How I went from burnt out and struggling, to six figures per year in six hours per week

How I went from burnt out and struggling, to six figures per year in six hours per week

I still remember sitting in my office and trying to think about just *how* I could make it all work…

When all I could give is 5 school hours on a Friday… and a few moments on lunch breaks…

And honestly… It was the best thing that had happened to me.

When I was working 2-3 days in my business as I started, I was disorganised and never knew what I should be doing from day to day. I had zero focus and it all felt chaotic.

And as a result… Nothing was consistent and nothing was working particularly well.

Dramatically culling my hours forced my hand in the best way I could imagine and forced me to become strategic.

So I went back to the drawing board with my business and created a blank slate.

How could I run a business (that puts money on the table) in such a short amount of time?

It started with simplifying everything.

1. I stopped creating offers and doubled down on one offer the program that was doing the best. I culled tools, and I culled social media platforms. I just focused on the ones that were necessary.

Let’s start with my offers.

At the time, I was running a Group Coaching Program, in addition to 1:1 coaching, releasing smaller products, and also running single sessions. September 2018 was the month that everything fell apart.

In July I’d taken a part-time role as a startup Marketing Manager: a role I was headhunted for. Just a few weeks prior to that I had messaged Ross and told him that I was looking at going back to work full-time, despite having two young children. Senior Marketing Manager roles just weren’t available in a part-time capacity and I was deeply lonely working from home. I wasn’t in any Masterminds, I didn’t have a wide network and I felt like I looked after the kids in our house… worked in our house.. And basically never left the house. I was suffocated. (Everything changed after COVID and homeschooling but that’s a story for another day…)

So in addition to juggling the house, my husband’s business admin and my own business, I was now juggling a part-time job.

And then… Ross had a grade 4 rupture to his spleen. The internal bleeding was about the size of a football or larger, and he collapsed in the emergency room of the hospital and was repeatedly in and out of consciousness. He was admitted to the hospital for a week so all of a sudden I was doing all the things, as well as solo parenting and also trying to visit him daily in the hospital.

Then the next weekend, Olivia became so ill, she was admitted to the hospital (her first two years were a whirlwind of going back and forth to emergency rooms with viral wheeze and bronchiolitis that would scare the pants off me – seeing your child gasping for breath is so incredibly worrying).

The following weekend, Ross had re-ruptured his spleen due to a staph infection at the hospital. The size of the internal bleeding this time was the size of a football, and so he was admitted, quite ill for yet another week

I remember by this stage having a panic attack on the kitchen floor. I was exhausted and burnt out.

And then, Olivia was yet again admitted into the hospital the weekend after that.

I was mid-delivery of a group coaching program and I still to this day remember sending an email from Olivia’s hospital bed begging everyone for permission to reschedule the call at the last minute and then receiving an email notification from Zoom that someone had still joined the call. From my phone I hopped on, Olivia with tubes beside me, letting her know I’d have to reschedule.

So… yeah… there was all of that.

So in January 2019 when I decided to create a blank slate for my business, it was with that experience in mind that I decided I’d no longer run a live group coaching program or 1:1 coaching for fertility again. It had to be an online course.

And I simplified the entire offer suite. It was literally one program: The Fertility Warrior Intensive, on a waitlist structure, with easy 3 – 5 day launches 3 – 4 times per year. Words cannot describe how much easier it is to have a simple business structure.

One program. Everyone knows the transformation. Everyone knows how it goes.

So onto simplifying my socials.

In 2018 I was driven by believing I had to be everywhere and everything was published one article or podcast at a time…. And in that year I was working about 2 – 3 days per week in my business.

I’d been wildly inconsistent everywhere.. I’d go MONTHS without releasing a podcast episode and Instagram looked like publishing once a day for a week and then ghosting the platform for a month. I’d sign up to other platforms like YouTube and publish 5 videos all at once, and then…. nothing.

I now know that it’s nearly impossible to run a business that way.

So I looked back and decided that I’d stick to just what I liked and knew: Instagram and the Podcast.

It completely scared the pants off me but the next thing I did was commit to showing up consistently.

As I mentioned, prior to this, I was ridiculously inconsistent (and it showed in my figures). I’d post and ghost on Instagram and I’d go months without publishing a podcast episode.

This needed to change.

I invested four figures into a program for Instagram and decided to post 1 – 2 times per day.

At first, it looked like one post when I woke up and one post when the kids were watching a bedtime show.

And then I started batching.

For those of you who don’t know, if you struggle with being consistent, it’s because you’re not batching.

Batching means sitting down and creating a batch of content or tasks in one go, rather than doing it one at a time.

For example:

Writing four blog posts at a time.

Recording eight podcasts at a time.

Researching the keywords and titles for 20 podcast episodes at a time.

Sitting down and creating 20 Instagram posts in Canva at one time, and then scheduling and uploading them at one time.

Batching will change your life and that’s not an understatement.

We once batched six months of podcast episodes at a time, and I once had 3 months of Instagram posts scheduled at one time.

The philosophy around batching is that every time we context switch in our business, we lose about 30 – 90 minutes in changing tasks and changing brainpower.

Plus, I firmly believe in working in flow with our cycles, rather than trying to do everything on a weekly basis – there are times of the month when women feel insular and want more rest, whereas there are times of the month when we feel energised and creatively motivated. I lean into that and try to batch by days of the week, and by weeks of the month.

So that was how I tackled Instagram.

And then to the podcast and I turned my blinders on to every other social media platform.

Just because another social media platform was good, didn’t mean I needed to be on it. I just stuck to making these ones flow and work effectively to drive leads into my business.

There was literally no way I was going to be able to get a podcast out every single week without high-level help, so I hired a podcast manager. I’d plan, research and record my episodes and my podcast manager would edit them, upload and place them onto WordPress.

This was the first big and regular bill I had in my business and at the time I didn’t feel like I had the consistent income to make it work, but I closed my eyes and dived in. I’ve paid $400 – $750 per month for this service and for someone who had only recently started their business this regular fee terrified me.

But it also made me commit to doing it well.

215 episodes later and nearly 1 million podcast downloads as well as awards under our belt and it’s safe to say it has been a great investment.

In our Poppin’ Podcast program we teach other wellness business owners how to easily and quickly edit and upload their own episodes for their podcast, but hands down for me, if I was starting again, this would still likely be an investment I’d make in my business.

It’s also worth noting that I used the same strategic process that we teach in Poppin’ Podcast to not just crank out episodes, but crank out episodes that moved people through my funnel and got found.

1. I made my offer hugely valuable.

 I priced my program at a price that was reasonable and sustainable (not just for my audience, but also for me!!) and then made sure that the value of what I was offering was 5-10x that.

It’s not enough to just put a product out into the market and we shouldn’t be including ‘stuff’ just for the sake of including stuff, but I made sure that my product stood out in the market by having insane bonuses (that if I’m honest, nobody else was offering at the time… although now I see lots of people doing it – good for them!).

I paid a fertility yoga teacher to provide a set of yoga classes within our platform and included a number of guest expert interviews within the portal. I also recorded a number of meditations and included them within the bonuses of my offer.

Hot tip: you don’t need to be the expert at everything, nor do you have to have a solution to every problem your customers face. Let’s say you’re a mindset coach – hey! You can affiliate with someone who specialises in nutrition for fertility. And, you can leverage the expertise of others through paid white labelling or guest interviews to support your audience.

2. I used my Launch Easy Framework. 

I’m going to say something there that is fairly controversial: evergreen is often sold as a less exhausting way to run your business, but I’ve tried both and I find that evergreen can actually be more exhausting than live launching.

When you live launch it’s really easy to follow a set process with a set of collateral you’ve built up and can repurpose for your launch. It can be as quick as 30 days executive (with a 5-day doors open period) and then you can spend the next two months (if you launch 4x per year) having downtime, focusing on batching your content and serving your audience and clients.

While evergreen funnels and products that are always open can be largely automated, so can live launches. But the problem with evergreen is that you do need to be continually funnelling people into that sales process (it’s never set it and forget it, or put it up and it will magically sell. ever.) and continually showing social proof and selling constantly.

So, I closed the doors on the program and used my signature waitlist launch formula to allow me to serve and show up between launches, then quickly (and effortlessly) deploy 5-day launches once a quarter.

It didn’t magically make six figures right away, but it created much less stress and allowed me to actually grow and sustain a business, whilst also navigating everything else that was happening in my life.

That single product made more than $150,000 before it was retired… all while I was working only six hours per week (and possibly not even that).

So where do you start?

Here are some questions for you to ask yourself:

✅ Where can I automate?

✅ Just because a social media channel is good… Doesn’t mean you have to be on it… Are there any you can cull?

✅ Is all your time being sucked up in creating new things and having new things rather than sticking to one and making it work?

✅ If you have limited hours, is your time best spent in 1:1 work or could you create oodles of freedom by shifting to an online program? 

I hope this helps and best of luck simplifying while scaling your business.

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