Transcription
People love to overcomplicate business. It's like the minute someone sees a little bit of success, they all of a sudden develop shiny object syndrome and start chasing new funnels, new apps, new AI tools, and all of a sudden you end up with a hundred tabs open on your computer, ten different content planners, an inbox full of complaints, and all while your Stripe account is drier than Gandhi's flip-flop.
You want to know how we coached over 18,000 clients? It comes down to three things. Three. That's it. You do these right and you win.
You see, most people aren't losing because their offer sucks. They're losing because no one knows who they are. If you take anything from this video at all, and I'm pretty sure you will, then let it be this: Best known beats best. You can be the best coach in the world, but if your ICA doesn't see you, you're basically pissing in the wind because if they don't see you, they don't follow you. They don't trust you, and sure as hell, they don't pay you. You don't need more certifications. You don't need better Canva templates. You need more eyeballs. You need better leverage, and you need more momentum. Let me show you how we did it and how you can do the same. Whether you've got ten followers or 10,000, the same principles apply.
First up, we talk about traffic and attention. You need attention. That's the current of this entire game. Not likes, not views, buying attention, buying conversations. And you can't buy conversations if no one knows you exist. Your job every single day is to refill the well. You're not just creating content; you're building a media machine around you, one that drips value, builds trust, and positions you as the guy or the girl. And think about spiderweb marketing. Every DM, every email, it's a thread. And when the timing is right, that prospect gets caught right in the middle. So the most important thing you want when you're actually coming to actually getting traffic and attention is you need momentum. And the real key to this is actually getting proof of concept. So if you're in the early stages of your business or you're testing something, the first thing we actually want to do is just get someone to message you, someone to comment, get some form of engagement. And the easiest way to get this is with inbound DMs. We talk about this in depth on the video in terms of how I've posted over 7,000 Instagram posts. But this is the first thing I look for in everything on the front end of the business: proof of concept. Can this system, can this type of content, this type of ad, this type of post, this type of video get someone to actually message, engage me? Because what we actually need more than anything is engagers. We need engaged viewers who actually give a damn about what you're speaking about, which is why it's incredibly important to be very specific in terms of the language and messaging you're using.
Now, one of the things I see all the time and I get incredibly frustrated with these people is fitness influencers who have millions of likes, millions of followers, but they are as broke as a joke. And this is the difference between posting versus positioning. And I ironically see some people who are business coaches who are more like dancing clowns. And the reality is this is going to weaken your brand. What you want to do is be one thing, and that's credible. And you basically want to do like—uh, this is an advert in the UK for a paint thing for a fence. It's called Ronseal. Does what it says on the tin. If you want to be a premium coach, you need to position yourself as a premium brand. Posting jokey content and you dancing around like an idiot isn't going to help you do that. Now, there is some element in terms of yes, we need to get traffic, which is obviously the whole name of the game, but it's the right type of traffic from the right type of people. So, you want to position yourself as the top of the game, as the authority in your niche. And the way you do that is by doing two things. One, you show that you've done the exact thing that your clients want to do. Number two is that you show you've helped the exact same people like yourself overcome that challenge. So if you want to help, say, for example, high-end executives get in great shape, if you were previously a high-end executive and you got yourself in great shape, tick box number one, you've done it. Tick box number two would be: Has someone helped someone else do the same thing? Yes, you are then the highest level of authority in the exact thing you do. And that's where you can really position yourself as a premium brand.
Some other ways to also do this is actually having credibility from big companies, big articles. So I've personally been featured in things like Forbes, Men's Health, Apple News, and all of these layer in credibility to myself and my brand that shows that I don't just work from my mom's basement and I actually have a successful business and I know what I'm talking about. And if you don't know how to get this type of press, like, for example, we had one of our clients, Adrien McDonald, go on live Irish TV yesterday, which is wild. We have an exact system we use with our clients to get them this type of PR, which makes you the credibility in your industry. And again, best known beats best.
So, if you're in a position right now in your business and you're struggling to sign up new clients and you've got an existing client base and you think you can't get any more clients, this is a big issue you have. Now, this is what we like to call refilling the well. Now, you're the crew drawing. Essentially, what you are doing is you have been draining the well. You have been hemorrhaging your followers. You have been raping and pillaging your audience. Now you have emptied said well—it's dry. Drier than Gandhi's flip-flop. Now what you need to do is you need to replenish the well with new followers, new audience, and warm traffic. Now how we do that is by creating reels, podcasts, story posts, long-form content, PR. You need to get people into your ecosystem. And this is the key thing we teach in spiderweb marketing: how you get these people in. And you systematize this because essentially this is like a revolving door where we want to replenish a well, empty the well, replenish the well, empty the well. But you should never get to the point where the well is running dry and you do not have a constant lead flow coming through. And this is why you will be constantly in a cycle of stress and anxiety, wondering when the next sales call is going to come in, praying and hoping for the next DM because you do not have this locked down. If you have this locked in place, like one of my clients, Dane, I spoke to yesterday in the US who I filmed a killer podcast with, he took his audience from 12,000 to 45,000 in like eight weeks because we helped him in terms of the exact process in terms of how to refill your well. Because if you're not doing this, you are going to run out of people to sell to, and you're just going to saturate your audience.
Now, the reality is you could be watching this, you could be the greatest coach in the world, you could have every credential under the sun, you could work with the US Olympic team, but if no one knows who you are, you have a big fundamental problem. And this is why you have to remember that best known is always going to win over the best. So you have to become best known in your industry and the first name associated with it. So you want your name to be synonymous with XYZ. I want Charlie Johnson to be synonymous with scaling online businesses. You want your name almost to be the solution. But let me be clear: Visibility without clarity is useless. It's the same reason why I know so many fitness coaches with hundreds of thousands of followers yet they're broke as a joke. Let's talk about how you can actually convert them.
Step two, sales and service. Sales isn't manipulation; sales is service. You're not convincing someone to buy; you're helping them decide. And here's the part most people miss: You can't sell high-ticket if you haven't paid high-ticket. You'll never be able to charge $3,000 for a program if the biggest investment you've ever made is $19.99 in an ebook on how to scale your business. Why? Because sales is energy. And if you don't believe in the price, they'll feel it. People aren't stupid. If you haven't been sold on solving your own problems, they'll sense that. And the reason you won't be able to sell them on solving theirs is that exact reason. Same thing with DMs. You want to save some time and hire a setter, right? Wrong. If you've never sold in the DMs yourself, what exactly are you going to teach them? This is why sales teams collapse, and I've seen it hundreds of times over. You're trying to outsource a skill you've never acquired, which is literally the dumbest thing you can do.
So, if you want to improve your sales, I'm going to give you the quickest way you can improve this. So, if you look at closing rate—which, if you are not tracking this, you will remain poor—this is something you have to track in the business. If you want to know what the definition of closing rate and the quickest way to improve this is: Closing rate is conviction. How much you believe in your product multiplied by skill. Now, for me to make you better at sales and increase your skill could take a while. But I can increase your conviction a thousand percent by getting shitloads of testimonials thrown in front of you every single day, letting you physically talk to your clients, having your clients talk to your sales team; that will help you increase your conviction, which will increase your closing rate faster than anything else. So, if there's one thing you need to do in your business after this video, it's to implement that straight away.
Now, I remember the first time I invested in a coach. I remember distinctly sitting on my kitchen table in the UK, overlooking the fields of Surrey, and I remember thinking, "Fuck, that's a lot of money." And that, for me, was when a big paradigm shift happened because I realized the difference between: You're either going to pay one of two ways. You're either going to pay in time or you're going to pay in money. Now, one they print, one you don't get back. And the way you utilize these two resources will define exactly where you go in life. And what that allowed me to understand very quickly is that the fastest way for me to actually get anything I want is to find the person who's done it, pay them, and then get the end result. And the reason you're probably not in the position you want to be right now is because you're guessing. And this is the main thing that's slowing you down. You're getting frustrated. You're not seeing results because you don't actually have a clue of what you're doing. And the definition of anxiety and overwhelm in your business is when you have so many options, you don't know what you want to do. And if you want clarity and conviction so you can just go and execute, you just need to be told to do this one thing, fix your business, and it will grow. And essentially, that's what we do in 7 Scaling Systems. That's what we've done with so many of our clients. A great example of that would be Dave Kennedy, who we took from $15,000 to $150,000 a month helping farmers in Ireland get in shape. Very small niche. And you think there's not enough people who are busy professionals for you to sell to; the reality is you are putting limiting beliefs on your mindset. And the quickest way actually to change your mindset is investing in yourself because yes, you're investing in a coach to help you, but what you're actually doing is you're putting a plus one on the scoreboard that you believe in yourself.
Now, the reason most people are afraid to invest in themselves is they have fear of loss. Now, what you want to reframe is the way you think. Instead of thinking, "What if it goes wrong? What happens if this falls apart? What if this is all a scam? What if this is all…?" Could happen. Or: What happens if it works? You then have the life of your dreams. And the reality is if it doesn't work, okay, maybe you've lost some money, but you've taken one thing off the table. And if I talk to you about my decision to leave my job as a real estate agent in the UK and leave my 9-to-5, essentially I looked at this a very simple way: If it doesn't work and I'm on this massive online fitness business and going to try and conquer the world, which was my goal, what would happen? I would go straight back to where I was in the first place. So the reality is there's only one decision to make: This is to do the thing. And it'll be the exact same thing for you right now. But the quickest way to actually have more success is to have someone hold you accountable and guide you through this whole process. And the reality is this is why business is quite warped: is that at the beginning, this is when you actually need help the most. Because if you think about it from this perspective, you have the lowest amount of skills, you have the worst mindset, and you have the least resources. And this is actually when it's hardest because you have no momentum. The bigger your business gets, the easier it is. And this is why it's actually more important at the beginning that you have someone to help you get that escape velocity to get going because there are so many things you do not know right now that you are paying an ignorance tax on.
Now, the most stupid thing I did with my fitness business when I first started it is we launched an eight-week program, which is basically the flagship of how I started my business. So this was £98. Now, the reality with this is we were selling a lot of people into this program, and it was an absolute anarchy in terms of ball ache to manage. We were doing everything manually. We had maybe five, six hundred people up to a thousand people every eight weeks joining this challenge. Cool. So you're making like £10,000 every time, every eight weeks. Sounds good, right? Not so much. Now, let me explain why. Because what happened, we had one client who came in and he wanted to be coached by me one-on-one, a guy from the US. His name was Jared. He lives in Florida. And he paid me £9,000 for one year of coaching. And the reality is he actually worked with me for three years. So I suddenly realized one client could be worth a thousand, and that was then no longer worth me doing this cheap eight-week program because what I was doing was massively underselling myself and actually getting the worst type of clientele because the people who pay more pay attention, and you naturally get a higher level of individual who's more competent, who will get a better result. And this is why one of the biggest lies people will tell you is to do low-ticket coaching, in particular with AI right now. If someone wants a coaching program and nutrition program for all, they can literally go to ChatGPT and ask for it. The exact same reason why doing group coaching programs is also… You want to focus on one-on-one because that's the one thing people want: accountability and actually working with a real human being.
So I remember I was selling a fitness program to a client called Nick from the US, and I remember this exact thing happened. He said, "You're expensive," and this is exactly how I handled it. Firstly, I said, "Compared to what?" And apparently, he was just using MyFitnessPal and some ropey PT in the gym. And the big thing he had of what he wanted, he wanted to be alive in ten years to see his daughter walk down the aisle. And I said to him, "What is that worth to you? Is that worth $3,000 for you to be able to still be alive in ten years?" Because he was about 100 pounds overweight. The likelihood of being alive in ten years' time was pretty ropey at that point. I had showed him all of these people that we worked with, all the results we had, and how simple this is. And the way I framed it, Tim, is like this: Would you, Nick, like to go and get brain surgery from someone fresh out of college, or would you rather go to the brain surgeon who's done it 10,000 times, even if it's a little bit more? I'm the brain surgeon who's done it 10,000 times, which is why it's $3,000, and we guarantee you will get you the result so you get exactly what you want. And that's where you need to reframe everything your prospect says, and you can actually use it against them. Because what you want to think about is you want to buy nice and buy once. You don't buy the cheap thing and have to continuously buy program after program after program and never actually solve the problem.
So now you've got eyes on you, and you're now a sales ninja. Let's talk about how to scale, and I mean scale properly without burning the whole thing to the ground, which I've seen happen countless times.
The third and final step: scale and systems. We scaled our coaching business to 400-plus high-ticket clients at one time. We've served over 18,000 customers. I'm telling you now, a lot breaks when you scale. You'll hit bottlenecks at $10,000 a month, $30,000 a month, $50,000 to $60,000 a month, and between $100,000 to $200,000. And I see the same patterns on repeat. At $10,000, you're overworking. You're doing everything. At $30,000 a month, your service is starting to drop. And at $60,000 a month, your team's like a leaky bucket because you can't handle the volume of sales calls or leads. Then when you get to $100,000, your leadership will be tested like never before. And you won't know your data to scale. You know how long it took me to build my first seven-figure business? Four years. Know how long it took me to build the second one? Four months because once you live through the mistakes, scaling becomes a numbers game. Referrals, systems, leverage, speed, TTV—time to value—becomes everything. How fast can you get a customer result? That's the real currency. You get one client, get them results fast, get them to bring in two more. You just triggered the referral flywheel, and your business can grow forever for free.
So, one of the biggest mistakes I made in hiring is I lost $80,000 on one hire. Now, this was in the start of January 2022. We had just hit maybe $300,000 a month or something in our fitness business the month or two beforehand, and I was on the warpath to try and scale to the proverbial moon, and I thought the solution was just to try and find the most expensive people I could hire for every position because that must be good. Now, the reality is there's a difference between what you pay someone and also their skill set because same thing in terms of fitness coaches. There's people who charge a lot who are terrible coaches. There's fitness coaches who don't charge a lot who are actually pretty good. Now, what actually happened is I got oversold on the interview by this guy, and I made a massive mistake. He was pretty jacked. He used to be working on a nuclear submarine in the US Navy. I was like, "This guy's really smart." And he was, to be fair. And then what I did is I told the rest of my team how great this guy was. So when he had an interview with them, they all had a cognitive bias because I'd said how good he is. Now, what happened is we then bought him in, and I think we were paying him maybe like $12,000 a month to do all of our tech essentially at the beginning. Now, what actually transpired after month one? It was like, "This is way too much for me." We were setting up a CRM system, loads of funnels, tracking stuff. I actually need the rest of my team. So then that went up to like $18,000 to $20,000 a month. Now this is when it started to get… And what we actually ended up doing is we did for three to four months, achieved absolutely nothing, probably wasted another $10,000 on random softwares like a CRM system called Zoho. And we got rid of him. Now, what we do is we replace him with a VA who we pay $5 an hour. Now, that is a big difference between $20,000 a month and a VA at $5 an hour to do very basic things. And this is where bad hires can really set you back as an initial point because when you get to a business that's scaling, you have to have the right people in the right seats. And one of the big mistakes I made was just hiring as quickly as possible to try and solve the problem because I associated speed of implementation on certain things must be the same across the board. That is not the case when it comes to your team.
Now, what this then also leads into is churn. If you hire bad people, your churn rate will go up. If you have high churn, your business is going to be a pure sales and marketing beast, which is going to be difficult to manage. What you actually want to focus on is this, and it's called revenue retention. Now, essentially that is: How much of your client base do you have right now will still be paying you next year? When you have a high percentage of revenue retention, you then have a very stable business model. And this is something you really want to have nailed down, which is why you have to make sure the product of what you sell is really, really good. In particular in fitness, if you get people great results, what happens? You tend to get a lot of referrals, and also what happens is you get more front-end clients because you've got more actual results to showcase, and this is how simple it is. So, one of the things you want to focus on doing is reducing time to value and getting people quick results. So, a great example of this would be one of our clients, Nathan Johnson, who's worked with us for maybe two years or so now. When he first came in to work with us, he was doing maybe $30,000 a month. His business was not making pretty much any profit at that point. It was really badly set up. It had massively high overheads and people getting paid way, way too much. And this is where, for you to scale your business effectively, you have to have the right people in the right seats with also the right performance bonuses for them to get paid. Fast forward probably six months later, Nathan was doing $100,000 a month and has been doing consistently since. And this is the reality in terms of what we did: get him very quick results. But what happened off the back of Nathan doing really well is we probably had—I would guess—eight to ten people come to us as seven-figure scaling systems to help scale the business. And that's essentially how in our business we grow very quickly: is because we use one client to acquire multiple clients, and we create the referral flywheel effect, which is essentially when you turn your business into a money printer.
Now, in your business, if you have anxiety, overwhelm, frustration, I feel you. And this is exactly what happened with my first seven-figure business, our fitness business, CJ Coaching. I remember we first got that to seven figures a year. It was literally like pushing a rock uphill. And it literally took my entire soul. The reason for that is because I didn't know what I didn't know. I was trying to do everything. I was guessing. I wasn't tracking numbers. And I was literally like all guns blazing trying to run through fifty million different walls at the same time. Now, the reality is what happens with that is you get anxiety, overwhelm, and you also have a very inefficient business. And trust me, it was messy. If I knew what I knew now, I reckon I could have probably done that four times faster and probably made twice as much profit very, very simply. And that's when the reality is when I came to my second business where we started helping coaches scale their business. We got to seven figures in four months because I knew exactly what button to press at what time and exactly how to do it, who to hire, who to put in what seat, how to track all the data, and what the actual problem was. And this is the reality that when you're scaling your business and you get…
To certain levels, you don't know what you don't know. And I spoke to an Italian coach yesterday, and they're doing really well. They're doing 100k a month, but they've only got like 20% profit margins, which is terrible. And some of their fundamentals, in terms of their pricing, in terms of their structure, is way, way off.
However, on paid advertising, I reckon you could probably get them to 500 to 600k a month, and this will be one of the best testimonials we'll have, clients coming into our business because I can see the numbers of really basic problems they can fix, and they will absolutely explode the next 6 months. And the reason I can see that is because I've worked with hundreds of fitness businesses at this point and have pattern recognition of all of these clients we've worked with, plus actually having done the thing myself multiple times.
And this is where there's a huge difference between the most important thing that most people don't realize in business, which is this, and this is the mistake that people get. And anyone who didn't particularly like school will probably resonate with this. There's a huge difference between theory versus practice. Now, if I think about when I studied business at my A levels, the guy who was teaching me business sold jam jars or some at the weekend. It's like you're not exactly Elon Musk. So, like you might understand the theory, but you haven't done the practice.
Now, the reality is the way you actually really learn is practice because you have skin in the game and you've been kicked in the dick enough times to understand what works and what doesn't work. Which is why we teach from a practice standpoint. This is the actual thing that works, not theoretical. And the reason you might be stuck in your business right now is because you're also doing what most people are doing right now. You are trying to do outdated methods from 2020. Well, we're actually in 2025. And the reason your business is still stagnant or stuck or going backwards is because you are using the stuff that worked 5 years ago when you didn't have AI, when you didn't have Reels, you didn't have all these tools at your disposal.
And this is actually where, if you are going to use 2025 marketing, you have the ability to scale your business faster than ever with actually a smaller and leaner team than ever before. Now, people will always ask me this very simple question: How the hell did you get 18,000 clients? Now, the reality is I come back with a very simple response over and over again. You get attention from the right people. You convert them through high-level service, not pressure, and scale by solving problems faster than they appear. Everything else is noise. You do not need to be famous. You need to be seen. You don't need to be perfect. You need to get people results fast.
If you want to live your dream life as an online coach and you want to scale without wasting years of pain and struggle like I did the first time, then you'll probably want to watch this video right here. It is literally a foolproof blueprint to achieve the three things that I believe everyone should want out of life: time freedom, financial freedom, and location freedom.