You're booked About 15 minutes to read
Read this before we talk.
Your invite and the Zoom link are on their way to your inbox. Between now and the call, I'd like fifteen minutes of your time.
You built a business that pays you for exactly as long as you keep showing up, and you already know what that costs.
What follows are seven questions Alleah had to answer, one at a time, over the months we worked together. Very few of them were about marketing. They were about the business she'd already built and what she'd built it to give her.
Take them slowly. If one stops you, stay with it for a minute before you read what happened for her. You'll get a lot more out of our fifteen minutes if you've already done some of that thinking.
Question 01 of 07
What happens to the business when you stop?
Be straight with yourself about this one. If you stopped posting for a month, what would happen to your calendar? And if you took your family somewhere for a week and left your phone in a drawer, what would be waiting for you when you got back?
Most of the experts I talk to know the answer before I've finished asking. The good months feel like you've finally cracked it, and then a week off or a bad flu shows you who's been carrying the whole thing. You end up checking your calendar from the beach.
Alleah had a name for hers.
Yeah, it's a party trick. A million dollar one, but it's still one.”
She knew what it rested on. Every client came from her posting, her energy and her being on for every call. A million dollars is real money, and it was still a business that only moved when she did.
For the year she paid agencies, they kept burning her money on tests. Whenever the cash ran thin, her gut sent her back to what she'd always done. She picked up her phone and posted, it worked, and that kept the company alive long enough for her to find me.
That cost never shows up on the business's numbers. It shows up in the way a slow week ruins your weekend, and in the vacation you take with one eye on your inbox.
And almost nobody lets themselves wonder whether it has to stay that way, because every fix they've been offered so far asked them to do more.
What would change if the fix asked you to do less?
Question 02 of 07
Do your prospects ever talk about your content on your calls?
Alleah's did. She told me so on a call back when an agency had brought me in to clean up its client list, sixty accounts, and hers was one of them. She said it in passing, the way you'd mention the weather.
My prospects talk about my content on my sales calls all the time.”
By then she'd spent a year and about $100,000 on agencies, coaches, courses and consultants. Every one of them came with a plan that started from scratch, and every plan needed something new from her. Her calendar was full, and almost nobody on it was showing up.
The calls are booking. Everybody's no-showing.”
I only had one question for her.
Do you know which pieces of your content, specifically, are doing the heavy lifting?
She didn't, and almost nobody I ask does. Experts get taught to listen for objections on a sales call, and a prospect mentioning your video sounds like small talk on the way to the real conversation.
Think about what that prospect is doing, though. They're telling you where they decided. Somewhere in everything you've ever put out is the video or the post that sent this person looking for your calendar, and they're pointing straight at it while you're busy steering toward the offer.
Every one of those mentions is your market telling you what works, unprompted, on calls you were already taking. Businesses pay research firms to find out less than that. Yours has been handing it to you for years, dressed up as a compliment.
So, do yours bring it up? And if you had to name the five posts that have done the most selling for you over the years, could you?
Question 03 of 07
How long had your best clients been listening before they paid you?
Picture the last client who signed without much of a fight, the one who got on the call already halfway to yes and mostly needed you to confirm what they'd decided.
How long had they been watching you before that call? Months? Years? How many times had they heard you say the same thing a slightly different way before one version landed?
Nobody puts a number on that part of a business. You won't find it in a dashboard or on a P&L, and it's still the reason they bought.
Remember what it took. You got good at the work before anyone paid you for it. You kept posting through the stretch where the numbers were embarrassing. You learned to explain what you do to people who had no reason to listen, and you kept at it long enough that some of them started asking if you'd do it for them.
When I asked Alleah what she wanted other experts to understand about all this, she put it this way.
There was a warm juicy foundation that needed what we did to be harvested.”
A foundation like hers doesn't come from a campaign. It's years of showing up for people, one post and one conversation at a time, and it belongs to your business whether anyone has ever written it down or not. It's why the people who already know you are so much easier to help, and so much easier to sell.
I've seen the inside of more than 750 businesses, and the experts I meet almost never give themselves credit for this part. They talk about what's broken, the ads and the funnel and the no-shows, and skip right past the years of trust that got them to twenty, fifty, a hundred grand a month. Nobody has sat down with all of it and given it the respect it's earned.
Running client success taught me something about the people who come in that way. They arrive already trusting you, and the ones who trust you on day one are the ones who stay and get results. Your foundation is doing that work right now, on every call where someone already knows who you are.
That's the hard part, and you've already done it.
Question 04 of 07
What if the hard part is already done?
I told Alleah exactly that, and she didn't believe me.
After I left the agency, she came looking for me.
Where'd the guy go who just seemed to get it?”
We scored her whole archive against what her buyers kept answering, and a handful of videos stood out from everything else. My instructions were short.
Don't build anything. Don't write anything. Just go repost these specific ones.
After a year of being told she needed something new, hearing she already had it made too much sense to trust. I don't blame her. When you've paid that much for complicated, simple sounds like a trick.
There's another reason it's hard to hear, and it has nothing to do with money. When you've been the engine for years, hearing the hard part's done can sound like hearing your effort wasn't necessary, when your effort is the only reason there's anything to repost. Everything you've been told to rebuild was built already, by you, the slow way.
So we tested it the cheapest way there is, and she reposted them.
Within eight days she'd signed six new clients.
She didn't film anything new or change her offer. Posts she'd already made went back in front of the people they'd always worked on, and they did what they'd always done.
Seeing how simple it was supposed to be messed with her a little. Then she told me she wanted to hand all of it to someone she could trust.
Now turn it around and look at your own business. If your best clients came from a handful of things you've already said, then whatever you keep being told is missing may not be missing at all. It may be buried under a few hundred newer posts.
Everything it took to make those posts is behind you, and so is the trust they built. What's left is finding which pieces carry the weight and putting them back where they work.
That part is simpler than anything you've been sold, and it's still hard to believe. She didn't believe it either, right up until the eighth day.
Question 05 of 07
What would your business look like if it got boring?
Early on, Alleah asked me for something most experts want and feel a little silly saying out loud.
A machine that when we put X in, we know we get Y out, and it's just about monitoring.”
She'd spent a year being told that machine had to be built from scratch. I told her something else.
You've been running ads this entire time and didn't realize it. You just called it content.
So her ad money went behind the same videos her buyers had been pointing at, inside an Attract / Nurture / Convert campaign. After a year and about $100,000 spent trying to make ads work, her first $2,300 in ad spend booked calls at $43 apiece.
That campaign was built six months ago, and it's still the same build.
You don't need more. You need less, organized well.
Then it got boring, which is exactly what she'd asked for.
Attract, Nurture and Convert, built once from the handful of her 2,000+ videos that sold.
The budgets. They go up or down when the numbers say so, and the structure under them stays put.
The VSL goes off and the webinar goes on. After the webinar, they swap back.
I've spent years running operations and teams inside other people's businesses, and the ones that last aren't the ones doing the most. They know which few things work, and they keep doing those on purpose long after it stops being exciting.
Boring doesn't get much airtime in the expert world, because boring doesn't sell courses. In your business it would mean a calendar that fills at about the same pace every week, and a number you can look at on Monday and trust for the rest of the month. It would mean the posts you're proudest of working for you every day instead of once, and new posts going back to being something you make because you want to.
What would you do with a month like that?
Question 06 of 07
What did you start this to have?
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Alleah asked me a question.
“Is it really supposed to be this simple? It feels weird just watching my business breathe, and not having to tell my daughter no on vacation.”
Read the last part of that again.
She didn't start her business to become a better marketer. She started it because she was good at something that helped people, and the business that was supposed to give her a life had been asking for more of it every year.
Once the business stopped needing her for every sale, I put a choice in front of her. She could keep it a simple little business that runs while she's on vacation, or she could go big. She chose big. She's going after eight figures a year now, and she took off to a Tony Robbins event to step into that seat.
I told her straight that when she outgrows what I do, I'll hand her to the people who build eight-figure companies. The businesses I build are the ones that run while the owner's on vacation.
Either answer is a good one. What mattered was that she finally got to make the choice, instead of the business making it for her. Most experts never get that choice, because they're too busy being the engine to ask what the engine is for.
So go back to the beginning, before the posting schedule and the sales calls and all the advice. What did you want this to give you? More time with your kids, money that stops feeling fragile, room to do the work you love without performing it on demand, a business that grows without asking you to grow more tired?
Whatever it was, you haven't stopped wanting it. You've been white-knuckling the business toward it for years, and it may be a lot closer than it feels.
Question 07 of 07
What would it take for you to believe it?
I'm not going to ask you to believe any of this on my word. Alleah didn't, and she was right not to.
What convinced her was eight days of her own posts doing what they'd always done once they were back in front of the right people. If we work together, you get the same test, and it comes first.
It starts with the map. We score everything you've posted against what your buyers keep answering, and your repost list lands before anything else happens. You spend about a week putting those posts back in front of your people, the way she did. Then you and I sit down for 90 minutes. You walk in having already made money, and you leave with a year of reposts planned, a list of what to stop making, your ads sorted by stage and a number for what your archive is worth.
If the reposts haven't brought in $3,000 in sales by the time we sit down, you get your $3,000 back.
Post them the way we lay them out and bring your numbers to the 90-minute call, where we look at them together. Either way, the repost list is yours to keep.
If it works for you the way it did for her, those 90 minutes are also where we decide what comes next, whether that's you running it yourself with the map or the two of us building the campaign together.
It won't fit everyone, and I'd rather you hear that from me now. If your content hasn't brought in clients yet, there's nothing in the archive to put back to work. If it sells on hype and pressure, reposting it won't make it sell any other way. It works for experts people already like listening to, whose clients get results.
So you don't have to believe me before we talk. The reposts will tell both of us.
See you on the call.
Before we get on, I'll have looked through your content. We'll talk about what it's already sold and what you've spent trying to make ads work, and I'll tell you straight whether there's enough there to score. If there is, I'll tell you what I'd expect to find in it.
If you'd like me reading your answers before we talk, send them here. Rough is fine. I'd rather read what you'd say out loud than what you'd put on a sales page.
Bring whatever you came up with, including the answers you're not sure about. The questions you couldn't answer tend to be the most useful ones to talk through.
