How I Create a 7-figure Coaching Business

I'm going to share with you my journey on how I have been able to grow a coaching business to seven figures, a little bit of the ups and downs through that journey, and what gave me real momentum when it comes to growth and scaling.

Now it didn't start as a coaching business, even though I was really coaching and didn't realize that I was coaching my journey into this world of online kind of coaching, teaching, and supporting space, I accidentally fell into it.

I had back surgery back in 2015 and I was confined to a bed and went through recovery for about three months.

I fell across this network marketing company and grew a network marketing company from my bed while I was going through surgery and recovery and I literally couldn't walk and get out to do demonstrations.

I had to do them from my laptop and that is when I realized that I love helping people.

I was one of the first five team managers within APAC in Australia. An Australasian Pacific region. I ended up being the number one team builder in APAC and number three in the world within the network marketing company that I was in at the time.

And what I realized after the fact was a network marketing company is really just a personal development company in disguise.

I had all those preconceived ideas of network marketing, pyramid schemes, and all the things that my mom had put into my brain. But what I realized is I was selling. Pretty nails, right? And makeup and, all beauty products, bright, colorful things.

I wondered why and I realized that online I could create content and build a team.

Now, at the beginning, there was no such thing as live streaming. I believe around then Periscope was just starting to live stream back in 2015. And what I was doing is I was starting to record content and post pre-made videos. And I was running little mini-challenges, which I didn't know at the time that's what I was actually doing.

I was running a live mini-challenge to grow my network marketing team. So I was putting Facebook ads out there and telling people about this amazing opportunity that I had. And if they wanted to learn more, come along to a five-day training, which was teaching them about the opportunity, about the product, about the rewards, about the benefits, and really about the fact that it was a personal development company in disguise.

I fell in love with helping people more than I did with the product.

That's why I became an awesome team builder, but I didn't sell heaps of products. I sold enough to stay active and get paid. But the sales of the physical product weren't my goal.

It was growing my team and really helping people. I didn't know it at the time, but as I then realized that the network marketing company wasn't the direction I really wanted to go, I started the Sparkle Class Academy as a bit of a side hustle, as one day I'll have my online school teaching something.

While I was still running my network marketing company, I had a couple of little online programs that I was teaching inside of the Sparkle Class Academy.

What I found was over time that really started to kick off and I started to get real momentum I was being restricted a little bit inside of the network marketing company because they didn't want me running the online side of my own personal online school and also selling the product and, you know, attracting people.

And I get it.

It's because I was one of the top 1 percent of the company and they really wanted me to just focus on selling their product.

So in 2017, I decided to leave and I put an ad out and I said to everybody on my current list, “Hey, I've got an idea. What if I promised to teach you something every month?

Don't know what it'll be. I'll teach you something that I know and I'll record it and we'll create a membership program.”

So on Boxing Day of 2017, I put an ad out to join a membership program where I promise to teach you something every month. Of course, people had sort of gotten to know me over the few years of being in network marketing and we had a few people sign up.

Then what I started to do was put together a little what I called MAPS, Marketing Action Plan. So I was starting to dive into different strategies around marketing and the best way to learn is to teach.

So I realized that if I was to teach a marketing method that I had used and implemented, I could share that with my community and they could then go out and implement it as well.

Now, I was also in a membership program with another coach and every month she put out a marketing strategy as well. And I'm like, “Oh, I'm just going to model success. Why don't I do the same thing?”

So I tried lots of different marketing strategies over probably a year or more because I had to put a new marketing method out there every month.

Then my clients at the time were choosing which map they wanted to implement. And what I found was after writing 20-something maps, the one map that had the best results for my clients, and looking back for me as well, was the map on running.

Now, a challenge to me is really going live for three to five days.

I've done 30-day challenges, 14-day challenges, 7, 5, 3, and 2-day challenges, but I found the 5-day teaching people live with a strategy on the back end of the live content, not only me helped to propel my business but also seeing results from the clients who were actually implementing and it was the best marketing strategy.

It was the most used map inside of that program. So after watching these results happening over and over and over again, light bulbs started going off. And I'm like, out of everything that I've put together, this one thing seems to be getting me the best results.

The fastest path from cold to sold was teaching somebody something live and then asking or giving them an invitation to join the program.

So back in the network marketing days, I was doing the same thing. I was teaching live and then inviting them to the business opportunity. And if they didn't want the business opportunity, I would invite them to try the product. And if they didn't want to try the product, I would ask them, do they know anybody else who would like to earn 500 a month selling pretty nails?

So that was a strategy that I used in network marketing. And at the time I didn't realize what I was doing. I was running live events and live challenges.

We call them boot camps. You can call them whatever you like. At the end of the day, it's teaching somebody something live with a marketing strategy in the backend to then get them to say yes to the invitation.

I’ve created about definitely more than 15 different types of live training and live challenges. And then when I decided to go all in on one live training and I started to do this for 12 months every time I went all in, I just got better and better and life got easier and easier and more predictable because my life revolved around every time I taught this live event.

And what I found was through repetition and immersion in learning everything I could around live events, we started to grow.

Now I've niched my niche over time because when I first started I'm like, I'm just going to teach everybody marketing. The stuff that I figured out.

Now, I've got years of experience in lots of entrepreneurial things over my life, but when I finally decided to stick to one way to attract people in, that's when life got easier and I truly started to scale.

Now, my program has been through many iterations over a period of time, but one thing has stayed true. The fact that I like to teach people something live and then invite them to join our program.

So, once I realized that I started to hone in on what I help people with.

So, rather than teaching all the things to all the people, I've eventually niched down to coaches, consultants, and service-based businesses.

And what I found was when I used the word consultants and I had that big network marketing following, I was starting to attract the wrong people.

I realized that I had moved away from trying to sell physical products to selling an online digital product. Now I did have a challenge teaching people how to sell physical products live and I created a whole course around it.

And all of my clients, literally when they implemented this physical product live selling method that I created myself, I had at least people making at least a thousand dollars an hour live streaming.

There's really a certain point with a physical product that the price point kind of hits. And then you really can't go any higher where having an online program. It's as however much you want to ask for, as long as you can keep a straight face and you believe that the value you provide is in alignment with this, with the price point, right?

So if you truly believe it, as I believe with my soul that the value that we provide in our program far exceeds the price point of the program.

So, I have no problem in asking for this. So, what I really want you to consider is, do you want to help people? Do you love to inspire? Do you love seeing people be successful?

Once they implement whatever it is that you help them with. And if so, I really want you to start to embrace it.

Now, I didn't do live straight away. I was very nervous. So I would pre-record them because I was conscious. I didn't want to be judged and I didn't want to mess up, and I look so awkward in the videos as well. So that's what I did first because going live was so scary and I wanted to make sure that You know, it was a little edited and I didn't mess up.

But what I found was through practice and just continuously going live, that it just got easier to the point now where I feel like I'm just having a cup of coffee with my best friend.

I went live for 365 days straight. Now I'm not telling you to go live for 365 days straight.

Once a week would be good. Once a week, even if it's just for five minutes. Write down three little dot points and talk about it for five or ten minutes. But through that 365 days, what I noticed was my Facebook business page went from 2,000 to 70, 000 followers just from going live. Pretty crazy!

And I always do something like this every year.

Every year I choose one thing to go all in on. Because I went all in on learning how to make my live streams look more professional, I usually choose one piece of software that I want to learn well every year.

Back then, it was just live streaming. And so through that year, I tested lots of things like streaming from Zoom and streaming from BeLive and streaming directly inside of Facebook, and streaming still on Periscope.

So I was playing with lots and lots of live-streaming things. But honestly, all of this fancy stuff that you see, this only started last year in 2022 when I went all in on Ecamm.

So ask yourself if you are somebody who wants to help people and if you do, why are you not putting your message out there in a live?

Because what you will get is consistency through people knowing, Hey, Sally's live at this time, nine o'clock on a Tuesday, Melbourne time every single week, except for launch week when we run our challenge.

This honestly is how we have been able to grow and scale.

When I decided to choose one live event and do it on repeat. and continuously making iterations to it and dialing it in.

So picking one thing and dialing it in.

And in the last two years, we've honed that skill even more because we used to teach all the marketing methods. So many marketing methods. Now we still teach them, but that's not the thing we're known for. I love automation. I love metrics and sexy numbers.

But the thing that we're known for is, going live.

Whether it's in a short little live for a podcast recording, or it's a live over a three-day event or a two-hour webinar, I just love it.

I swear. I was a lonely entrepreneur. And I thought, “hey, why don't I just open a Zoom room and see if any of my network marketing friends want to come in and hang out and work for the day.”

And then I also noticed I was still teaching at the time and that the students who had the best results were the ones that would come up and knock on the staff room door and ask for help. Similar to people in Zoom, when they get stuck, they ask for help. That's when the VOS was created back in 2015, when we just had an open Zoom room, 24/7, I just paid for one Zoom account and let people jump in and out.

So, you have something inside you or you wouldn't keep on reading this right now. You have something in you that you want to share with the world and there's this free platform that you can utilize.

Put your message out there like never before, before live, before social media. You would have to pay for a billboard a radio commercial or so many things to get your message out there. You have a platform to utilize to practice your message, to practice helping people through a live stream.

Hit the button and just start talking. Just talk. It doesn't matter if you mess up. If you say, um, too many times, it doesn't matter. When you stop thinking about yourself you start thinking about the people that you're helping, that you're inspiring, and it no longer is about you.

So many shifts when it comes to your livestream, because, you know, the biggest critic we have is ourselves. Most people will watch your livestream and notice that we won't really notice anything like you will, right? So when you do record yourself or go live, I beg of you to watch yourself back with loving eyes like you would your best friend.

Don't judge yourself, okay? You have something special, something beautiful that you need to share with the world, or you would not be following us here inside of the Sparkle World.

So I want you to commit to me today that you will start to go live once a week, just pick a set day and a set time and hit the button.

Even if it's just holding your phone. And this is what I used to do.  Hold your phone, talk to the dot. And eventually like when I went live for 365 days, it became a habit.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phn9zpAAhiU&t=1265s

Never let anyone dull your sparkle,
xox Sally