A coaching founder walks through one client's seven-year climb in three acts, then pulls out the three habits that drove it.
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yesterday
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Format
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educational
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3.4K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Growth looks bumpy day to day, and the businesses that reach millions get there by fixing one constraint at a time, measuring inputs against outputs, and copying proven models.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach or consultant stuck between $10K and $100K a month who feels like everyone else on Instagram is growing in a straight line.
A founder who keeps chasing shiny ideas and wants a simple rule for deciding what to work on next.
Someone running paid ads or a content funnel who has never logged daily spend against calls booked and sales made.
SKIP IF…
You want the actual financials or tactics of Jay's business, since the speaker says most of it is under NDA and withholds the numbers.
You are looking for a step-by-step funnel build, because this is a story with three lessons rather than a tutorial.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Instagram makes coaching growth look like a smooth climb, but real businesses are volatile and only trend upward over time. Taki Moore tells the story of Jay, who closed an agency, struggled moving from one-on-one coaching to group, then grew past $200K a month and eventually over $3 million a month. He credits three habits: pick the single biggest constraint every six weeks and ignore the other fires, log daily inputs and outputs so you know scaling spend will work, and copy a funnel someone else has already proven.
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Growth looks like a straight line online but is bumpy in practice, and the speaker introduces Jay and the boardroom event where he is speaking from.
01:49 – 04:12
02 · Act one: the dream
Jay shuts down a burnt-out agency to coach one-on-one, joins a program for new coaches, and loses four of six clients when he tries group.
04:13 – 07:05
03 · Act two: the struggle
The traffic light system flags stuck clients, the Great Orangy calls help Jay fix group coaching, and the business climbs to $200K a month.
07:06 – 09:38
04 · Act three: the victory
Jay joins the higher-level community, sells parts of the business to private equity, and reaches well over $3 million a month.
09:39 – 11:38
05 · Lesson one: attack the constraint
Pick the one bottleneck, work only on it for six weeks, and expect the next problem to appear.
11:39 – 14:03
06 · Lesson two: daily cause and effect
A spreadsheet linking daily spend to followers, DMs, calls and sales gave Jay the confidence to scale aggressively.
14:04 – 16:46
07 · Lesson three: model what works
When stuck, Jay asks who is crushing it, then copies their funnel, including translating a VSL line by line.
16:47 – 21:12
08 · The Boardroom blade and next steps
Jay wins the peer-voted award, and the speaker points viewers to videos for their own stage of the journey.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Social media shows coaching growth as a straight line up, but real growth is volatile day to day and only trends upward when you zoom out.
At any moment a business has thousands of broken things, but only one of them is the constraint holding back revenue, profit and freedom.
Attacking one constraint for six weeks and letting the other fires burn beats trying to fix everything at once.
Solving one bottleneck simply reveals the next one: marketing, then sales, then delivery, like business whack-a-mole.
A one-on-one coach capped at 40 hours of Zoom a week cannot scale, so the move to group is what unlocks growth even when it initially fails.
Four of Jay's six one-on-one clients churned and refunded when he first moved to group, and he still pushed through.
A simple spreadsheet of daily activities (spend, followers, DMs, calls, sales) gave Jay the certainty to spend aggressively on ads.
If you know that adding input A reliably raises output Z, scaling spend stops being a gamble and becomes arithmetic.
When a problem appears, the first move should be asking who is already crushing it, not inventing a solution from scratch.
Jay copied another founder's funnel line by line, translating each sentence of the VSL into his own audience's language.
Copying what works is a repeatable growth strategy, and Jay used it even at multi-million-dollar scale.
A traffic-light system of red, orange and green clients helps spot who has no clear next step or isn't engaging.
Takeaway
Fix one constraint, measure, copy what works
WHAT TO LEARN
Steady growth comes from choosing one bottleneck at a time, tracking daily inputs against outputs, and borrowing proven models instead of inventing everything.
02Act one: the dream
Moving from one-on-one to group is what makes a coaching business scale, even when the first attempt loses clients and refunds.
03Act two: the struggle
Real business growth is volatile day to day, so judge progress by the long-term trend instead of comparing yourself to curated social posts.
A simple health check that flags clients lacking a clear next step or engagement lets you intervene before they churn.
05Lesson one: attack the constraint
At any moment only one bottleneck is truly holding growth back, so naming it and ignoring the rest is the highest-leverage planning move.
Work the chosen constraint in a fixed six-week cycle, expecting the next bottleneck to appear once the current one is solved.
06Lesson two: daily cause and effect
Log each step of one acquisition pathway daily, from spend to followers to calls to sales, so inputs can be tied to outputs.
Once you can show that more input reliably produces more output, you can scale spend aggressively instead of playing it safe.
07Lesson three: model what works
When a new problem appears, ask who is already solving it well and connect with them before designing your own answer.
Copying a proven funnel, even line by line into your own audience's language, is a legitimate strategy at any size.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Constraint
The single bottleneck in a business that, if solved, unlocks the most growth right now. Everything else is a distraction until it is fixed.
Six-week game plan
A planning cycle where a founder picks the number one constraint, works only on that for six weeks, then reassesses.
VSL
Video sales letter. A scripted sales video that an ad sends cold traffic to, used to book calls or sell directly.
Traffic light system
A monthly client health check marking each client red, orange or green based on their progress, clarity on next steps and engagement.
Resources
Things they pointed at.
01:20productBoardroom
03:42productClients
04:42productBlack Belt
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“If you look on Instagram, it looks like every coach is always killing it... and you're not.”
Funny, concrete proof of the model-what-works lesson→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
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If you look on Instagram, it looks like every coach is always killing it. They start small, perhaps, but it quickly gets good, and then it gets better, and it gets better, and it gets better, and it gets better, and they're always crushing, and you're not. Okay, well, that's fine.
That's Instagram. You and I have both been around the block enough times to know that it doesn't always look like that. In fact, it almost never.
looks like this. And for every like overnight success story, there's just a ton of stories of people who figured it out and did the hard stuff and fixed a problem and another. And the reality looks much more like this.
It's bumpy. And yeah, if you zoom out far enough, the trend is up, oops, up and to the right. But day to day, it looks pretty volatile.
Day to day, week to week, month to month. So if that's your scenario, this video is going to be super freaking helpful. I want to tell you about a client called Jay.
Today's a really special day. It's 11 .07 p .m. here in Austin.
I've lost my voice and I smell like smoke. Not cigarette smoke, but like wood fire smoke. Because about an hour ago, I was on a ranch outside of Austin, hosted by Tina.
Tina, shout out to you. With meat and barbecue and... guns and lassos and all the stuff.
But we were there on the second night of boardroom with 80 clients who are frankly my favorite people in the whole wide world. They're what I call BIVAMF, B -I -V -A -M -F, batteries included, value adding motherfuckers. They're my elite clients.
They each paid 60K a year to work together. And at the end of the night, something dope happened to Jay. But before I tell you about what happened at the end of the night, I need to go back in time and tell you about act one.
This is the dream. Every coach starts with the dream. And Jay's story looked like this.
Back in 2019, I was running an event for Black Belt. And my buddy, Kevin Hutto was speaking. You see Kevin.
And I had a client called, I had another client also called Jay, who wasn't this Jay. And he snuck his ads guy in, pretending like, snuck a mate in, pretending he was his ads guy. So we could like watch, come to Black Belt and see what Kevin Hutto was up to.
This was right back here. At the time, Jay's running an agency. He's doing, you know, I don't know, $10 ,000 or $20 ,000 a month or something like that, maybe in an agency, but he's burnt out on Friday.
He looks around at all of these coaches doing amazing stuff. He's like, oh my goodness, this coaching thing, this is a much better model. And so he gets super inspired.
This is the dream. He's super inspired. I might become a coach.
The margins are better. The clients are better. It's just a different model, much less laborious.
And he gets really excited. And so he shuts down the agency and starts doing one -on -one coaching with a bunch of clients. The problem with doing one -on -one coaching on ads, which was his deal, was he was doing something like 40 hours a week on Zoom calls.
But he had a dream and he'd taken the first few steps. That's act one. He joins a program that we launched called Clients.
And Clients helps brand new coaches, because that was him, to design a program and grow it to $10 ,000 a month consistently. And so he's kind of on this journey. But instead of doing the group thing, he tries it.
I think he's got maybe, I might have these details wrong. I think he's got like six clients and he moves them over to group and four of them churn. and refund and he's down to two because he doesn't know how to do the group properly.
That brings us to here. That's act one. Exciting and dangerous, right?
It's ups and downs like life. Act two, the struggle. So he's here.
Business is going okay, but he's just like, he's just tried to make this transition from one -on -one to group and it's not going that well. But he's got enough money that he's joined Black Belt in the hope of figuring it out. Transition's not going so well so far.
And he's like, here. Now this circle I drew in orange because something magic happened. We looked at the data of our client base and we realized that there were a few people who were stuck at a very particular spot.
And we run a little traffic light system with our clients every month. And we look at... their progress, their reporting, their engagement.
And we work out very quickly if someone is red, like they're in big trouble, or they're orange, or they're green. And a green for us is like they are clear on their right next thing, like what to work on. And they're engaged, you know, playing the game with us in Black Belt.
Anyone who's not a green light is automatically, you know, orange. And orange means one of these two things is missing. Either they don't know what their right next thing is, or they do, but we just don't know it, so we can't update our system.
And they're not kind of playing the game. And so we had a group of clients who were tagged orange in our system, and we invited them onto a small group call, like five or six people at a time over a period of a few weeks. And we called it the Great Orangy, right?
Needed the name. It's the Great Orangy. So one thing with Jay on the Great Orangy, any...
admits that he's moved to group. He doesn't really know what he's doing. People aren't very happy.
He's struggling with it. So he's got this dream that it could be amazing, but right now it's really, really hard. So on the call, I'm like, mate, if he's gone back to one -on -one and it's capped like 40 hours a week on Zoom, not fun.
I'm like, hey man, you've got to move to group or it's never going to grow in scale. And he just decided, you know, I'm going to be Taki for e -commerce. Whatever he's doing.
I'm going to do for my crowd. I'm doing it with coaches and he wants to do it for e -com. So he goes through the great oranging and it takes, frankly, a little while for it to get good.
But sure enough, the group starts to take and I'm going to give you the three specific things that he's done in just a moment. But the group starts to get traction. He starts to get traction.
The business starts to grow and he goes from... you know, struggling and burning out one -on -one to 50K a month, to 60K a month, to 70K a month, the thing takes off like a rocket and it gets to $200 ,000 per month. And it's like, holy crap, this bit here was really hard, but it's starting to come good.
Do you remember the conversation we had about that, about reality, how it's not like... Always great. So long as the trend is heading up, we're doing okay.
So that's kind of where he's up to. Let me get back to my thing. Okay.
Act three. This is where it gets kind of bonkers. So act one, we talked about.
Act two, the struggle, the great oranging. Gets to 200 grand a month. Now we're at act three, the victory.
This is what has happened in the last little while. So the story started seven years ago when we started working together.
So let's mark these in green as like a milestone in my relationship. Here is joined clients. Say this is joined Black Belt.
200K a month. He joins, oops, he joins Boardroom, which is our community for seven and eight figure coaches who are doing amazing things in the world, right? So you've got to be, have a great business and be doing something that's worthy of sharing with others and be the kind of person who shares the stuff.
So 200 grand a month.
He sold parts of his business to a private equity firm. And then another part, I'm not allowed to give away all the numbers, but let's just say it is very comfortably over $3 million a month, right? It's a great business.
Has this been all smooth sailing? Of course not. There's been bumps and dramas and troubles every step because that's running a business.
So today, Jay did a walkthrough of his... his business journey. And I'm not going to give away any of the details because there's a lot that's like NDA'd.
But there are three lessons that I can share that have helped Jay go from like seven grand a month to millions of dollars a month. And like, frankly, changing thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of lives. So here they are.
Lesson number one, identify and attack the constraint. At any given moment in your business, there are thousands of things that you could be working on. Thousands of things which are...
which are broken. And the danger is, in your business right now, there is one thing that is holding you back from the growth that you want, the growth in revenue, the growth in profit, the growth in freedom. And if you're not careful, it's really easy to get distracted.
Like if this is you right here, and this is more, what you like more of, it's very easy to get distracted over here, distracted over here, distracted over here. and over here and over here it's very easy to get pulled in a million direction and sometimes it's the market sometimes it's distracted by what other people are doing often it's our own good ideas because there's millions of things in your business that you could fix but only one of them at any given moment is the uh is the constraint and the mistake that so many coaches make is they focus on either a shiny opportunity or some other you know distraction instead of identifying the one thing that if I solve that, it unlocks the bottleneck.
And so what I love most about what Jay's been up to is he has consistently, ever since he figured this out, years now, every six -week cycle, he'd come to the six -week game plan with us, identify the number one constraint that's holding him back, and then attack only that for the next six weeks and let the other fires burn.
That's why the journey looks like this. You know, you've got a problem. You attack it for six weeks and you get to the next level.
And then the problem is something else. It's a bit like business whack -a -mole, like marketing's the problem. And you solve that.
And guess what? The bottleneck just now, the marketing's not the bottleneck. Sales is the bottleneck, for example.
And so you attack that for six weeks and then now it's delivery. And it looks like you're solving problems and you are. But the end result of solving each of these problems as they come up is you end up somewhere really freaking rad.
That's... Lesson number one, identify the bottleneck and attack it aggressively every six weeks. That's what Jay's done.
Lesson number two, business really took off. There's a couple of moments where you can see on his graph, the inflection point where things got very exciting really quickly. And the second one was when he figured out daily cause and effect like there's lots of things you could be doing in your business like tactically day to day to day but um he was growing a little bit but what allowed him to like to like really hit the gas was he he figured out one way that he could get clients was it the best way it doesn't really matter but he built a little spreadsheet and here was the um the days of the month you know one two three all the way down to 30 and it had each of the activities each of the steps kind of.
Back then it was boost a piece of content on Instagram and get followers.
Then the followers would get a DM and they'd have a conversation and they'd book a call and they'd buy a thing and make a sale. Oops. And that would result in an amount of money.
And life got really good when he started to graph this thing like this and he could say, okay, this day I spent I'm just going to make up a number, $100. And at the end of that, I got whatever dollars.
Here, I spent $200 and this number got a bit bigger and this number got bigger and that number got bigger and that number got bigger and this number got bigger. And after a little while doing this, it gave him the confidence that this thing works. And my job is to, because there's daily cause and effect, if I can increase this number, I know with certainty that if I put more money in here, All of the numbers down the trail get better.
And it gave him the confidence to actually lean in and aggressively grow and play offense instead of like playing it safe, like a bunch of people do with their ads.
So what's the lesson here for you? Don't just do marketing, keep track of the activities. And once you've figured out one clear pathway or borrowed one, this one was when he got from, you know, from in our community and adapted a thing to suit him.
Once you've got a pathway that works, If you keep track of like, I input this and that happens, then we can increase the inputs and we increase the outputs. And then you grow confidently.
You can aggressively scale, which is what Jay did. Thing number three.
Sorry, it's taking a while to upload. I should have made it already there. Thing number three.
Okay. Model what you want. And I don't mean be a great role model because Jay is that.
But there's been several times along this journey where something is, something is, And in every case, Jay would have a look at the thing and identify the problem. And then his very first point of call was to go, was to ask in the community, hey, who's, how are you, how are you solving this?
Who's crushing?
And then we'd connect them with that person or bring them up live on a jam and they could explain it. The most recent one happened, how long ago? Maybe three months ago.
Jay's stepped back into marketing to drive qualified leads in that they've expanded into the States. And I'm like, who's crushing with lead gen and booking sales calls? And I'm like, this dude, Brandon.
And so Brandon's like, oh, thank God I get to help out. And they were chatting about it. And at the end, Brandon just literally word for word, just like gets really intense.
Unmutes his line, gets really intense in the camera and goes, Jay, I'm begging you to just copy my funnel. These are the numbers. And Jay's like, well, that sounds great.
If they're the numbers, I'm going to copy your funnel. And so if you look at the ads.
and it's basically add to a VSL. If you look at the VSL, like Jay said today, what I did was I had my camera dude over and we looked at, this is hilarious. Over here, we've got, Jay's gonna shoot his VSL.
This is Jay. So he's got his camera dude there. He's about to shoot this video.
And then over here on his other laptop, he's got um the other dudes the guy who said like i'm begging you to copy it and he just pressed play and get the one sentence in his head and go okay well what's that for my audience and he would like say the line to camera and then he'd go uh line two okay translate it in his head and say that second line and it's it's literally he did that so he said that he just he just copied what works so that's the story that's how jay's been able to go from like the dream through the struggle to the victory.
And it's still a learning curve, even like right now with a mega business and great money and heaps of freedom and like, frankly, enough money that he never has to work for several lifetimes, nor do his kids ever, although of course they will.
After dinner tonight, between the main course and the fire pit and the s'mores and all the good stuff, we... They're together for Boardroom. And in Boardroom, there's an award that you win.
There's an award that we give away each time we get together. And it goes to the most worthy. In fact, there is a card that everybody fills out.
And the work that, you know, the header just says, name only the most worthy.
And we're looking for who's the person nominated by your peers in a group that is frankly an elite level group. Who's the person who has the business and the life that you most admire and want to emulate and who is generous in a way that only the best boardroomers can be. And 80...
People filled this thing in today. And today, after dinner, before the s'mores, something kind of magic happened.
We tallied up the votes. And it's kind of unfair. This is what the votes look like.
If you think about all the people who were voted, a bunch of people had a few votes. Somebody had this many votes. And one guy had...
That many votes. And that dude was Jay. So Jay won the boardroom blade today and gets to take it back home to Australia.
Yes, it's a samurai sword. No, he won't be able to get it through customs. Yes, we will ship it to him because otherwise it's weird.
So I just wanted to shoot this video to, A, give you some lessons from people who are further ahead in the journey. And secondly, just to say, Jay. watching you grow for the last seven years has been like an absolute delight.
It's been super rich and juicy working with you and your team, watching you guys grow. I love the magic that you're cooking up with Josh and the rest of the gang. And we're just really freaking proud.
You are the epitome of what Boardroom's about. Even at your size and scale, you show up almost every single week on a weekly jam for Boardroom. Often you're there with a problem to solve, but also often you're there to just hang out and help out.
We're grateful for you. We're proud of you. It's been a hell of a journey so far.
But today we've been talking about the dream, act one, act two, act three, this bit.
I'm super pumped about all of the... between here and the moon. Proud of you, mate.
Well, well done. If you're a coach and you want to know, you want some help along that journey, whether you're at the dream stage and it's like, how do I get to $10 ,000 a month? Is this even a thing?
Or how do I get this to 100K a month? Or how do I get this to, that's over a million bucks a year. How do I get this to one to three mil or 10 mil or 30 mil or more like Jay and the others?
There's a link down below to a couple of videos that will help you on that journey, whether you're doing this bit or that bit or that bit. It'll show you what to do next. All right.
So listen, there is nothing like this business in the world, not just financially. It is incredible financially, but there's no other place I know where you can have as much fun, help as many people and make as much money. That's where we are right now.
Love you heaps, and I'll talk to you soon. Sorry for the croaky, smoky, and held voice.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Instagram says every coach is always winning. Taki Moore opens by calling that out, then shows what the climb really looks like through the story of one client who went from burnt-out agency owner to a business doing over $3 million a month.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:49model
Three-act client journey
Act one: the dream
Act two: the struggle
Act three: the victory
A way to frame a business journey as an exciting start, a hard middle where the model gets fixed, and a payoff once the trend turns up.
Steal forsetting expectations for a long growth path
04:42model
Client traffic light system
Green: clear next step and engaged
Orange: missing clarity or engagement
Red: in big trouble
A monthly review of each client's progress, reporting and engagement, where anyone not green is treated as orange and pulled into extra help.
Steal forspotting stuck customers early
09:39concept
Attack the constraint every six weeks
Each six-week cycle, identify the one thing holding back growth, work only on that, and let other fires burn until the next cycle.
Steal forquarterly planning
12:07model
Daily cause and effect tracker
Days of the month
Spend
Followers
DMs and conversations
Booked calls
Sales and revenue
A spreadsheet that logs each step of a single acquisition pathway every day so inputs can be tied to outputs.
Steal forscaling ads with confidence
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
20:39link
“There's a link down below to a couple of videos that will help you on that journey.”
A soft pointer at the end, tied to where the viewer is on the journey, after a long stretch of pure story and lessons.
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Taki Moore explains why teaching what you know gets you friend-zoned, and walks through the Belief Map he uses to install three buying beliefs in every piece of content.
Taki Moore's case for sorting clients into negative, neutral and positive, writing entry standards for both logistics and vibe, and letting the bad ones go.
A coach who has worked with 4,831 clients explains how product design, three coaching roles, and a few reframes get beginners acting in days instead of stewing for weeks.
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