How Bryan Harris Created a $1,000,000 Coaching Business

0:01Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Hustle and Flowchart. Today, we'll be breaking down how Brian Harris created a$1 million coaching business. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Shocker, Brian Harris, and the EO Fire Studios. Brian is the founder and CEO of Growth Tools, where they make it almost impossible for coaches to fail at consistently getting new clients. In today's foundation, we will be talking about why Brian shifted from email growth to high-ticket coaching.

0:40We're also going to have some real talk about getting real clients consistently. We're also going to talk about partners, promoting other people's stuff, obstacles and challenges, when it comes to partnerships that scale, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brian and our sponsors. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business.

1:14Oh, and it's the UK's fast-growing business podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Brian say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with what is up fire nation thanks for a round two john good to be back uh most most friends i have and clients that i coach really truly maybe they wouldn't articulate it this way define success as reaching their monetary goals at the end of the day if business is down they weren't successful if business was up they were successful And I have found from falling in that trap myself that it very much indeed is a trap.

2:00For me, what I found to be helpful as defining success, not just as a bullet point on the wall, but like deep down is, and this might sound cliche, but impact on others. And let me define that. So there's kind of three components of it. First, before you can even define impact, is what was I meant to do? Who was I meant to do it with? And then if I'm on the right bus and I'm on the right people with a bus, then are we legitimately helping people? Meaning is their life changing in the way that they hired us to help them change it? Wherever that leads, I don't know. But that's success. That's the adventure.

2:37And trying to control things more overtly than that is always a trap. So that's my definition of success is, am I doing what I was meant to do? Am I doing it with the people I'm supposed to be doing it with? And are we legitimately helping people? If those three questions are answered, then success is there. Fire Nation, value bombs have already been dropped. And we have just gotten going. Talking about a million dollar coaching business. Because Brian, when I interviewed you back in 2015, your focus was on teaching email list growth, which is still very important to this day. But I mean, back then, that was your focus.

3:13Now you've shifted to showing people how to scale their high ticket coaching. Why the change? Ultimately, the most important thing isn't your email list. It matters a lot. In fact, it's interesting, parenting and dog training, all these industries that you'll come across as you just go through life of things you want to learn. There's a lot of people that disagree with each other. And early on, I found one of the overlap points, one of the things people actually agreed on was grow your list, serve your list, sell to your list. And that is still very much true, but that's just not the end point.

3:44Like the thing that I've become obsessed with over the last nine years, John is results. And after selling courses and memberships and books and software, I've found like the thing that people bought those products to accomplish, they just weren't accomplishing our success rates after selling thousands and thousands and thousands of courses was below 1%. And that wasn't necessarily bad if you compared it to industry standards, but it was terrible objectively. People paid us a lot of money and then didn't get the thing they wanted to get. And after experimenting with a lot of different product types, I just found coaching was by far the most effective thing.

4:21Like we have right around half of the people that hire us hit their first major success mark, which is revenue generated within 90 days. And over 90 % of people hit that within 180 days. So in short, like the reason I stumbled into coaching was I just wanted the thing that actually worked. So we help people start coaching and grow coaching businesses because that produces actual transformation and impact. And we run a coaching business because that has just been the most effective product type that I found. There's a second part of that as well, which is over the last nine years, actually, I'm at the 11 year mark.

4:56So we were two years in the first time we interviewed now, 11 years in. And first of all, I'm just shocked that we're still around. But second major thing that happened in that time period was just, I don't remember where it came from now, probably a conglomeration of multiple books or people, but the most root level entrepreneur question I've ever come across finally surfaced. And that question, once we found it, we spent a couple of years really, truly answering it and then rebuilding the company around it. And that question is, and I would challenge anybody listening to ask this question of yourself and sit with it for a while.

5:27And it is, what's a problem so interesting that you would gladly bet the next 20 years of your life on solving it. And then go do that. Like go get the right people, go align your purpose with that and go make impact in that direction. And for us, we can answer that question a couple of different ways for us, but acutely, the problem we're solving is making it nearly impossible for businesses to fail at getting customers. Because we found in all different business types, from coffee shops, local businesses, to online course creators and memberships and software people, the founders and the business winds up spending the vast majority of their time trying to generate revenue to stay alive versus actually solving the problem that they were built to do.

6:08So I hire a great marriage counselor. That marriage counselor, if they struggle with getting customers, they'll spend almost all their time doing marketing stuff versus becoming an amazing marriage counselor and helping more people. So I want to free up and we want to free up. We're making it our mission to free up people's time and brain space to just go be better at the thing they're at versus having to become marketing experts in order to stay alive. So by combining coaching with that problem, we have estimated our biggest impact can be had from that. And it's been fun. It's been a big adventure and it's hard and it's not easy, but it's been so fulfilling to do.

6:38Take just one second and restate that question that you had about the 20 years. So what's a problem so interesting that you would gladly bet the next 20 years of your life on solving it? See, Fire Nation, that is such a more powerful question than just what is your passion? follow your passion. I mean, I hear that the latter all the time, everywhere I go. I'm just like, that's, it's just so surface level because there's so many flaws in that philosophy where Brian's question really gets to the juxtaposition of what could be a meaningful, meaningful decade plus of your life. Now, a lot of people are scared of ads.

7:17They're scared of SEO. They're scared of social media and different components of it. So let's have some real talk. How realistic would it be to generate consistent coaching clients without those things, without ads, without SEO, without social media? Very. 90 % of our clients do within six months. So it's super doable. A couple of keys are one, pick one marketing channel, one product. So one simple marketing channel. I have found partnerships or doing list swaps is one of the simple, it's just the hardest to screw up way that I found after a decade of trying to, like everything I've heard of before.

7:52The hardest thing or the simplest thing with the fewest moving parts is barring other people's audiences, partnerships. Now, a key to that is one simple offer. Don't keep stacking course after course after course after course or coaching program after coaching program after coaching program. One simple marketing channel, one high ticket offer. That's all you need. And you can go to multiple million dollars a year with a very simple business doing that. I learned this first from the way Elon has built most all of his companies. He has something called the Hershey kiss business model and they started not day one not with their model s that you see driving around everywhere that cost thirty thousand dollars they started at the very top at the very high end it's like the opposite of the Ascension model start with the highest ticket product you can sell so they started with the Roadster that was 200 grand and then after they capture the market and generate a profit in this side of the business it's a lot easier to generate profit with the tuner that was another car versus a thirty thousand dollar car then they introduced the model X the model s which are hundred thousand other cars still elite level you know high-end luxury car, but slightly less profitable, but a bigger market.

8:53And then after years and years and years, they work down to the entry level car, the Model S that you see everywhere that costs 35 grand. So I have found the same thing to be true in online business. And one of the biggest mistakes I made, and then I see others making, is starting low ticket and ascending up to high ticket. That is so hard, so difficult, and a thousand things can go wrong in that. But starting with a very high ticket, start with a high impact, high price, high profit product like coaching, selling a$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 coaching package is substantially easier than selling$1 ,000$5 ,000 things.

9:25That takes legit elite level marketing talent to do that month after month. It does not take elite level marketing talent and sales talent in order to sell one coaching package at 10K a month. Almost anyone can do that with a few basic things. Fire Nation, when I hear these thoughts and these processes, I just think of this quote by Seth Godin. And it's all about like trying to be the lowest price or undercutting your competition by price. It's the problem with the race to the bottom is that you just might win. And that's a race you don't want to win, Fire Nation. Let Walmart have that. Let Amazon have that.

10:01That's not the business that you are running. Now, you talked about list swaps and a couple of other things. What if we wanted to partner with other businesses? What is the easiest way to do that? Yeah, easiest way is something on a list swap. The simplest version of that. again, start with the hardest thing to screw up, which is my number one thing. Like what can we just do year after year after year after year? And we don't have to have elite level talent to actually do it, uh, is to swap a resource with another list. So imagine John, uh, you have the 10 step guide to start a podcast and I have the 10 step guide in order to start a hot ticket coaching business and grow a million dollar coaching business.

10:35And I email out my list, uh, that has a couple thousand people on it about yours. And you'll have several hundred people opt in as several hundred people buy from you. Same thing on your side. You're going to email out my million dollar coaching blueprint thing. Some of your audience is going to be interested. Some people opt in, some people buy. The cool thing of doing that is you have a ton of trust with your audience because they followed you for years. I have a ton of trust with my audience because they followed me for years. Whenever you email out a resource of mine, like a simple video or a cheat sheet or a checklist, you can go to like one resource that we use.

11:03It's called attract.io. A-T-T-R-A-C-T dot I-O. And it's a simple resource builder. You can put a resource you can swap with another audience in 30 minutes and it looks good and it converts and has all the stuff in it simple it's free go check it out go make a resource and give it to another list promote their resource to your list and they'll promote yours to your list and you get clients as a result of it like that's the simplest thing to do our yes rate so we measure this we do we partner we set up over a thousand partners a month like we're like a dating service because this is what works so we've like super specialized when people come and hire us one of the first things we do is match them with other people.

11:41And we have found the yes rate. The people you find that you reach out to that say yes is over 50%. So it is simply a matter of having a very simple resource and asking people to promote it for you. And the yes rate is over 50 % and the success rate is very high as well. So the simplest thing to do, find somebody with an audience and give them a resource, promote it to each one of your audiences and both of your lists, your audience grows and your sales good too. Fire Nation, we have just gotten started on this topic. So don't go anywhere and we'll be right back after we thank our sponsors. Welcome to the world of entrepreneurship.

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15:15Brian, we're back and we're talking a lot about list swaps and finding the right people to exchange value with. But we've heard in the past that promoting someone else's stuff to our own email list will actually dilute our own offer. Is this not true? No. Now, if you did sales every day to your audience, that would create problems. Unless, and there's 10 examples of that not being the case, you go to a company like AppSumo, know, who literally that's all they do. And they have a very engaged audience that buys from them all the time. But we have a different spin on that. We do not promote, nor do we ask other people to promote direct offers every day.

15:55Instead, we ask them and have found to be effective to promote really good resources that you find on the internet to other people. So for example, John, if every day to your audience, you simply made offer after offer after offer, go buy this thing, go buy this thing, go buy this thing, go buy this thing, like your audience would burn out and you would lose trust. But imagine like if every day you found another really good resource or once a week, you found an amazing resource. Like let's say I had a$3 ,000 course on how to close sales calls and we literally charged$3 ,000 for it. And we just gave it to your audience for free.

16:26And you said, Hey guys, Brian has this course on how to get on. If you hate sales calls, never done it before, but you want to be good at them. Brian has a$3 ,000 course. He's given you for free. You get like 48 hours. Make sure you go redeem it. Here's the coupon code. You get it for free. That would be something you'd be excited to promote to your list as long as it made sense to your list because it's a great deal. And your list would love it because it's an amazing deal. So that's the concept. Find good resources and swap them with other people. Don't promote crap. Promote good stuff. But I want to dive deeper into the obstacles and challenges because when you're doing partnerships at scale, there's going to be these kind of struggles.

17:00So what are the biggest challenges that your clients are struggling with in doing these types of partnerships, specifically when they're doing them at scale? So let's define scale as you're generating at least$50 ,000 a month. Anything before that, ignore what I'm about to say. But you can get to$50 ,000 months within nine months or so if you do the basics of what I've talked about prior to this. But once you hit 50K months, the number one mistake I see, I call that scale. We literally call it the scale stage when we're coaching people. You hit 50K three months in a row. Now you need to do different stuff.

17:28And the different thing is if you are the owner especially or if you're the director of marketing running this, stop doing it yourself and hire a channel owner. I do not want you to be the director of partnerships for the rest of your life because you will start sucking at it. Instead, hire an amazing talent to come in and actually do that for you and grow from 50K months to$200 ,000 a month. So the number one mistake I see once people actually get to scale, meaning they've had some escape velocity, is continuing to do it themselves versus hiring someone in to come in as a channel owner and 4X that channel.

17:58And that can happen within a year. Here's the deal. And I know you're really good at this and you're also really focused about this as well. and that's tracking what is working and tracking what is not working. And partnerships, you know, they're just notoriously hard to track. So how do we optimize this? How do we optimize hard to track marketing channels like partnerships? So two things. One, we have a tracker called a three by five sheet. Three actions done five days a week. And all that does is looks at the four most important things in doing partnerships. Are you getting eyeballs? Are you turning those eyeballs into leads?

18:30Are you turning the leads into bookings? And are the bookings turning into actual closed customers. So we track those four things. We use a sheet for that. In fact, if you go to growthtools.com slash JLD, I'll just give you a copy of the sheet with a little loom over video kind of showing you the workings of it. And you can just see exactly how we do this. We do this every day and it makes sure that we know what's working, what's not, so we can fix the stuff that's actually broken. So that sheet actually shows you in red, is it eyeballs you're suffering from? Is it leads you're suffering from?

18:54Is it actually getting people to your sales page or closing them? Which one of those is the actual issue? And which partnership was the issue? Whatever the red is, you go fix it. It makes it really simple to do that. What I found, John, is, man, this applies to literally any kind of marketing channel, whether it's ads or SEO or YouTube or podcast or whatever, is almost everyone just chase ghosts. They don't problem solve, they solution guess. They imagine, maybe they have a good instinct, maybe they have an intuition of what they think the problem is. Like, hey, we're not getting sales and we're running these ads.

19:25We need new creative. Go make new creative. But if you dig into the numbers, it's rarely that. it's probably like the sales page isn't converting, but they have actually no idea because the tracking is a mess and they either go to one or two extremes. Either they track everything, which is absolutely paralyzing and nobody can make heads or tails of it, or they actually track nothing. They look at the bank account. That's their tracker. Bank account goes up. That's good. Bank account goes down. That's bad. If it does it for a couple months in a row, we'll kill whatever the thing is. And both of those lead you to the same spot, which is confusion and overwhelmed and losing money.

19:55So we identify in any funnel, specifically partnerships, but it applies anywhere. What are the five numbers that matter? let's track those every day. Whatever the first one is that's off spec, let's know what it is and let's go fix that. And if you do that within three to six months, any channel will be working and growing really well. Within nine months, you can have that channel to scale. So that's the key. What are the five numbers that really matter? Track them every day, find the first red and go fix it. When you do that, your level of marketing skill and sales talent doesn't even have to be all that high because anybody can go look and see, oh, dang, we're getting lots of people booking calls, but they're not closing calls.

20:35Well, gee, I wonder what the problem is. Let's go talk to the sales team and ask them what's up. In a 30-minute conversation later, you fix the problem. So it shows you what the problem is versus you having to guess what it is. That's been the key for us at managing these on scale with any channel. Fire Nation, Peter Drucker's quote, which I love, what gets measured gets improved. So when you figure out the five that need to get improved, start measuring them because that's where your focus will be. Now, Brian, you've dropped a lot of value bombs. Give us one thing of everything we talked about today that you really want to make sure our listeners get, and then give us a call to action.

21:10I know you had that great URL. Anything else you want to give Fire Nation as a call to action? And then we'll say goodbye. My encouragement to you, here's a challenge to all of you. If you want to increase your revenue by 20 % tomorrow, this isn't a sales gimmick or a slim headline. If you want to increase your revenue by 20 % tomorrow, increase your price. In 11 years of coaching, names that everybody knows and names no one knows, everybody in between, there's not been a single company ever of the thousands of people I've directly one-on-one worked with that couldn't raise their price immediately.

21:43John looked up your revenue report a while ago, raise your sponsorship price by 20%. Brian talking to myself, charging X dollars for coaching, raise it by 20%. If you want to increase your revenue, the simplest lever, just go to your sales page, go to your sales call, wherever you're converting people from and multiply the price times 0.2 and add it back and do that next. You will increase your revenue. I've yet to see a single case where that isn't true. So I challenge all of you to try that on your next sales call, your next sales page, increase the price by 20 % and come tell me how it worked for you.

22:12As far as call to action, I want to give everybody here, I don't want to talk about what to do. I want to make it easy for you to do those things. So I would love as a next step, anybody that's interested in the things I talked about, high ticket offers, coaching, how to do list swaps, go to growthtools.com slash JLD. I'm going to put a couple of things there for you. I'm going to show you our three by five tracker. This is the number one takeaway after decade in business. I'm going to give you our resource builder, attract.io. And I'm going to give anybody that comes from this podcast, I'm going to match you with five different people to do list swaps with.

22:43We'll find them for you and match you with them. And I'll give you some instructions on how that'll work inside of that page when you go there. So if you want to do a list swap, come here. We'll help you do it. If you want to track it, show you how to do it. If you need a resource, go to attract.io, go to that landing page and I'll give that for you. So just go do it. Go take action. After a decade, like the number one thing that differentiates people that get results that don't are people that do things immediately versus people that think about it a long time. So I want to encourage you, incentivize you, challenge you to go do something right now.