Million dollar dreams to 100k in debt...!

Million-dollar dreams to 100k in debt.

I was on a call this morning with my Trifecta buddies, the three other men that we meet weekly, and we talk business, we look at the problems in our own businesses and where to move, get feedback from others in the game.

And I was discussing an interesting post that I came across in the Kajabi Facebook group.

Now, if you don't know, Kajabi is a platform that hosts membership courses, it enables the people in a course to go through that you can drip it, you can have emails go out, it's a very powerful platform, it's been around for probably, I don't know, 1010 12 years.

It was originally I remember when Andy Jenkins launched that thing back back in the day, and then it went through an evolution.

And it was called New Kajabi for a while.

And I have been a founding member of that for some time.

And Kajabi is awesome, like, seriously awesome.

But the question came through, hey, I have just spent all of this time all this money building my course.

Now, what do I do? How do I sell it? I'm not selling, I'm not able to sell this thing.

And this, unfortunately, is a pretty common experience, people get drawn into the idea that you can just be an expert in your topic and build your course.

And it will sell that you will begin to live the life of your dreams, that money will start pouring in, you'll become a leader of your tribe, guide them through the journey that you've been on.

And unfortunately, what happens is that building the course is just one small piece of the puzzle.

And as people go to solve the rest of the puzzle, which is how do you sell the course, they run into an interesting problem.

And that is that it's hard that often it's very piecemeal of getting a piece here and a piece there, we'd better do Facebook ads, but then you find out it's $8 link, and you're like, oh my goodness, we're going to sell a $200 course, with $600 worth of ads.

They haven't thought through the business cases like Well, where's my $3,000 offer on the other side, my $15,000 offer on the other side.

And what they see is the influences and the marketers who have their games together have been in the game typically a long time.

And they don't see the 15 person team behind them, they don't see the 42 people that are involved in that entire business.

All they see is the attractive character front, they're drawn to them.

So yeah, I love this.

I love what they're what they're doing.

And they believe it's it's easy that they can do it too.

But they come to find out that building a course is just one piece, they also need to know how to sell know-how to run ads know how to not only do the course but also fulfill on the course.

I mean, these three pieces in themselves are challenging.

Now, there's a lot of books on them.

There are a lot of courses on there.

But one of the solutions that usually gets presented is Hey, go and get a marketing company.

And so my buddy who went down this path as a secondary game, he's got his primary business.

And He was like, Okay, well, I can see the benefits of bringing my wisdom across and making a course.

And so He did that.

And He ran into that exact problem, which was like, Okay, I got the courseware How do I sell it? And He went to a marketing agency, and they said, Great, we will take your $15,000 and sell your course.

What was a little unnerving? He described the first implementation meeting.

They didn't show.

I was like, oh, that's that is a bad prognostic sign.

And He was like, Yeah, we ended up firing them.

And then He went to a second marketing company 25k.

And what He found was, these guys were better.

But they weren't the only team that was required.

He also needed a funnel team and an AD team and a team to run all of these things.

And suddenly 100 came down to find out that no one was buying that this course was being provided to a market that just didn't work.

There was no one there who either wanted the product or was willing to pay for the product and yet, that million dollar dream of him leading a tribe selling and living the expert lifestyle, it was actually found to be a false hope.

And instead of the million dollars in sales, the million dollars, not even in profit, but just in sales.

He was 100k in debt.

And He said, you know, it was just so hard to find the missing piece, it felt like stumbling around in the dark and getting a piece here and a piece there and a piece here.

And it's tricky.

It's extremely difficult to actually get a view of everything that is required in order to get a business to work.

And the guys that know it, they don't need to discover and share their life, it's obvious to them.

There is a trap that they fall into.

And they just go well, I just want to focus on the Facebook ad part, or I just want to focus on the funnel building part or I just want to focus on how to make YouTube ads, or I just want to focus on whatever part of it is, but you as the potential expert drawn in by the dreams by seeing the few successfully pulling it off.

And you're like, damn, okay, well, I'm going to buy their course.

And that's going to be the missing piece.

But it's not the only missing piece, because you cannot see the entire requirements of all of the systems that you need in place to even get to market in a reasonable amount of time.

And even if you do get to market not have a problem of selling to multiple people, and so nobody buys of not being able to get feedback from people who say, Hey, this is not a good market.

There's no one that's going to pay for this.

It's a blue ocean because there's no fish there.

It's not a blue ocean, because no one else is in it.

It's a blue ocean, because there's no fish there.

And instead of the million dollars, there's 100k debt.

So this is very challenging.

It's challenging, because the current solution is a $15,000, or $25,000 investment into a marketing company to build all of the stuff, but there is no guarantee that they actually know what they're doing either.

And that's definitely a major challenge is like well.

Are you sure you know what you're doing? Or are they suffering from the same problem that you've got, in that they've can see a bit more of the overall picture, but they certainly do not have the whole thing.

So these risks, these risks are real.

And so you got to ask yourself, or hey, what do I do here? Before you start building the course, and putting all of the money and investment into that, you need to know whether it's going to work whether it's going to sell.

And start thinking about all of the pieces that are required to get a expert business or online course business off the ground, your sales, your ads, your product production, your customer experience, your support team, looking after yourself, your video ads, your video production, all of these things must be thought about and ideally plant that you can actually go across and look at all of the pieces that you've got in place before you go to development.

You see the excitement of it all the lure of the money, the lifestyle of quitting your job and being a successful online entrepreneur.

It's very strong.

And it's awfully easy to begin production on something because it feels like you're making progress but you have not stopped and seen everything that's required.

You've got the course but no way to sell it and then you start trying to problem solve.

How do we sell this? But there's been no work into will will this sell? Is this the right product? Can this be sold at a price that actually provides enough money for you, is there enough value for the customer to say, You know what this is a valuable experience for me to be part of, I can see the transformation that is going to happen in my life by joining this course or going to this event.

So your ability to think through all of the aspects of what's required is critical.

Be very cautious about overt enthusiasm and jumping in when you cannot see everything and hoping that on the other side, you're going to be able to sort it out because it's a difficult problem.

And you may will then have to go to the marketing company and say, Hey, I don't know what I'm doing.

He is my 15k.

Here's my 25k.

And they say, Great, we take your money.

And by the way, you're also going to need another 25k to actually implement our work, or we didn't tell you about that, oh, now it's 50.

And so these stories are common, and they leave people giving up on the dreams, the dream dies, and they go back to getting a job.

Perhaps happy that they've had the experience.

Sure.

But at some level, there was a whole bunch of people that didn't get the help that they needed.

Because the expert only saw one chunk, one piece of the puzzle, you got to see all of the puzzle, you got to see the marketing, you got to see the sales, you got to see the ads, and you've got to see the fulfillment.

And when you put all four of those pieces together in a consistent and systematic way, now you got a shot.

Now you can deploy fast now you can deploy cleanly now you can deploy effectively, you show up to a marketing company with a clean set of plan to like great.

They might even ask how did you do it? They're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I would have done the same.

Really? I don't know.

So there is a challenge in all of this.

And that's how to build all of this stuff systematically, quickly, so that you can deploy fast.

I'm excited for this.

This is a big problem.

This is a big problem for budding entrepreneurs.

And this is actually a problem for businesses, many businesses as well, that their ability to get to market quickly, effectively cleanly to actually test marketing and say, yep, that worked or no that didn't, to find their highest profitability, to find their highest return on adspend.

All of this takes planning, getting that planning on point is critical and is best done systematically.

Alright, I'm going to invite you to keep an eye on the channel.

It's funny that systems businesses often end up building marketing solutions.

Why? Because that's where the money is, that's where the pain is.

That's where the suffering is.

You actually got to get the production on point before you can expand into profitability.

So thanks for tuning in today.

I hope you got a lot of value out of it, providing you more info on this as we continue into the journey power of system the power systems create results.

See you next time.