You solve one problem for one target market with one offer, and the next one is a game changer for us.
This is, if you do that, you know how to turn a cold person into a paying customer in two minutes. You're unstoppable. My brain is like processing, oh, this is crazy.
When I first became a single mom, I was running a seven figure business, but it was messy. I was on Zoom calls for eight hours a day. I got to the point where I'm like, I don't even care if I'm not making seven figures anymore.
I I just want to figure out my bare bones and I'll just let the rest go. But then I realized, what if I'm what?
Ironically, in the second month, we hit $80 ,000. And then I did like $200 ,000 two months later. And then I had my first million dollar month in December of last year.
So if I wanted to 10x my business, this is exactly what I would do.
On this channel, we like to help make dreams come true. We're currently in post -production, but we're also getting back to comments and to dreams that we feel like that we may be able to help out with. Whether it's guiding you, connecting you with mentors, some of them have even been able to quit their jobs and actually go forward with their dream.
We have seen some great results. If you currently need help in your dream in a big or small way, let us know in the comments. Make sure you're subscribed and you might just hear from us.
Let's get back to the video. Roy, do you have a dream? I do.
Don't say I do, say subscribe. Roy, do you have a dream? I do.
It's... For you to subscribe. Because I sent you.
Roy, do you have a dream? Yes, for someone to subscribe after hearing me subscribe. I do.
Oh my god, don't say I do.
Maria, what do you think is the most expensive mistake an entrepreneur can make when trying to grow? The biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make is they build a business that they work for versus... business that works for them.
And here's what I mean by that. When I first became a single mom, I was running a seven -figure business, but it was messy. And I was on Zoom calls for eight hours a day.
My life was such a shit show in other areas that I finally had the bravery and the courage to confront reality. And that's when I got ruthless and made the decisions that needed to be made, the cuts that needed to be made, the firings that needed to happen, the restructuring that needed to happen. which then it's scaled to eight figures automatically.
I mean, you're prioritizing simplicity, right? I find a lot of entrepreneurs are working very hard. They're putting 16 hours a day in.
I don't put 16 hours a day in at all. And yet I pay myself like $500 ,000 personally a month. And I'm only working on Tuesdays and Fridays.
And so for me, a successful business is one that requires no compromise on the financial goals and no compromise on the time freedom goals. I don't know why this is reminding me of a meme. I don't know if you've seen that meme.
They're just like, I quit my 9 to 5, and now... I work 24 -7. Yes, yes.
Or the ones where it's like entrepreneurs will work 80 hours a week for themselves so they don't have to work 40 hours a week for somebody else. We glorify the hustle so unnecessarily. You don't need to work 16 hours a day in order to make a ton of money.
You are working hard and that's great, but imagine how much more money you could make if you put that same energy towards actually building a system that works for you, which is what I teach my students to do. And so the goal is not for you to work for your business. It's for your business to work for you.
Like, what is it really that's getting people stuck in that? Why are so many of us making this mistake? I think one, they don't ask, am I building the business?
that I actually want, a business that's actually going to give me freedom. You know, you get a client and you're kind of excited, but you also have a sinking feeling in your stomach because you're like, oh damn, now I got to go deliver. Now I got to go get this client, this result.
That's a sign that something's off. Something's not aligned. If you hear of a marketing strategy and you're like, I'm going to try that, but it feels heavy, there's a subconscious sabotage that's happening and it's going to prevent you from scaling.
And so when I have my people come in, I help a lot of businesses scale. We look at all the things they're doing and so often they don't allow themselves. to grow because they inherently deep down know if I grow, it's just going to be more of the bullshit I don't like.
What is really the key to actually unlocking what you have figured out? That's such a good question. We like to feel like we're the saviors of our business and that we have to come up with the ideas and we have to cut.
And it's like, it's so humbling when it's like, no dude, the thing that I do is have one link that's sent automatically. It's kind of a bummer. It's like a buzzkill.
It's like, nope, it's really simple. But like my ego is hurt by that. I would love to show you something sexy, but I don't have something sexy.
Except the millions of dollars in my bank account. That's sexy. So is there a system in the early days that really helped your business that you would recommend?
I had no idea what to do as a new entrepreneur. I made $63 in my first year. So it took me a year to make $63.
And then another year to make $350. So I was really bad at knowing what to do. to make money as a new entrepreneur.
And the thing that changed for me, if you look at my revenue year by year, you'll see a year where it's like, oh, Maria figured something out because now she made like, whatever it was, like $10 ,000 or $20 ,000 in the year. So it was a big difference in one of those years. And so what I found is that we need to really identify the few things that are actually making us money.
It's like one or two things and stop doing 80 to 90 % of what you're currently doing. And so a big part of what I try to do is have entrepreneurs examine where our time is going. So it's like a time audit.
A good time audit is tedious because you're really paying attention to the minutia of where your time is going. And then we just start asking, is this direct thing making us money? And have the courage, because it takes courage to cut off all the 80 to 90 % that isn't actually making you money.
So I only do something if it makes me money now. And then what I learned is that I needed to prioritize income generating activities, the things in my business that were going to actually make me money. And so for me, what I did...
was book two sales calls every single day. And on those sales calls, I would sell website design, logo design, like logos by Maria. That's what I would do.
But sometimes we over glorify systems as automations or these massive complicated things. But I like to think of systems as just anything that I can do on a regular basis that's going to get me closer to the money. I'm not running a business to be a hobby.
I'm in business to make money. And so when I look at a system, I look at something, a structure. you know, it can be an automation, it can be a process, but just things.
step one, step two, steps threes. Those are recipes that are going to get me closer to the almighty dollar. That's what I care about.
That's what I want to do. And so for me as a new entrepreneur, just the concept of, okay, every day before I do anything else in my business, before I reply to client emails, before I do anything, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to book two sales calls for myself. And I'm not going to do any other work in my business until those two sales calls have been booked.
That's what jumpstarted my revenue because I finally had latched onto something practical that I could do every day in order to make money. And it's Sometimes it really is that simple.
Speaking of sales, I just want to say that... What do I want to say? Let go.
What? No. This episode is sponsored by TIFF.
Why? Good guess, TIFF. Granola, the world's best AI notepad for back -to -back meetings.
Are we actually using this? I mean, yeah, this is where I thought that the sales thing, because we could show you utilize Granola for the sales calls, right? It takes the notes for you, and then you're able to send follow -up emails.
Granola doesn't want to hear about... our sales process what do they want to see uh let's check the meeting notes oh i'm gonna pull up granola what did granola want okay they wanted us to talk about the what did i miss feature the fact that it's transcribing everything and then live while you're in the meeting you can ask it questions oh and also the speaker designations like who's saying what and oh yeah like yeah granola save that and then the apple watch so what do we do with the apple watch that's pretty easy i have A lot of footage of you using the Apple Watch.
Sometimes I think you talk to your mom, but it's granola. We've gone on multiple walks and you're just on your own. I've never done that.
The first thing that they should see is what the actual day is going to look like. Okay, you guys are acting like I'm literally always on it. Like I'm not.
Are we filming? For real? I'm going to just reapply my makeup.
I'll be right back.
Definitely take it away before she comes back. All right, guys, click the link in the description for one month of granola for free. I promise you will not regret it.
I feel like a jingle would be good with that.
Are we ready? I'm rolling already. So what do I say?
Back to the video. Back to the... You want to start with back to the video?
And then just go straight. Like and subscribe. I totally hear you.
And I feel like the thing is like my I'm going to just like give you the thing that I know that if I were listening, I would be like, oh, but I have to make the thing that I'm selling. Right. But then also I have to balance that with the sales.
And I feel like that seesaw you end up obviously naturally once you get the client, you are focusing on servicing them and all of that. They forget about sales. Right.
It's like I know that's important, but like in the moment I forget about it. But it's a classic mistake that so many entrepreneurs make. And this is what I try to teach my students.
even if other parts of the business are on fire or burning, you do the thing that makes money first. So using your podcast as an example, if you've decided that sponsorships are the way that's going to make you the most money. I don't care if you have an episode due in two days, you sit down and you do whatever you decided was your sponsorship work first and to hell with everything else.
In that moment, the only thing that you're worried about is the sponsorship emails or reach outs or whatever it is. If you don't do that, you're forever stuck in a feast and famine cycle. You let's use design business or you have the design clients because you had some free time.
So you went and bought some design clients. Then you spend all your time servicing those clients. So then when you're done, you have no clients in your pipeline.
You've got to get out of that feast and famine cycle. And you do that by letting that fire burn for a little bit. It's always going to feel urgent.
It's never going to feel comfortable. But if you don't do the money generating stuff first, you'll forever be stuck in that feast or famine cycle. And that's one of the things I want entrepreneurs to break just to get to seven figures.
There's a whole nother level going from seven to eight, but just to get to seven figures, you've got to get out of that feast and famine cycle. You have to be consistent with your money generating stuff. And so for someone who's in that place where they're like, well, I mean, I don't know if I can even sustain the new client.
Should they like actually like just focus on the systems first before they're actually going to like do that? Or should they just be trying to get that anyway and try to manage both at the same time? Well, I'll say first and foremost, this is why I like a low ticket business because it's infinitely scalable.
You make the course once, you make the product once, you can put a thousand people in it or 10 ,000 people. Or like in my case, we were almost at 200 ,000 customers served. to that client, most people don't actually have that problem.
Most new entrepreneurs do not have so many clients that their systems are strained. They have two clients a month if they're lucky. And so most people worry about problems that aren't even problems in reality.
You're very good at agency stuff, right? You're very good at what you do. So that makes more sense that you were in that position.
If I woke up in your shoes, I would still choose to prioritize more clients for the pipeline. That's what I would do. I've always focused and you pick up the pieces as you can.
But if you don't focus. on the money -making stuff, eventually you will run into that famine and you'll be kicking yourself. So let's say the business can handle more customers.
What is the next thing that the founder should be putting all their attention on? Most people have no idea the problem they're actually supposed to be solving in their business. They think they need more leads.
They think they need more sales. They think they need more marketing. What they actually need is more traffic.
And so if you want to generate a lot of sales very quickly, solve your traffic problem. Now, it's not an easy problem to solve. A traffic problem is a hard problem to solve.
But all I see entrepreneurs do is instead of tackling the actual problem that matters, they have shiny object syndrome and they go worry about a thousand other things because they're scared and avoidant of the actual problem that needs to get solved. I promise you that if I sent 3 ,000 people to your checkout page or your book a call page or whatever it might be, you would see a huge influx in revenue.
But you are so stressed out or so scared or so fearful to solve that actual traffic problem that you're optimizing for a thousand other things instead of focusing on the number one thing that's going to actually solve the majority of problems in your business. which is traffic so I can't talk enough about traffic because it is the lifeblood of a healthy business especially one that's scaling to seven figures to eight figures so how exactly do you go about increasing traffic well there's three things that solves a traffic issue number one is content Number two is ads.
Number three is email. And I'm going to go into all three of those because those are the game changers in your business. If you have an eyeballs problem, if you have a traffic problem, we need to make content.
We need to run ads and we need to send really good emails. And let's start with content. The thing I always like to do when I talk about content is say something that no one else has ever heard before because we hear so much content advice and our eyes start to glaze over.
It goes in one ear and out the other because everyone's like, post more. Like who gives a rat's ass? We all know that, right?
I like to tell people that the first thing that you need to do if you want your content to make money is track how much money each and every piece of content is actually making you. Because sometimes we make content that gets low views, but very high sales.
And so my ego is not involved in this at all. I would rather have a reel that gets me. 30 ,000 views, but makes me 50 sales than a real that gets a hundred thousand views and makes me three sales.
Like today I posted an Instagram story. It has a special little keyword on it. So I will know by the end of the day, if I go into that stat, I'll know that that Instagram story made me 4 ,000, 5 ,000 or however many thousand dollars it is made me that amount of money.
But then every piece of content should have a call to action. Okay. So every piece of content is going to have someone do something right.
And you should track it. So let's say it's like to book appointments. If I'm a realtor, like booking appointments, well, let's say you have them comment real estate to go view the listing that keyword should be tracked to the book appointment page and so if you have a bridal like a wedding makeup person comment makeup if you want me to do your makeup even if it's to a little inquiry form that inquiry form should be tracked oh when i posted this reel of this bride i got 30 inquiries but when i posted this reel of this bride i only got two so obviously i need to figure out what about this bride got me so many more or this content or this makeup got me that many more inquiries and so it doesn't matter what the call to action is that what needs to be tracked so you can understand the impact of each individual piece so this is the final this made me 22 million dollars first i publish an instagram reel people comment under that reel with a keyword that i give them that triggers off a many chat automation that many chat automation sends them a link directly to a checkout page and then they buy so it goes real many chat comment sam cart checkout page bada bing bada boom make some money
Now, some people build out crazy, complicated ManyChat funnels where they collect all this info and there's 17 steps and it's such a huge, complicated process. But the way I use ManyChat is very simple, right? It's an app, it's a software, it's a program.
Yeah, so if you don't know what ManyChat is, it's basically a software that you can sign up for. And when you comment a keyword, it'll send you a link to something. Now, one of my rules is if it's not easy, I don't do it.
And that's been my rule for almost a decade. And so my ManyChat funnels. you again would be underwhelmed you comment a keyword it's one message that says hi here's a link and they click it like that's it but i get 7 000 comments a day 8 000 comments a day like thousands of comments a day between my profiles sorry to interrupt here guys um many shot actually has been a game changer for our business and so we're gonna do a little demo for you and actually show you how to do it very quickly before we get back to the video roy take it away hi guys welcome to many chat i think you should look there Hi, guys.
Once you load this up, a modal comes up. Modal? We're going to go to new automation where you see a menu of all the kinds of automations you can do.
The one we're going to pick is auto DM links from comments, meaning when someone comments on a specific reel, once we put what the word is that triggers the automation, they will get an opening DM that says send me the link. I also highly recommend activating the DM asking you to follow before they get the link. helped us reach 10K recently.
Yeah, we were really struggling before that. And then they will get a DM with a link. You get to choose what the button is.
So this is a great way to track conversions other than sales. And it's also an easy way to get people over to the checkout page. All right, what's next?
That's it. Now we just go live. Boom.
all right guys we love many chat so much we actually reached out to them asked them to be a sponsor on this video and they said yes i actually don't know what to do with this part so i'm gonna pass it to the other screen you know what to do here click below use the code anatomy you get a free month of many chat pro you'll thank me later all right guys let's go back to the video the ghost i stopped talking over my And then the thing that I'm good at is the volume.
I'm the queen of volume. So I'd rather a simple process that I then absolutely beat the shit out of at the front. That's how I think about it.
I just fucking pound the volume at the top. And that's what actually gets the results. People are focused on these, oh, if I run someone through and then does this automatically, especially in an AI world, we're way too excited about automations.
It's like, bitch, it doesn't matter because you have three people going through it. So I try to get people focused on the beginning stage, on the front end funnel, because that's the thing that's actually going to drive sales. So stop optimizing a back end.
that no one's ever going through and start focusing on simplifying so your energy, so your time is freed up to solve the thing that's actually going to make money, which is traffic. And so what's your content strategy and your posting schedule if you don't mind sharing? Yeah, I'm going to make a distinction first between what I did to get to about half a million followers on Instagram and what I'm doing now.
I would tell someone who's brand new and is like, okay, I'm going to start posting content consistently for the first time. What they do typically, and this is the pattern I want to break for them, is they go and they post two times a day, every day for two weeks, and then they fall off. Now you don't trust yourself.
And that's a huge problem as a new entrepreneur. You have to learn how to build that trust in yourself because it's going to serve you through the periods where you want to quit. And so a beginner strategy, if you have never posted consistently for 90 days, you need to start here.
You need to post once a week for four weeks. And never miss that post. I don't recommend scheduling it because what we're trying to do is train your muscle to get into a rhythm of posting when you say you're going to post.
That's going to kill you. You're going to be dying. You're going to have all this excess energy, excited to post more.
You have ideas to post more, which is the opposite energy of most people by week four. By week four, most people are scraping the bottom of the barrel of motivation. They don't have a ton of ideas.
They're coming up short and they're about to burn out. So you end week four feeling very excited. Then...
second round. Now you're posting two times a week, maybe three times a week for another four weeks. And then at the last chunk of four weeks, you can post up to every single day.
I still recommend you do like five times a week, like not quite fully every single day, but the energy is so different. And the key is if you miss a week, if you miss a post, you have to start from zero. You don't want to progress until you hit the scheduled slots.
So you end the 90 days with a totally different muscle definition where you slowly ramped up, very disciplined, very controlled versus the other way where you're just a frenetic, motivated mess for a hot second and then you burn out. And so if you're willing to go slow at first, you can go really far eventually very fast.
Right. And so during that time, I know the goal is consistency, but is there any realm where they're actually tracking the performance of those pieces of content? Yes.
That's a great question. So sometimes people will say, hey, Maria, I posted for a while and I didn't see any results. And I was like, well, were you auditing your content in between or are you just continuing to post?
shitty content. And so the first piece of data that I have people track is the views to followers ratio. Meaning if I have a piece of content that has a hundred thousand views, but got me a hundred followers, that views to follower ratio is very low.
I got a ton of views and I didn't get any followers or very little followers versus I might have a piece of content that gets me 5 ,000 views, but 500 followers. That's an excellent views to followers ratio. And then eventually we can graduate to okay views to sales ratio that would be the next metric to track but in the beginning you just have to pay attention to what are the things that are making people click and stick around because eventually those clicks and those follows are going to become customers but then what i recommend people post at what times this is what works not just for me but i have the pleasure of having the back end insight into many thousands of very successful students and so i'll give you like i call it like level one level two and level three of a content schedule so level one Is one reel every single day at 7 a .m.
PST? Is this the time that I recommend? So 7 a .m.
PST, that's step one. That's assuming you've done that 90 -day content muscle -up ramp. You're like, okay, I can actually post content longer than 90 days.
I'm going to do one reel every single day at 7 a .m. Okay. Level two.
is where it gets a little harder. It's one reel every day, one carousel every single day, and then one story every single day. So you've gone from posting one piece of content every day to three pieces of content.
And you're primarily optimizing in this case for Instagram or you're cross -posting across? I never cross -post. Okay.
Thank you for clarifying. This is just an Instagram. posting content schedule.
But Instagram is where we make a lot of sales, especially if we're just getting started and we're brand new. We don't have an audience in other places. Instagram is a fast moneymaker.
You can post it real and make money within 24 hours because the algorithm puts you in front of people like emails. What are you, who are you emailing to three people and your mom on your email list? Like you don't, it's just different when you're a beginner and you don't have an audience.
So then level three would be as many pieces of content per day as you possibly can. So for me, that's seven pieces of content to the main feed every single day. Now, I now have a team of two other people to help me do it, so it's not me by myself.
But I was ramping up to three pieces of content to the main feed plus at least one story every single day by myself, just by myself. And the reason why I prioritize it is because it was a money -making activity. It's one of the things that gets done first.
It's how I make so many sales. But the way you want to think about it in your head is the more I post, the more I make. So your goal needs to be getting to the volume as fast as you can.
So then what is your goal with the stories, the reels, and the actual carousel? So I'll start with the easy one. That's our Instagram stories.
We just do one story every single day, post at a 7 a .m. PST. That's a pitch content.
So I think about content in two buckets. There's pitch content and there's nurture content, right? And so story content is always pitch with a clear call to action to make sales.
Or like if you're booking calls to book calls, whatever is the conversion metric that makes money for you. Just get the bag. And then some of our reels pitch and some of our reels nurture slash like get more followers, right?
We always make sure we have at least one pitch reel. every single day. And the reason why is I like to start the day off making money.
I want every day to start with dollars in my bank account. And so 7am, that's kind of like a prime slot. And then 9am is always a carousel.
That carousel either pitches or my nurture carousels are very popular. Those tend to go viral pretty consistently for my account. It's where I say like Instagram is my diary.
So I just share. what I'm going through, something that I've been struggling with, something that happened to me. I'm extremely vulnerable on those carousels.
And you're speaking specifically to your audience. You're making carousels that you know will speak to the audience that you have. I think a content mistake, and I'm glad you flagged that, is they think, oh, I've got to talk to my audience.
Well, that's so much pressure. What do I say to my audience? I don't even know what that means.
So I just talk about what I want to talk about, what's really going on. And I just launched today a course on how I make those carousels. And one of the things that I talk about in this course is...
If I feel an emotion, so if I feel an emotion of shame or I feel an emotion of joy or I feel an emotion of fear, that emotion in my body is a signal that it should be a carousel. And that's how I make content. That's how I come up with my ideas.
And then in the afternoon, there is structure to it, but it's kind of like dealer's choice. Like it's, we've got some podcasts that we're going to collab with, or we have the studio reels that I film myself. We always like to do funny, trendy ones because those pop up.
These are reels. These are all reels, by the way. We only do one carousel per day right now.
But I would say the two most important ones would be the pitch carousel in the morning. And then that carousel rotation of pitch, nurture, pitch, nurture, pitch, nurture with the carousels. Those are like the foundational.
pieces of content. Okay. Yeah.
How has social media changed in your opinion as of especially this year? And how has that changed your strategy if it has? You know, it's very interesting.
At the beginning of this month, I had a content day with a bunch of eight figure content creators. I have millions of followers between all of us. And one of the girls shared that her, what she called identity based content.
was popping off now she's this is all organic and it's the same thing where it's like if you're a high functioning anxious woman like shout out in the comments or something right like she's calling out these identities and so who your people are how they identify this literally putting that in the label plumbers of orange county new moms of two kids like the more specific it is the better however my theory with that is that like so many things with content and with ads It's a phase.
Just use it while it's working. Eventually, everyone's going to be doing it. Their eyes will glaze over and they're scrolling.
That's the nature of content. That's the nature of ads. Yeah, it's a tactic versus like a principle.
Exactly. So let's say across reels, stories, and carousels, does one work better to try to get emails or to try to get one certain call to action? The pitch carousels, that would be where we either collect emails or we pitch products.
But we ran a six -month experiment to see, do we make more money if we send people straight to a checkout page? or email then checkout page? Because it's a good question.
We wanted to know. For sure. We made so much more money sending them straight to the checkout page.
Hands down. Even though it was more friction in the conversion point, you lose so many people throughout that funnel. It's just more delayed.
I'll tell you, we were gobsmacked by the result of that experiment because we like to think we're great marketers. We like to think we write great copy. We like to think people read the words we write and they buy.
But that is not what the data told us with our emails. We made so much more money when we sent people straight to a checkout page rather than put them on what I do think was a very well executed email campaign to get them to convert into customers. They just didn't convert.
And so now what we do is our pitch carousels no longer collect email addresses. They just go straight to the checkout page, which reinforces the theory I've always had, which is send everybody straight to the checkout page right away and remove the obstacles to money. Send people straight to a book a call page if that's your point of conversion.
Send people straight to an inquiry form if that's your point of conversion. conversion send people straight to the checkout page if that's your point of conversion don't have these long nurture sequences or video sales letters or webinars like people are like oh i gotta stop doing video sales letters i gotta stop doing webinars i would say yes yeah from the experience we've done.
My brain is like processing, oh, this is crazy. I literally. Well, this is what people always tell me because they're like, oh, I just spent a week recording video sales letters or I've had this webinar that's been working.
I've been doing webinars successfully for three years. I'm like, cool, try to not do the webinar. And the reason for it is we live in an age of instant gratification.
And so the things we think are warming the lead up. are actually cooling them down. Someone is interested in you.
They saw a really hot piece of content from you. They want to learn more. They want to work with you.
You go put them through a nine -day warm -up sequence. By day two, they've lost interest. Prospect's always the highest at the point of them finding you.
In my experience, they're like the most excited about you. Right. I feel like we hear so often like, oh, okay, you need to focus on organic first, right?
Like how do you know when it's the right time to start running ads? Well, I would disagree that you should focus on organic first. I tell people if you've made $1 in your business, it's time to run ads.
You don't get a medal for hitting a certain revenue goal by not running ads. There's no like, you only did it organically confetti award that comes to you. In my opinion, it's much better to start running ads as soon as you possibly can right away and start getting the sales in.
Why take the long road with organic when you could just do it the fast way with ads? The reason I love running ads right away, the way that we do it is we get our ads to pay for themselves. We call it elevator ads.
So you use that money from that first sale, you put it in the second and you scale it up at the pace that you're bringing in sales, basically create an ads machine. You put $1 in, you get $2 .5 out. That's our average return on ads spent is 2 .5x.
And if you can do that, why would you not start doing that right away? Ads is such a morale booster because people are dying. They're languishing in this slow burn of organic content.
It's different. It's good. But ads is like you press a button and you get traffic.
And I don't know why you wouldn't do that sooner. And so if you're an entrepreneur and you've made $1, you've gotten someone to pay you at least $1, it's time to run ads. Run them yesterday.
So what's the anatomy of a successful ad? It's not so much about the ad itself. It's what comes right after the ad because it's pretty easy to make a good, sexy, clickable ad.
That's actually pretty easy. It's just like whatever works on organic is what works for ads. Some of mine are literally like a talking head.
Like they're not overly produced. What are you saying in them that actually like gets you? It would be the same as like my pitch reels at seven in the morning.
So it's like, I just launched my new carousel course. Comment carousel to get a link. Like it's basic shit.
It's here's what you're going to get. click here or comment the keyword to get taken to the landing page. Where most people fail and they don't make the ads profitable is two things.
One, it's the landing page. And so people need to know what is it I'm going to get and why do I need to get it right now? Every landing page needs to answer that question, but people don't do that.
They'll say like, oh, you get seven modules and six worksheets. That's a feature, not a benefit. So what am I going to get?
I'm going to get a solution to my problem. And why do we need to get it right now? We teach there's nine different urgency angles.
The more urgency angles you have on that landing page, the better. So what are the best ways to create urgency for your product? So there's a couple of different ways.
There's nine ways to do urgency. The ones that are most important though, and that are not popular, but I think should be are like flash sales. coupons and discounts.
Now, most people hear and have heard the advice, don't ever discount your services. Don't ever discount what you're doing. Don't run flash sales because it hurts your brand.
We run flash sales all the time, every month pretty much, every other month, whatever, enough. And my brand is sterling in this industry. So there's no actual connection between discounts and your brand.
People are so worried about it's gonna cheapen the brand. It's not going to. People think they're Louis Vuitton.
They think they're Gucci. It's like, you're not there at all. Those companies have been around for hundreds of years.
Like, God bless you, but you've got $6 in your bank account and you don't need to be worried about your perception and your brand. You need money coming in. And urgency really happens when people are like, I need to get this now.
That's urgency. If I don't move now and don't buy now, I'm not gonna get as good of a deal. And so in my opinion, people should be so much less worried about their brand perception and so much more worried about the fact that they don't have money to cover an emergency in their business or their personal life.
And so... solve for that stuff later. But a lot of times when I see these sales and I see the sale again tomorrow and the next day, are you repeating these or are you actually spacing?
You're spacing them out. Yeah. I mean, we're very careful to stay in integrity.
That is a huge deal for flash sales. The deadline is the deadline. The flash sale is a flash sale.
The coupon expires and the coupon expires. And I will make no exceptions because in my opinion, making exceptions like that or not being like in integrity with that is so disrespectful to the customers that bought when you said it was time to buy. I would never do that.
I never make a policy exception. Our policy is our policy.
And if you don't like it, I'm sorry, but that sucks for you. So that's the first thing with a good ad is it's a landing page. Second thing, it's your AOV.
And AOV, in case you don't know what that means, is average order value, the amount the average customer pays you at the point of checkout. And so it's understanding the ratio of your cost to acquire a customer via ads relative to the AOV in that moment. We want our ads profitable day one.
Let's say the cost to acquire a customer is, let's just do easy math. It's a dollar. my AOV would need to be two and a half dollars, right?
That's how I get my 2 .5 return on ad spend. And so if your cost to acquire a customer is $10, I need to make at least $25 in my AOV across all my ads funnels. Those two things, the landing page and the AOV, that in our experience matters so much more than the initial creative because it's fairly easy to get clicks.
Most people can figure out how to do that. They can't figure out what to do with the people once they get the clicks. And those are the two things I want them paying attention to.
So for someone who is in service businesses and all that. What are other ways that they could be paying attention to this if there's no conversion like that? So if I woke up and I was like, okay, I got to run out to people who are like booking calls with me, right?
First things first, I want you to be able to book a call within 24 to 48 hours. pretty quickly, right? And we want to close in that 24 to 48 hours, because then in that case, I'm still making a sale within 24 hours, maybe 48 hours.
But that's not typically what people do in a service phase. It's like, oh, cool. I'm going to talk to you in a week and a half.
Then your show up rate goes to shit and you don't really have a good close process in place. So you're maybe closing, I don't know, one in five calls when you should be closing one in three. And so it's the principle is still the same.
It's take them straight to the thing, right? The book call or the buying a page or whatever, and then get them on the phone as fast as possible and close them as fast as possible. So maybe you're two days out from your profit, but I don't want to be 90 days out.
That's how I'm going to die. Very quickly. Like how much do you spend on typical on ads a month now versus like the beginning?
So when we got started, you start with $5 a day because that $5 might make you a $27 sale. And then you put that $27 into the ad fund and that might get you two $27 sales. And so you start with $5.
Like you don't start with millions of dollars or thousands of dollars. You start with $5. And we just very gradually over the process of a few years have scaled up to where we're spending about $10 ,000 a day on ads.
And we want to spend $30 ,000. That's the metric that we're hitting. But again.
If you have a machine, which we do, you put a dollar in, you get 2 .5 out. You just try to scale that machine as fast as you can at that profit level until infinity. We know people that are spending $100 ,000 a day on ads.
That's the dream. Like that's what we're trying to go to. And so right now we're spending about $300 ,000 per month with a return on ad spend of 2 .5.
But we started with $5. So for someone who's watching and they have their ads running and they were successful, but then they plateau. What should they do then?
Yes. So what's happening there, it's a very, people typically get like a beginner's luck, right? Where you just like, you turn it on and it's like, oh, this is amazing.
And then you reach this point where it's like, wait. And it's just like that plateau and it's very confusing and it's very discouraging if you don't know what's going on. And most people panic and they turn their ads off.
You're going to hit a plateau. And what's happened at that plateau period is you've tapped out your world market. Congratulations.
You got all the low hanging fruit. off the tree. You did a great job.
Now you're venturing into Siberia, which is your cold market. And that's where I love it because that's where the challenge comes in. It's like, oh, you could kind of get away with mediocre creatives.
Cool. Now we got to get great creatives. Oh, you had a pretty good landing page, but it wasn't a great landing page.
Cool. Now we got to get a great landing page. Oh, your AOV was like, it wasn't quite 25 when it needed to be.
It was 17. Nope. bitch, you got to get it up to 25.
Like now we're playing the game of volume, which is my favorite game. It's like, okay, babe, like now we're going to scale this thing up to a hundred sales a day, 200 sales a day. And there is no room for mediocrity at any point.
We got to dial this shit in so we can really scale it up. But I love that because once you've tapped into Siberia and you've mastered Siberia, no one can stop you. You know how to turn a cold person who's never ever seen you before into a paying customer in a matter of two minutes.
You're unstoppable. You can literally scale to the moon and then the world is your oyster and everything else is easy. So obviously we hear so much about we should build an email list.
I know emails are really important for you. So now how are you balancing that? Well, it's so interesting because our top revenue every single month, it's not from ads, although we make a ton of money from our ads.
It's not from Instagram, although we make a ton of money from Instagram. It's actually from our emails. We have an email list of over a million subscribers, right?
But don't get twisted. We do not get many new customers from email. So no one is reading our email and turning into a customer.
Our customers are reading our emails and buying from us again. Does that distinction make sense? Yes.
And so our acquisition strategies should not be to generate an email list because we could just focus on acquiring customers and sending people straight to a checkout page. And then we can just email them again. and continue to get the repeat customers to buy from us.
So yes, our revenue is the most from email, but I'm just making a lot of money from the customers I have already acquired from ads and Instagram. Does that make sense? Yes, it's a one -two step.
You want to get them first to get the product so that you can get them into the email so that then you could actually continue to - No one should be focusing on collecting email addresses. They should be focusing on collecting customers and then emailing their customers later. Does that make sense?
Totally. Okay. Because that is not a popular strategy.
Because most people say, send people to a freebie, like warm them up. But again, it comes back to like, do you want the dollar or do you not? And so if you want the dollar, you'll remove the things that we think warm them up, but actually stand to cool them down.
So with emails, how many emails are you sending a day? We send three emails every single day. It sounds scary.
People are like, oh my God, Maria, like I would unsubscribe, but they don't. Unsubscribe rates stayed the same. Of course, we closely monitored that.
And all we did was add an extra like two or $3 ,000 per day to our revenue by sending that third email. We do make a lot of money from our emails, but the way that we do it is 7 a .m. nurture.
And so a lot of times the nurture emails are repurposed from carousels, but with at least a 90 day lag. And so we're very careful to like structure our content so that people are seeing different stuff. So the nurture one is typically a repurposed carousel and it's a 7 a .m.
Always includes a photo of me. Very conversational. You would think it was from a friend, like it's just a chatty email.
no pitches i actually build up to a pain point so they're expecting a pitch and then i don't which like pops the balloon and makes them love me even more and then we do one at 1 p .m this is all pst time so 1 p .m and 5 p .m are our two pitches if you've ever seen my pitch emails they're very very short i like to say four sentences or less we just go in we do not beat around the bush a lot of people do with their pitches they drag it out because they're scared to ask for the pitch so they'll just like pat it we just say hey i have this if you want it It's going to be super helpful.
You're going to enjoy it. Click here to grab it. I'll see you there.
We do that a little assumptive close a lot where it's like, I'll see you there or like see you on the inside because it's that assumptive close where it's like, I assume I'll see you on the inside and I can't wait. I know you're going to buy it. I'm actually curious because I think that like one of the things I found really fascinating were your subjects.
Yes, my subject lines. I put so much work into those because I write all my emails. Yeah, I think the written word is the last thing a founder should outsource.
That's my theory. I write every caption on Instagram. I write every carousel.
That makes me feel so much better. Yeah. And the reason for it is that it's the moneymaker thing.
It's the most important thing, right? It's the thing that drives the traffic. And so it's worth the founder's time.
Good content is worth the founder's time. And so with my subject lines, I probably put more effort into my subject lines and more intentionality and more time than any other piece of content. Because email is my heist for my revenue.
And the subject line is what gets people to open my emails and read it. Our email open rate is like 50 % or higher for every email. It's very, very high.
The average is like 25 to 30 in most industries at the volume that we do. And so hundreds of thousands of people read my emails every single day. That's why I put so much work into the subject line.
And so I learned everything that I know about writing subject lines from one of my first ever mentors, Taki Moore. If you're on his email list, his subject lines are even better than mine. So how do you go about creating a good subject so that people actually open it?
Basically, it's not what you expect. It's like the most clickbait thing, but not clickbait in a negative way, clickbait in a positive way where it's like, I gotta know what that is. Like the porch pirate.
What the heck is a porch pirate? And then in that, I share how I saw that subject line from a local. community app thing that just was like someone was stealing packages off a porch and they called it the porch pirate.
And I'll share what a pattern interrupt that was for me and how important it is to have pattern interrupts in our content. And so anytime I grab on to anything that's interesting, I'll grab it and then I will find a way. to tie it back to the email because the subject line is the most important thing.
I can craft a story around the subject line, but the most important thing is the subject line because otherwise people won't read. One of the things I noticed is like on, I don't know if it was a few of them or a lot of them, they were like all lowercase. It was like little things where I'm like, oh man, like that stands out against like, you really were thinking about like small little things.
Little things really, really add up. And again, I'm not an optimizer. Like I'm a big fan of like, just get it done and get it out.
But there are a few things that I will spend time on optimizing. Subject lines are one of them, but the lesson is not to overly optimize. everything.
It's to just get a bunch of stuff out there, then start paying attention to what's actually making you money and optimize that. Too many people are over -optimizing things that don't actually have anything to do with their business or their money or their revenue. I can't deal with it.
It's like, go figure out what's actually connected to you making more money and then cut away everything. Then you can optimize. But you're like six steps away from that.
All right. So how do you choose the pricing for your products? So we actually have a pricing formula that we teach our students.
I'll just tell you the price points that are good and the price points to avoid. 27, 37, 47, 57, sweet spots. Great pricing.
Even up to 97 is like fine. Then from like 197 to 997 pretty much is what I call the pricing dead zone. So like 297, bad pricing.
497, bad pricing. 597, terrible pricing, dead zones. And then you get to 97, you're in the sweet spot again.
Let me tell you why that's a dead zone. It's because it's too much to have an impulse purchase, which is what we want. in a low ticket role, like, yes, I need this.
I need it right now. I'm just going to buy it. I'm not going to think about it.
So impulse purchasing happens below $97 pretty much. But then if you're in that like $497, you need sales infrastructure. You have greater objections.
There's more friction to the sale, but the price point doesn't justify the infrastructure. And so if you're going to be selling something at volume, at 97 or higher, that's worth it to build it out because there's enough margin to actually do it well.
We should be able to charge 10 times more for a product than we are. So if I charge $27, I should be able to charge and... get, make sales at repeat $270.
And so that's our metric. Some of our products, we charge $6, but we could charge 6 ,000. And so we really look for a huge gap in what we could actually charge versus what we do.
Most people charge, they're like, oh, but it's worth more than $27. It's like, I don't care. I'm going to go sell it for 20, 20 spots, 20 units.
At $27, I'm going to make more money. You're over here selling, you know, maybe one every other day and you're not making enough. And I learned this from Sam Walton, who founded Walmart, because he talks about how his competitors would be worried that they weren't charging enough.
So he lowered his price and then he priced for volume. That's what we teach our customers is to price for volume. And we always tell our students, like, if you weren't sure what price point to start, start with $27 because that is objectively a no -brainer price.
And then if your sales aren't moving at $27, you have a packaging issue, you have a messaging issue, you have a traffic issue, you have other issues, but you're sure. or shit don't have a pricing issue at $27. And so I'm just a huge fan of there's so much money to be made in that low ticket range.
And then like in the high ticket world, I'll tell you the price points that move well there. It's 97, it's 497, it's 897. And then you can really get into the nitty gritty like after 10 ,000, but like people feel weird about like 3 ,000.
Like there's typically some friction at the $3 ,000 point. Again, we just know this as we've been doing this for 13 years, but. it's totally fine to experiment and change price points like that's not a big deal at all but you can kind of ask around and know but there's pricing dead zones in the high ticket range as much as a low ticket but i have made millions of dollars selling stuff for 997 which is what i did and how i got to seven figures and then i've made literally millions and millions of dollars selling 27 things but if you have previously sold a high ticket offer, there's so much low hanging fruit.
Think about all the leads that you brought in. Like let's say we convert 2 % of our leads or 10 % of our leads, right? Into a high ticket thing, whatever it is, right?
You have a hundred leads that come in, maybe one or two of them buy your high ticket offer. 98 of them can buy your low ticket offer. I think that's why I saw so much success with the low ticket is I had been selling.
a high ticket offer for like three years making over a million dollars doing it but there's a lot of people that like had never been able to afford it and they were like they ate up the low ticket thing so somebody is bought in they heard you they're like okay fine yes i'm gonna make a low ticket offer i'm gonna do it what would you do for the first 30 days that's a great question okay for the first 30 days well you have to start by knowing what kind of low ticket product you're going to sell so 30 days you have an idea for your product but you don't know what to do after that First thing that you need to understand is that you do not put good work into the product, but it's not as much time as you think.
Most people spend way too much time on the first version of their product. I say that it should take anywhere from two to five hours from start to finish. And here's why.
You think that it has to be this big, fat... beefy 30 video course massive thing it shouldn't a good low ticket product solves one hyper specific problem so it's not making money or like the wealth academy or like the things we call our high ticket things it's how to make more sales with your instagram stories super specific.
My students always panic. They're like, oh my God, I'm going to sell a shitty product. Like they hear two to five hours and I think shitty product.
And let's just say that it's not a good enough product. Let's just say that like, okay, it really isn't good enough. Do you know a really good way to get great feedback on a shitty product?
Get a hundred customers to experience it. Cause they're going to let you know immediately what problems they have with it. You know, we always say like, if one customer has a problem with it, We're not going to pay that much attention.
But if we have like 100 people telling us this part is wrong, we pay attention to that. We really want to fix that. And so we're always optimizing our own products.
But it's the customers that tell us what we really need to improve. You as the founder, you have blind spots. You don't know what actually truly matters to the degree that your customers do.
And so if we put it in the hands of our customers, they're going to help us make a good product even better. So spend two to five hours making a good product. That's the first thing you're going to do in your 30 days.
And then we recommend that you put it on like Sam's cart. That's the checkout page that we use. That should take you like two of the 28 days.
Your next 28 days is generating traffic to that checkout page. So that's the content we talked about. That's the ads we talked about.
That's the emails we talked about. But most people don't do that. They spend the entire 30 days on step one, which is designing and creating their product.
And most people take longer than 30 days to create their product. You should take two days to build it and get it set up. 28 days to actually like market it and send all the traffic to it.
Yeah. That is a phenomenal breakdown. I want to rewind.
I want you to take me back before the eight figure business to when you were even just struggling to make your first sale. Yeah. Yeah.
Where did it all start? So I started in 2013. And I had the great joy of working for my dad and his company.
And so this was in high school. I was working for him. And so going into college, I studied graphic design.
And I knew that I did not want a real job after college. So straight away, a little freshman Maria, 18 years old, I got to work. And I worked really hard in college because I also had a full -time job because my parents just didn't have the money to pay for anything, including my college.
So I really didn't experience a typical college experience like most people do. I went to a local college. It was not out of state or anything like that.
I drove home. live with my parents because I couldn't afford anything at the time. Eventually I was able to like script together two pennies and move into a terrible neighborhood.
So next I went on a company that is not even around anymore. It was called Odesk. It became Upwork, I think is what it was.
It's a gig website where you go on and this is very much pre -Canva. This is very much pre -AI and you got paid to make. posters and invitations and graphic design stuff.
I thought, oh, I heard that graphic designers, if they work really hard, eventually they can make $60 ,000 at the peak of their career. And I almost had to sit down on the bench because I thought that was so much money. I didn't know anyone making more than $20 ,000 a year in my rural small town.
And so I would go and apply to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jobs. Mind you, this was one of the first years that I made $63. So I wasn't that good at it.
And I literally would apply. and spent like three hours applying for a $20 gig, which I then didn't get. But I so much look back and admire the grit and determination of 18 -year -old Maria.
Not a lot going on upstairs, but I just had like hustle and I knew what I wanted. The thing that I tell people, because they ask me, Maria, how did you... stick around when your business only made $63 in the first year.
And I was working really hard in that first year. And then in the second year, I only made $350. How did you keep going past that second year?
I would have quit. I would have pivoted. I would have changed directions and you didn't.
What did you do? And I was really struggling to answer that because I was like, I don't know what I did. I just didn't quit.
That's not a helpful answer. When I really sat down and I really thought about it, I realized that I kept my word to myself in other areas of my life. If I said I was going to wake up and go to the gym, I woke up and went to the gym.
If I said I was going to lunch with a friend, I went to that lunch with a friend and I didn't cancel, even if I felt like canceling. In any other area of my life, I kept my word to myself. My brain and my body trusted me when I said, I'm going to be a millionaire.
I'm living in a shithole in a small town in Ohio, terrible neighborhood. Nothing around me is saying you're going to be a millionaire. No one around me saying, you're going to be a millionaire.
But I said to myself, I'm going to be a millionaire. And I believed it because in other areas of my life, I kept my word to myself. And so I wasn't panicked.
I wasn't stressed. I didn't have any scarcity because my body and my brain knew what we say comes true because we keep our word to ourself. And it's such an important value.
I see so many flaky people. I see so many entrepreneurs say, I'm going to post every day. And then they don't.
Apart from the money that they're leaving on the table and missing out on, I think more importantly, they're destroying their own trust in themselves, their own, like, my word to myself is my bond. And they miss that. And I think that that causes a lot of shakiness where they're like, oh, I don't trust myself to solve this traffic problem.
So I'm going to go over here and try to figure out a different problem because I don't trust that I can solve the real problems in my business. And I'm going to avoid that feeling by working on something else. It's very, very important that we keep our word to ourself.
I never break my word to myself. And that's one of the huge reasons I've been able to build what I built. So fast forward to like 2016 -ish, I think I made $8 ,000.
And that's when I figured out how to get gigs. Okay. But still, if you're getting gigs, you have to do 300 applications to get one $60 gig.
That's how I ended up with like $8 ,000 a year. So it still wasn't a lot. And then I hired my first ever business coach.
I made an investment in myself and I literally had to sell my camera, my clothes, like, and I didn't have brand name clothes. I'm selling like stuff I bought at TJ Maxx for $3. Like I'm emptying my wardrobe, but with spill of my clothes, anything I could find that wasn't bolted to the ground, I sold to pay for this coach that was like $1 ,500.
She taught me that the gap is that I wasn't selling my own thing. I was. like trying to get other people's jobs, but that I would make more money if I sold logo and website packages.
She taught me about the concept of packages and being able to charge a little bit more of a premium price. And she also taught me the value of a niche and focusing in on a particular group of people. So I was like, all right, I'm going to design logos and websites.
for new female founders. That was my little niche was like people who are just getting started. I charged $1 ,500 for the logos and the websites because she charged $1 ,500 for her coaching.
So I was like, I guess this is just what we're going to do. And I would put them on a little payment plan. So they would pay me $250 per month for like six months or whatever it was.
And I remember when I got on the first sales call, ran through the script that this business coach had gave me, gave me, and she said yes. And then she paid $250. I was like in the bedroom and I was like gasping for air.
I couldn't believe it. I was just like, I'm rich. I really felt so rich.
And then one of the things that made a big difference was hiring my first part -time team member. But again, I'm making $8 ,000 in a year. I'm living very much hand to mouth.
Like I don't have money at all to hire anybody. And so I decided that I'm going to cancel Netflix. I'm going to cancel my personal gym subscription.
I'm going to cut back on my food budget. I knew every dollar where it was going and what it was doing. And I still found things to cut to pay for this.
And then this is what really made the unlock to me is she's going to work for me two hours a week. And I'm going to use those two hours to do income generating activities so that I am making sales. I took my sales calls at those times.
So I am making sales that will pay for Yolandi's check. and then some. So then Yolandi, over time, she went from getting paid $200 a month, so $2 ,000 a month, and then far beyond.
But it started at a very, very, very tiny amount. Most people don't think they can hire for as little as $200 a month, but you can. You just have to use that new time very intentionally.
Right. So if someone who was starting off and they are just like, I... literally don't have the resources to bring anyone on.
Like I'm literally screwed. Like what do I do? Let's say there's someone who's watching this and they genuinely do not have the money, right?
Like there really is no money coming in. Like it's just like true. I actually do not have the money.
What do you do then? Well, your time is still worth something. Some activities that you do are like negative dollars.
Scrolling social media, negative dollars because it's costing me brain power. I think of it as I actively lose money. when I scroll social media.
So that's the first thing you can start doing is stop scrolling social media. That would literally give you three hours in your day for most people. Yep.
And then we have all the time that people spend, this is going to sound so weird, but like gossiping and talking shit. Like people spend a lot of time talking about what the tea is. That activity in particular actually has a cost.
There's a difference between hanging out with your friends and having like positive things. And that's something anyone can do, even if they don't have any money at all. And if you just do that, it's not the only reason, but it's in part.
No, that makes total sense. I feel like what's really fascinating is you really seem to not only audit your time, but you understand how much that time costs. Yes.
The most important thing as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is to know what your hourly rate is. That's the most important thing and your true hourly rate. I've gone through many years where my hourly rate was a humbling amount, right?
Where my hourly rate was like $8 or $17. And it's like hard to face that. It's hard to accept that like, oh, I can actually go to Target and make more money with what my actual hourly rate is right now.
But let me tell you, when you know what your true hourly rate is, you start making decisions differently, which I'm a huge fan of. Right. And so I am curious, like how did you actually get it to that seven figure mark?
Because that's a remarkable thing that you did on your own. And so then it was like. Full steam ahead.
I think I made $20 ,000 that year, which was like more than double what I'd done the year before. And then I think I made like $40 ,000 the next year, $50 ,000. Like I got it.
I got how packages worked. I got how sales worked. I got like that was the whole like booking two sales calls every day came from.
I woke up, even if a client's logo was due, I was like, I'm gonna figure out how to do this in the afternoon because my job in the morning is to book these two sales calls. So after that, I was a machine. I ended up being so good at booking clients that people would.
pay me in February, get put on a wait list. I couldn't even work on their logos until November, but I was so good at positioning myself that people would wait for a Maria Wendt logo. They wanted it that bad because I knew how to make them do that.
And how were you booking them? I was posting in Facebook groups. And then the call to action was to book a call.
And so I was just like, comment, I'll give you a free brand strategy sessions or what I call them. I reviewed the current brand. Like, look, here's the gaps.
I'm literally, it was the most unscalable thing. However, like I hustled it up to six figures. And then what happened is I had graphic designer friends and they were like, Maria, you were booked out.
What are you doing? So I just started showing my friends how I was getting clients. And then they started sending their friends to me and their friends to me.
And it grew very word of mouth. And eventually I had more people wanting to work with me to get clients. Then I even did doing the logo stuff.
And so then I made the full pivot into teaching people how to get clients. It was very specifically for like service -based people, like getting those like service -based clients. And then the thing that got me to a million dollars, and I was at a million dollars every single year, very consistently for a number of years, was I followed the rule of the five ones that I learned from Taki.
And so the rule of the five ones is something that you should follow if you want to get to a million dollars as quickly as possible. So if speed is your metric, this is the rule of five ones you follow. So you solve one problem for one target market.
with one offer on one platform for one year. And I started following the rule of five ones in November. And by May of the next year, so like seven months or whatever that was, I had hit my first million dollar a month, like run rate.
Like, so like $80 ,000 a month. That simplicity is why it scales so quickly. Now, most people don't have the balls specifically to pare down their offers to just one offer.
They have tiers of offers. They have different offers. Or they'll be on Instagram and other things.
But I personally have helped many students scale to over a million dollars now. The ones that hit it are the ones that had the balls to cut off all the low performing offers and go all in on one offer. But let me tell you, all the energy that you're diluting over three offers or five offers is what's keeping you from hitting seven figures.
And imagine the micro shifts in your marketing that happen when you know the end result is this offer. It's just everything just gets so freaking dialed in, but that is the thing that's keeping you from seven figures. And so I tell people, I'm like, look, if you want to go slower and keep your multiple offers, you can.
It's totally up to you. You're the captain of your ship. You can sail your boat, make it take three times as long.
But if you want to get $2 million quickly, you got to cut the low performers if that's your objective. It's totally okay if you want to take longer. And I don't mean that sarcastically.
Some people really do want multiple offers. But if you want speed, five ones. And you can always build on them.
That's the thing. That's a starting point. I wish I knew that.
I wish I actually listened to that advice. I feel like having Roy.
We did not do that. We didn't do that. We didn't do that.
We took a long route. We took a very long scenic route. It worked, but it didn't work at the same time.
So I definitely, I feel like any entrepreneur listening to if like, I mean, if you're doing this great, if you're not, please do this. Like this is like fundamental. It's just in my experience, it then sets you up very beautifully for the next stage, which is seven to eight.
That's the other thing is like, there is the cost of how long it's going to take you to get eight figures. If you take longer to get seven figures, it's going to take you like 10 times longer to hit eight figures if you even hit it. And Michael Masterson talks about this in his book, Ready, Fire, Aim, which I highly recommend.
The skills that you master and perfect at level one, stage one, where you're only selling one product is exactly what sets you up to hit eight figures very quickly. And so I think even if you have taken the long route to get seven figures, I would still push you to pare down and learn how to sell one product. I think learning how to sell only one product is fundamental.
in my opinion, not just to get to seven, but also to get to eight. It's a very important exercise. I think all entrepreneurs should do.
Absolutely. Very quickly, like I do want to talk about the fact that like at this point, you know, you've gotten this really big accomplishment, right? And I know that you had a bigger team and then you shrunk the team, which is around that time.
Yes. So my team was very big when I was making about a million dollars a year. Okay.
And I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I had like 30 people would be on a zoom call and I was like, who are these people? What are they?
What is too many? Right. So my profit margins were abysmal.
And I just was like, we need to simplify. And so I had conversations with people. I let them all, I let a lot of them go.
You know, we do great stuff or packages and stuff, but I just like, I need to simplify. And ironically. We then got to eight figures with like three team members.
And so that's how I was able to take home such tremendous amounts of money every month. Personally, my tax bill is millions of dollars every year. Personally, my tax bill is millions of dollars because of the fact that because I have a very small tight team and a very, very scalable business model, we don't need a big staff to handle it, which I like.
Although I will say now we're sailing to nine figures. I'm slowly, it's like barnacles. Like you're slowly acquiring more people, but I've learned.
how not to build a team. And so even though we are bringing on more people, each person brings in a lot of revenue. I want every person on the team, you have to be bringing in a minimum of $300 ,000 a year in annual revenue at a minimum, or at least have to see the direct connection to that in your role.
And that's kind of like a bare minimum for me. I know people who are like, each person needs to bring in at least a million dollars in revenue. And I think that's a good thing to aim for.
Bringing in $20 ,000 a year, you're just taking up my time. You're costing me stuff. So then I do think that this is a really pivotal part of your story yeah so in let's see Ellie was born in 2022 and in the very beginning of 2023 unfortunately I found out some stuff about my ex -husband that caused us to separate and get divorced and rough timing right on three months postpartum four months postpartum so I was very yeah I was very very new and so um and obviously it's like hard to talk about but um Yeah, I think I just was really like you're right.
I had things going for me professionally But then I was also adjusting to being single and then being a single mom Taking care of Ellie all by myself for a period which he's much more involved now but at the time it was just me taking care of Ellie and so the Unsustainability of all of that came crashing in like the walls came caving in really fast by breaking a point was when I I would drive to drop Ellie off at daycares like across town.
It's really lovely daycare, but It's always hard. Drop -offs always sucked.
Sometimes when I would drop her off at the daycare, if it had been a particularly hard emotional day, I would have to like literally take a nap on the couch before I could work. And I was just sleepy. And then when I would pick her up, she never wanted to go in her car seat right away because she had been separated from me all day.
And then she didn't want to be separated from me again to be in the car seat, in the back seat while I drove in the front seat. And so I would sit with her in the back seat of the car, just kind of like hold her on my lap for 10 minutes. And I was holding her like this, and I just reached, like, full, proper rock bottom.
And I was like, this has got to change. I can't do this anymore. Why?
Because I could tell she wasn't getting everything she deserved.
I... It was just so hard to see how much she, like, clung to me. She was physically on me.
And I just had this like such a, it was so, I saw so clearly in that moment how big my pride was. I didn't like that some parts of my old life had lost, right? My husband, my life as a married woman, I hated that I was a single mom.
And so I was trying to preserve at least some part of my old life, which was my successful seven -figure business. And so I was trying to make it work. And I just got to the point where I was like, this is so stupid.
Like I've got to do something that's better for her. And so I felt that I had to die to the death of my ego as a seven figure business owner and be willing to dramatically downsize to make sure Ellie had what she needed. I got to the point where I'm like, I am willing to just make, I think like it was like $8 ,000 a month was like my expenses, maybe even less.
And I was like, I'm going to figure out a way to make $8 ,000 with low ticket products. And I'll just let the rest go. Like, I just need to be with Ellie more.
I need to not be doing this. That's when I let people go. I finished out my contracts with my high ticket customers.
I fully released and let go of the successful business. And so that was devastating. But in the second month of doing low ticket, we hit $80 ,000 again.
And then I did like $200 ,000 two months later and then $400 ,000. And then, you know, $700 ,000, I think the year after that. And then I had my first million dollar month in December of last year.
The best part was I had all this free time. It was incredible, but I think it all started because I made a decision that like, I want a business that works for me. Were you fearful at the time at all that you were, you know, how you were going to manage?
I think at that point, my confidence in myself from a sales and marketing, I mean, I was making a million dollars a year. I was like, I bet I can find a way to at least pay our bills. I weirdly feel a lot of pressure now because I'm the sole provider.
to make sure I have good disability insurance, to make sure I have money. I live very frugally still. My lifestyle creep is not in change at all.
So I still live in the same apartment I lived in before Ellie was born. I have to drive the same paid -for car. I live on the same couple thousand dollars a month, not a lot, that I did for a long time.
And the rest of the money is just going into investments. So I have a number in my head that I want to see in my investments. And then I want a house that's paid for in cash.
And then I think I'll take a little bit of a breath because I'll know that no matter what happens, to me for the rest of my entire life until I die, I will have enough to live on and Ellie will have enough to live on and like be fine and comfortable in the future. So I want to close here with the biggest lessons that I have learned from your story.
Overall is simplicity is really the key to growing a business. You have definitely had many lives as an entrepreneur. You've had to reinvent many times.
I find it very inspiring and empowering to see an individual like herself really graciously identified the priorities in life right now. I know that you've spoken a lot about it. It's Ellie.
It's the business. You know, the anatomy of a dream is about living the life that. you ultimately want to live like the ultimate dream I think is that by accomplishing your own other people can live theirs that's right and I see that in your story that you're now also accomplishing that and helping so many people accomplish their dreams and I always tell people I'm not smarter or more clever and I don't mean that in a self -deprecating way I mean that in a like there's nothing special about me you can do it too if I can figure it out you can and hopefully I can help you figure it out a little bit faster and I just and I'm grateful every day for it Thank you so much.
Thank you. All right, guys, you know the drill. We're going to be diving into the anatomy of Maria's dream.
We're going to be going over all of the principles that came up in her journey. And because there are so many, we're going to be putting a list of all of them right here. And we're just going to be touching on the few that we find to be the most important.
And if there are any that you want us to go deep on in a future video, let us know. All right, let's dive in. So the first principle that came up in Maria's story is to recruit superstars.
Now, superstars are your employees, your C -suite. And sometimes they're even your mentors. They're going to be the people who are going to increase your chances in business.
Maria actually began doing this really early in her journey when she hired a coach. And she was making around $8 ,000 a year doing freelance graphic design gigs. It was around that time that she hired the coach for about $1 ,500.
And you might recall she mentioned she had to sell her camera and she had to sell clothes to afford it. But this ended up being... pivotal because that coach helped her put together a logo and website packages.
She had her target a specific audience. And then I believe she also taught her how to run a sales call. And that more than doubled her income and then doubled it again.
Ultimately, I feel like we just can't ignore this principle anymore. We keep seeing it in our previous episodes. Sharon Srivatsa became a billion dollar company after paying $10 ,000 that he didn't have, by the way, after hiring a coach.
Charlotte Chakardin created an insanely viral and profitable business when she hired a TikTok coach for just $300 a month. And she also signed up for the Small Business Development Center and found a mentor through that. And that was free.
Meaning, yes, a lot of the people that we have interviewed have spent a lot of money on coaches, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to attain one. And I think the thing I'm realizing is that the most successful people... All of them tend to hire a coach before they are successful.
And I've spoken about this before, that you have to look at the anatomy of your dream like a sports team. Because you're the owner of this team. Now you, as the owner of this team, what is the first thing that you do?
You'd recruit players. But you'd also recruit coaches. And the thing is, in the beginning of our companies or our dreams, we're wearing all three hats.
But who the hell is watching what you're doing when you are on the field? Whether it's in the form of an actual business coach or a mentor or a teacher, it ultimately needs to be someone who has done this before. We need to recruit them as seriously as we would a player.
And speaking of players, I wanted to talk about the way that Maria actually approaches hiring her players. And the thing I'm noticing is that she's incredibly intentional about... who she brings in and what each person actually contributes.
Because right now, every single person on her team needs to bring in at least 300K in revenue, is what she said, or at least have a direct connection to it in their role. I mean, how many times do we actually hire someone without knowing how much that person would actually generate for us? Because I think a lot of us, when we approach hiring, we immediately go to what is the thing that I need?
And I really need this particular thing because then it allowed me to do a bunch of other things. But ultimately, we're not really actually asking ourselves, is this role going to actually free enough time for me to do the revenue generating activities? In the early days of our business, I remember that we would.
have a very clear understanding more or less as to how much we had for the role, but we didn't necessarily have in mind like an actual number attached to what that role should bring, making it really hard to actually measure success in that role. Of course, like a sales position is super easy, but in other positions, it's really hard.
And so no matter what game you're in or what industry you're in, that should be our focus. Because when you do find these superstars, what's interesting is you don't need many of them. She talks about how she shrunk her team and then basically she really was able to get it to eight figures with just three team members.
That's nothing. Kim Kardashian herself said that she built skims with three people, which shows you that if those three people are the best at what they do and they actually hold their weight, you can get a lot more done compared to a big team who does not have superstars. So ask yourself this.
One, who is coaching you now? If the answer is no one. Who's one person who has already done exactly what you're trying to do, even if they're only a few steps ahead of you?
And what would it take to get time with them this month? Number two, for the next person you want to hire, can you draw a direct line from their role to revenue? If you can't, is that really the hire you need right now?
Oh, and by the way, down below, we have included a downloadable worksheet where you can go through all these questions yourself and hopefully start putting these principles into action. Moving on to our next principle, which is strategic focus, which is basically the practice of narrowing your business around one clear direction, whether it's where you compete or who you serve or what you offer or what receives your attention so that your effort becomes concentrated enough to actually.
breakthrough. Now there are three ways to apply strategic focus and Maria, she does all three. Number one, simplicity.
Number two, attention. Number three, niches. So let's start with simplicity, which is this idea that the simpler your business is, the easier it is for it to grow, which is by far the most important part of the anatomy of Maria's dream.
Now you may remember her talking about the rule of five ones, which was one problem, One target market, one offer, one platform for one year. The whole point of the five ones is ultimately how simple it is.
Now, by following that, she hit a million dollar run rate in about seven months by simply simplifying. And then at the seven figure mark, she simplified again. And so she spoke about how she had around 30 people on a Zoom call and terrible profit margins.
And so she made cuts and she restructured the company to have those three team members. And that led her to the eight figures. Now, the part that really stuck with me is when she was talking about how she simplified the business so much that it scaled on its own, because most of us do the opposite.
At the beginning, we tend to offer every service line, every feature. But what's worse, and I'm speaking from experience here, is if you see success from that. Because by the way, I am not saying that an unsimple business cannot grow, but to a point.
Because then what happens is you successfully Build five service lines and employees under each of them. And then you reach a point where you can't figure out how to scale.
And you're wondering, what am I doing wrong? And I'm having to do it all myself. Sharon Shravatsa talks about it.
Like the more capable you are as an entrepreneur, like technically speaking, you could build a pretty successful business. But at a certain point, because you didn't build the infrastructure and the simplicity to run without you, guess what happens? You're not going to scale for longevity.
And one of the key reasons is because of attention. which is another way to apply strategic focus. Now, when it comes to attention, we want to focus it on the few things that actually matter, meaning you're going to say no to most things, which is someone with ADHD that literally feels criminal to my brain.
But... Man, is Maria Savage at doing this. You might remember Maria doing a time audit of her time where she actually goes through every single line item of what she does and she asks herself one question, is this making me money?
She focuses on the income generating activities first. And for her in the early days, that meant booking two sales calls every single day before she did any other work. And the reason this works is because Maria understood that attention is finite.
And as founders, we so often treat our attention like it's an unlimited resource. I mean, how many times do you get to the end of the day and then you feel that you did so much, but then also feel like you got nothing done? And it's because our attention went everywhere and absolutely nowhere at the same time.
And so why do we do it? And I honestly thought about this a lot. And I think it's honestly just because that work that actually moves the needle usually doesn't feel good.
It's boring because it's the same thing over and over. Or it's uncomfortable because It generally comes with some sort of rejection or honestly no guaranteed payoff.
And busy work is how we avoid it while still feeling productive. But people like Maria, they do not prioritize their feelings. They prioritize their attention and their time on the highest leverage tasks.
And that might mean other areas of your business might not be at their best. And that is okay. Telling myself that that is okay.
Because by doing everything, we accomplish nothing. Which brings us to niches, the third way to apply strategic focus.
Now, I think the biggest fear with niching is that it'll limit how big we can get. Like, if I can only speak to this one group of people, aren't I leaving money on the table? But look at Maria.
She's really clear that she's for beginners. I mean, from an early stage, her niche was for new female founders. And today she's often speaking directly to moms and the women that are building their businesses after their kids go to bed.
And she's built an eight -figure business with almost 200 ,000 customers. And I mean, honestly, that's not a small pond. And the thing is, the most successful people, they start with one pond and then they pond up, which is what Caleb Rawlson talked about.
I mean, look at Amazon. They literally started by selling books. But I think we look at how big these companies are now and we see the massive pond that they're in and we forget that they started in a much smaller one.
Which brings me to our next principle, which is to build a personal brand. And obviously, this is a significant part of the anatomy of Maria's dream. A huge portion of it is when she began started posting online, not just to sell her courses, but to actually build an audience that knew her and trusted her and wanted to learn from her.
In Caleb Ralston's episode, we talked a lot about building a personal brand and how the strongest personal brands build the strongest associations. And ultimately, what he was telling us is that we need to decide what we want people to think of when they hear our name and then pairing ourselves with that over and over and over again.
And I want to touch on something that she spoke about, which is pitch content versus nurture content. And so let's start with pitch. Now, pitch content's job is to make money today.
meaning we're going to measure that in sales or booked calls or inquiries. And here's what's super important because every post for your business should have some sort of call to action, especially the pitch content, meaning the comment keyword, book a call, the stuff that we talked about with ManyChat is so important because this is how you're going to actually be able to track the results.
We'll pop up some examples on the screen from Maria's content for you to see what I mean, because this is where ManyChat is actually super useful. And overall, the whole goal with pitch content is it is very clear. This is the information that she can provide you.
This is what she can help you with. And this is what you can purchase. When you see pitch content online, it's generally comment down below, comment this keyword, and I'll send you.
this now let's move on to nurture content now the point of nurture content is to build trust with the people that you already have now she mentioned that some of them do go viral which is great but again that is not the point of it in those cases you are going to optimize for engagement like comments with your community now i want to look at posts of hers that i think are nurture because what i will say is this is that she's not posting random stuff so i'm gonna pull up maria's instagram i'm going to record my little screen here for example here right now i'm going to read the caption for those of you who are listening and not looking at the screen 22 months ago i decided to start posting consistently online almost 400 000 followers later people are starting to recognize me when i'm out and about i'm getting invited to better and bigger rooms i make hundreds of thousands of dollars per month from the digital products i sell on instagram trust me you will never regret working to grow your instagram account so basically she's just talking and sharing like her
personal like journey. She's literally sitting in business class with a Louis Vuitton. So immediately we're associating her with success.
Okay. And she's talking about her success. Now let's look at another piece of nurture content.
This right here with her daughter, a week in my life as a single mama millionaire, what I did every day. She's posting things that ultimately strengthened her associations to her success so that you trust her more. So even the diary post is technically proof that her method works because she's living the result her customers want.
Because she's not just selling the skill, she is selling the lifestyle, one that she has. And that's why you trust her more. Now, yes, these posts, they are vulnerable and they are personal to her.
But motherhood, in her case, is very tied to her business and her customer. So she is speaking specifically about the things that are personal to her, but also to her consumer. And so I think that this is when Caleb Rawlson was talking about, like, don't just post your Starbucks order.
OK, don't just post these random things in your life just to engage with your audience because that's not engaging with your audience. When you are very clear about the associations, about the thing that you are actually providing, why you have a personal brand to begin with, you begin filtering everything through that lens.
And so ultimately, I think the biggest thing that we can take from Maria is that everything that she shares is not only authentic and true to her. but it is also relevant to her audience and very helpful for building trust. And like I've said, we're not just buying from brands anymore.
We're buying into the people behind them. Which brings me to... Gentry Quinn, who is one of our subscribers and our dream shout out for this episode.
Wait, hold on. There's way more products. I'm probably the worst QVC host ever.
So Gentry is an esthetician and a makeup artist, and she created this incredible line of products. It's a restorative beauty brand for women over 40. She runs it with her husband, which Roy and I can relate.
And part of their story is extra virgin olive oil straight from his family's farm in Italy. I couldn't go home. Do you see that?
Roy, do you want to try it? Roy, I have to have you smell this. Come here.
Is that perfume? Can I take it for the rest? I'm blown away by these products.
So I will leave her details down below. Go give her some love. And if you have a dream or a business that you want us to shout out on this show, there's a form down below in the description that you can fill out.
And you might just hear us talk about it and give this wonderful QVC style ad for free. All right. Our next principle is evaluating the right metrics.
which is to measure success by the numbers that show whether we're getting closer to our dream and not the numbers that simply look impressive. Now, in the anatomy of Maria's dream, an incredibly important part of her success was the fact that she understood which metrics to focus on. And that was sales.
Now, she tracks how much money every single piece of her content makes down to the story that went out at 7 a .m. And she's not the first person on this show to say that sometimes she makes a piece of content that gets low views, but gets very high sales. Now, it's not always sales.
She said it could be inquiries. It could be signups. It could be clicks to your podcast, whatever it may be.
The point is you have to be clear before posting in order to make sure you are evaluating the right metrics. And if the goal of signups or sales are not met, you need to try something new until you get something that gets you at least 10 more than the last. So before you release your next piece of content or launch your product or make another investment in your dream, you need to ask yourself this.
Number one, what outcome am I actually trying to create? And number two, which metric would prove that I'm getting closer to it? And after you do that, this is where you create a spreadsheet where you basically have your intention and the outcome, the post, and the actual numbers that came from it.
And this will allow you to see that if you set out for this to be a sales post, what did it actually convert to? And so that you are tracking it. properly and this leads me to our next principle which is the volume principle now this is basically what it sounds like it's that success becomes predictable when you increase the number of high quality attempts that you make maria is the queen of volume i mean she literally said the more i post the more i make and now in order to do this she keeps the product simple and then she puts all of her energy into getting it in front of as many people as possible here's the thing Because I think that a lot of times we get really caught up in the quality of our work.
I know that we do. And I think that we really just have to be honest with ourself, especially in the earlier days of something. Quality really comes with reps.
But I do want to make this clear because we hear the Gary V's of the world saying that we need to post 300 times a day. And the truth is your volume doesn't need to be Maria's seven posts a day. It just needs to be more than you did last month.
And this is where her 90 day ramp came in. I mean, most people get really excited and then they post twice a day for a few weeks and then eventually they fall off. And then at a certain point, you don't trust yourself.
I'm speaking from my own experience on that. I have done that so many times before. And Maria's approach, I honestly, like now that I'm actually doing it more consistently, Maria's approach is 100 % correct because it's ultimately what worked for us.
which was that month one, once a week, same time, you never miss. You start with the minimal amount that you actually feel that you can keep up with. And then month two, two to three times a week.
And month three, up to five times a week. You can make the numbers however you want, whatever works for you. It's just picking a number that you actually can stick to.
And then we do what Maria says to do, and is that if we miss one in those 90 days, we have to start over. I loved this part when she was saying, slow to build, slow to break. And of course, this doesn't just apply to content.
It can be your outreach or your sales calls. The point is you don't have to do volume everywhere in your business all at once. You want to pick one area to strategically focus on and then build it up until the volume is there and there's a system behind it.
And then, only then, we move on to the next one, which brings us to finding the bottlenecks. Now, finding the bottleneck is the practice of identifying the things that are holding your business back, whether it be now or down the line. And in most early stage businesses, the bottleneck is often the founder.
The founder. Here's the thing. You're not going to fix it overnight.
And this is why working backwards with bottlenecks is so important. Because bottlenecks don't get solved all at once. You have to pace yourself.
Now, most people say to hand off the most important thing first or the thing that's most time consuming or essential in your business, right? In my experience, what usually happens is that you can't find the right person for that. And so you never really fully let go of it anyway, meaning you are still the bottleneck.
That is why I think working backwards is a better way. So you want to start with the lowest leverage tasks and you want to work your way up. Now, in our episode with John Hu, he talked about this, where he says that you want to start with the things that you could immediately trust a talented high school intern to.
do. That being said, being a bottleneck isn't always a terrible thing, at least for a while. And it's because sometimes you need to understand the problem inside out before you can hand it off.
Elon Musk, whether we like him or not, he does run very successful businesses and he is known for jumping into a department himself. And sometimes he even works the line and he understands exactly where the problem is and then how to fix it. So once you understand what it takes, then you build a system for it.
And that's when you can remove the bottleneck by having someone else do it. So the goal isn't to get rid of the bottleneck immediately. It's to understand it, build a system for it, and then let it go.
Now, again, you want to start by letting go of the simplest low leverage thing and then work your way up until you reach the highest leverage thing. What John called the magic in a bottle. And I really loved that.
So for Maria, that magic. was the writing she said that she still writes every email and every caption and every carousel herself because that is what makes her the money i want to backtrack here and i do want to talk about another bottleneck in maria's journey and that was in her former business and in that former business the bottleneck was maria that business was her seven figure business which was group coaching and high ticket clients.
And it ultimately ran through her. So every single sales call needed her and every single client meeting needed her time. Here's the other thing.
Bottlenecks generally have more than one way of solving them. And so she had two paths. One was to keep the model and replace herself and train other coaches under her so that she didn't have to be the one every single one of those meetings.
And number two was to change the model, to change the offer itself so that it didn't need her time at all. And as we know, she chose the second one. And that's when she moved into low -ticket products, where it ultimately saved her time.
A big part of that reason was her daughter. She didn't just want the fewer calls. She wanted her time back with Ellie.
And so training coaches, option one, well, honestly, that would have taken longer. And she wanted something simple enough to fit around being a mom. Which brings me to our next principle, which is to know when to quit slash pivot.
Now, the thing that we can really learn from Maria is that in the anatomy of her dream, she knew when it was time to pivot away from what was no longer working for her life. On paper, yes, it was successful. But it wasn't what success looked like for her.
Because for Maria, success actually looked like a business that gave her freedom to be with the most important thing in her life, which was her daughter. And the current model of her business was not allowing her to do that. And this is where I keep thinking about her saying that the point of a business is for it to work for us.
not the other way around. There are three signs that it's ultimately time to pivot. There's no momentum, there's diminishing returns, or there's new information.
And Maria's new information wasn't a market shift or a bad quarter. It was realizing that the life her business was giving her wasn't the life that she actually wanted, which is the whole freaking point. And let's be real, it's easier to pivot away from something that's failing on paper, and it's much harder to pivot away from something that is working.
Especially when you have a family to support. But we can't hold on to the dream so tightly that we forget why we built it in the first place. And for Maria, why she built it was freedom.
Her old business, as successful as it was, had taken that away. And sometimes quitting or pivoting doesn't mean giving up on the dream. It can mean getting back to it.
And I think what made this decision possible for Maria is that she already knew what mattered most. Her daughter. So when her business started taking her away from her daughter, the decision wasn't really about strategy.
It was about her values. Which brings me to our next principle, which is to lead with values. Now, leading with values means not compromising what matters to you, even when there is something to gain.
And if I'm being honest. When I was breaking down the anatomy of Maria's dream, I was so focused on all of the tangible principles that she basically talked about. But the more time I spent with her story, the more that I realized that her values were behind every single decision that she made.
Her values are the North Star of her dream. And honestly, I think that if I wore in Maria's shoes, I would have probably fallen into the trap of convincing myself that there was only one way to do this for my daughter, right?
I would have probably told myself, okay, if I push harder now in this coaching business and I get there as fast as possible and I build all this wealth and financial stability, eventually I will be able to spend time with my daughter, right? But Maria was so clear that the whole reason she was doing any of this was to be with her daughter now, not someday.
So that path wasn't really an option for her. And so she had to find another way. And the thing is, as founders, we're faced with so many decisions.
And the truth is, there are many right ways to go. But there's usually only one or two that are really right for you. And your values are what help you figure out which ones those are.
So you have to ask yourself, what are the things you're not willing to compromise on along the way? Which brings me to our next one, which is resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is the ability to find creative solutions with what you already have instead of waiting for what you think you need.
When Maria decided that she needed her time back with her daughter, she didn't really have a playbook for the low ticket world, but she looked at what she did have. And she had years of knowledge teaching people how to get clients. She had an audience that couldn't afford her high ticket offer.
And she had two whole days a week, plus early mornings and late nights. So she built a business that fit exactly that. And here's the thing, the most successful people, they don't just make do with what they have.
They turn it into something better than the original plan. Like James Clear, New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits. He was spending over 20 hours on each article for his newsletter twice a week.
So when he had a newborn baby, he didn't have as much time anymore. And so he had to ask himself, what would I do if I only had two to four hours? And that's how his 321 newsletter was born.
And it now exploded. And it goes out to three million people every week. Or let's take Jaws, one of my favorite movies.
I don't know if you guys know this, but the mechanical shark in that film, it kept breaking down. So Spielberg had to suggest the shark instead. That's why we don't see it.
And so he suggested it with the barrels and the underwater shots and that iconic score, the da -na, da -na, da -na -na -na -na. Okay, that whole thing was literally all of that to insinuate the shark was there without showing it because the literal shark they had did not work. All of that is what made it so terrifying.
It made it better. And Maria didn't just rebuild her business. She built a better one.
It made more money and gave her the freedom that she actually wanted. Most of us, we do the opposite. We look at what we don't have and we use it as a reason to wait.
And we actually caught ourselves doing this recently. We'd been wanting to meet up with you guys and do some sort of meetup. And we met so many times to discuss the type of event that we wanted to do.
We were pulling together numbers, looking at venues, all of this. And eventually we had to come to the conclusion that it just wasn't the right time. Every episode takes so much of our resources.
And ultimately it just felt like it was going to have to be a next year project. And then after making that decision, I realized, wait. Why does it have to be a big event?
What could we do with what we have right now? And that's how the idea of a walk came about. And so we hosted our first founder walk in Los Angeles, and we met with about 27 founders at a park.
And one of our subscribers, her name is Perky, flew from Denver to be a part of this walk. And I just have to say, Perky, if you're listening, thank you so much. Seriously.
You are a champ. You are amazing and such an inspiration. And she wrote a whole Substack article that we'll link below about the walk if you want to hear more about how it went from her POV.
But I'm saying all of this because meeting Perky and meeting all of these founders was one of the biggest highlights from building this channel so far.
I'm not going to talk about it too much. Because we all know that I tend to get a little emotional. But ultimately, what started as this big idea turned into something much smaller.
But that smaller, simpler idea for what we did actually led us to having the ability to talk to every single person there and building a deeper connection. And ultimately, that's really what we want to do. And what I keep thinking about is that we almost didn't do it because we couldn't afford the version that we had in our heads.
Which brings us to our last principle, which is mindset. Because mindset is ultimately the thing that gets us to be resourceful or not. Breaking down the anatomy of Maria's dream and sitting in front of her talking about how simple and scalable her business is, especially when our show is the most unscalable and complicated thing.
I mean, literally, we are shooting and releasing one episode every single month, and all of the creative decisions and processes are mainly all running through me and Roy. And so when I look at what she's been able to build and the freedom that she's been able to attain from it, I would be lying if I would be sitting here and not disclosing to you guys that I feel so far from that.
When I think of all the bottlenecks that we have and all the problems that we need to solve to actually get to the place where it's scalable and simplified, I feel like we're never going to get there. And I think there's something really humbling about doing this show where I come on here and I feel like I understand all of these concepts perfectly well, right?
Sometimes I talk about a few of these principles and I ask myself, like, why haven't we been able to apply that for ourselves?
what we're building at some point I'm going to have to completely start over from scratch and rebuild something else and then I get terrified because I feel like I've already done that too many times and then I get in my head over and over and over again in the process of documenting and studying other people's dreams and what they've done and I feel like there is something that they have that I do not but maybe I'm just not cut out for the the dream I have in my mind.
But then I honestly I look at Maria and I think the thing that I really took from from her is that that my dream isn't on the other side of me figuring out the answers. It's on the other side of me deciding that I'm capable of solving them.
Like I have to really believe that. If you don't believe that you're really capable of solving that, you are just going to stare at the problem.
And honestly, that is like, I think what I do almost every day. And I'm sure if you're watching this and you've gotten this far, you are probably looking for answers too. I think we look externally for answers, but I wonder how many of them are already within us.
Like I look at Maria and she changed her model and she didn't have to go back to school. All of those answers were within her. She just had to trust herself to find the right way.
She just had to trust herself. I think so much of the anatomy of our dream is getting out of our own way.
I think we want to become. the successful version but what if that successful version of us already exists and we just have to let them take over and so when you don't know the answers let them take over when you don't know if what you're doing is going to work let them take over if you feel Tired and burnt out and like you can't keep going.
Let them take over.
Because I think that when we do.
I think that's when we reach the anatomy. Of our dream.
All right, guys. I will see you in the next one.
Can I hug you?
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title promises a strategy, and the cold open delivers a number instead: sixty-three dollars in year one, twenty-two million since. What follows is less a strategy than a demolition. Leads, nurture sequences, webinars, brand perception, big teams. She cuts each one and shows the bank balance that survived.
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A Hollywood showrunner explains why people buy on emotion, not logic — then the host spends an hour turning his rise, collapse, and comeback into nine repeatable principles.
How Charlotte Trecartin built CharCharms and WallCandy from a college bedroom prototype to Target nationwide with no ads, no investors, and a team that fit in a basement.
A 13-minute checklist-style tutorial, delivered in front of a live handwritten iPad overlay, walking through the four pre-launch requirements a digital product needs before marketing is even worth attempting.
A solo creator opens her notebook, her ManyChat dashboard, and her email inbox to show exactly how $500K a month in digital-product sales gets split across Instagram, email, and $5-a-day ads.
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