Ep. 71: Stop the Hustle and Grind, Plan Like a CEO to Achieve Your Profit Goals (Guest Racheal Cook from Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast)
SHOW NOTES:
Contact and follow Racheal Cook, the CEO Collective and Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast: Linkedin - Instagram - Twitter - YouTube - Facebook - Pinterest - Website
Podcast Episodes Mentioned:
Full interview with Racheal Cook, Episode 25
Working smarter, by achieving your goals the right way with Jen McFarland, Episode 14
CONTACT HEATHER:
Contact Heather: Instagram - LinkedIn
Get the Balance Right Coaching: Website
Book a Discovery Call (via Zoom) - Click Here
Heather & Get the Balance Right - Link Tree
Zeitzwolfe Accounting: Website - Facebook
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Do you want to make next year your most successful one so far? Are you ready to start earning more and finally reach your profit goals? In this episode, learn how to free yourself from the constant hustle and grind, so you can build a sustainable business. We discuss the importance of planning like a CEO, to achieve predictable revenue.
As we close out the year, it’s time for you to schedule a CEO retreat. You deserve this opportunity where you can reflect on the past year and map out the next. In this podcast, you’ll learn tips on how to create a year-end retreat that will catapult your success. We also revisit highlights from episode 25, with guest Rachael Cook from the CEO Collective and Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. Get out your calendar, sticky notes, and whiteboard; it’s time to get organized.
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Planning a CEO Retreat
We are coming up on the end of the year. Ooh. And I urge you all to schedule time between now and the end of the year to have a CEO retreat.
Yes. A retreat, just for you. The purpose of this retreat is to reflect on the current year and then. Plan out the next year. Now I know we are in some crazy times, but if you can get away from your normal settings, like if you live in an apartment or a house, a tiny home, Yurt or wherever you live, get away from that.
That would be best for this retreat. You want to go away for at least two to three days. That's ideal. And if you can go somewhere such as a hotel room or an Airbnb or a boat house, I think that would be really cool to have a retreat in a boat house. Just make sure that wherever you go, they have wifi or at least you can use your cell phone as a hotspot, just make sure that that, because you want to be able to access the internet. I don't want you spending all kinds of time answering email. No, but you may want to use the internet for searching things and looking at some of your software that you have.
Here's the thing. The CEO retreat should not include your parents or your partner or your kids, or your furry friends, any of that. You want to just get away. If you'd prefer not to go alone, then find a friend who is an entrepreneur and go together.
As long as you don't spend all of your time, goofing off. Traveling around shopping. It's not for that. Instead. Utilize the benefit of having a friend to hold each other accountable. Shout out to Jen McFarland from Epiphany Courses. She has agreed to go along with me and be my CEO retreat, buddy.
We're going and staying away at the beach. And why did I pick Jen McFarland? Not only do I enjoy hanging out with Jen, but I know that she will be a great person to brainstorm with and I know that she will take this retreat seriously. In fact, she was super excited about this because she said that was exactly what she was thinking.
She needed. Why is she a great person to brainstorm with well, case in point, she was on my podcast episode, number 14, where we discussed working smarter by achieving your goals the right way.
If you haven't heard that episode, it is chock-full of goodness. And I'll include a link in the show notes. So please check that one out if you haven't heard it. So here's the thing. I know that Jen will take the CEO retreat series. And we'll be able to bounce ideas off of each other. That is exactly what you want in a CEO retreat, buddy.
Otherwise go by yourself. Now when the retreat starts, be sure to spend time reflecting back. This is super important. You can start by journaling to jog your memory of what happened in your business. This current year, you can also do a brain dump of all the things that you accomplished.
If you can remember them and then reflect on the things that didn't work, maybe your fails, or maybe things that you wanted to achieve, but you just never got around to, or , it got kind of half-baked and you never really finished them. It's really important to get all those down on paper so that you can look back and be like, wait a minute.
Why didn't I finish this? Oh my God, I forgot. I even had that and I wanted to implement this and I never did, but why that's all the good, juicy stuff you want to be thinking about? One thing I love to do is reflect. All the people that I met, Just brainstorm all the people I met and who they are connected with. Sort of like a web; it is really interesting to look at who you met through another person.
And from that person who else did you meet? It's a really fun exercise. And if you can't remember all the details of who you met last year, go back and look at social media and see who you became friends with, like on LinkedIn or Instagram that should jog your memory as well.
After reflecting on the past year, then I want you to get out some tools to solidify this information. You might want to look at, like I mentioned, social media to jog your memory, but go back and look at your planner, your lists, your calendars, your emails, these are actual records of what you did, who you met, who you had meetings, with all of that. You also want to think about all the new prospects that you met in the prior year. So you can brainstorm about that, but then go back and actually look at your CRM. and If you've used some sort of bookkeeping software, like QuickBooks print out a profit and loss for each month, You want to look at each month to see how you did each month?
If you do use something like QuickBooks, you can do a comparison where you can print out the P and L by month and then have it compared to the prior year. So you can do year to year comparison, quarter to quarter comparison. You can print out all four quarters of this year and then all four quarters of the prior year.
And then look at comparisons. This is really important when you look at your numbers. In a profit and loss. You always want to be comparing it to something else because you want to be able to benchmark what that is. And this is a really cool thing. If you look at things by month by quarter and then reflect upon the prior year, you can start to see trends that happen.
Maybe you have certain months of the year that you are more productive. Or you have certain months of the year where you're hardly making any money at all. Part of what the show is today. We're going to be talking about predictable profits you want to make sure that your income is as predictable as possible.
And looking at these types of reports will help you do that. And you can figure out where you need to fill in the holes and make more money throughout the year. So use all this information when you're planning out next year.
Make sure that you are comparing. Month to month, year, year, quarter to quarter.
If you have a CRM or whatever you use as your client list and your prospect list. Go back through look at all the invoices for the work you performed. now, , if you're a nerd like me and you like spreadsheets, you might want to create a spreadsheet with your clients and then all the invoices they had and see which clients you actually made more money from.
Now, if you use something like. QuickBooks, you can output a report that shows you the revenue by client. This will kind of give you a better idea of, okay, where should you be concentrating your efforts? And \ some of these clients are maybe not a good fit. Maybe you did a lot of work for them and you just didn't make the money that you felt like the value that you gave them.
The return wasn't equal. And then you can think about, okay, next year, talk about some sort of price increase. Or maybe if it's not a good fit, maybe you're going to have to let go of that client. These are those types of things that you're looking for in this deep dive. Another area that you want to look into is market.
You want to understand how your marketing efforts perform? This is so vital to your business. Now, digging through marketing data is extremely helpful in creating your new goals. So Look at things like social media, email newsletters, webpage visits. If you use something like MailChimp, which we've talked about on the show, you can look at open rate . You can see how many people actually received it. , interacted with it, clicked on it. Those are the types of things that you're going to be looking at. And social media posts. You want to look at what types of posts performed better than others. the reason why We're looking at all this stuff is because the things that are working, you want to double down on them next year, you want to consider amplifying what. And rethink your strategies around the other areas that didn't really pan out , the way that you had hoped that they would remember being an entrepreneur is all about testing out ideas.
Re-evaluating them and then tweaking them. So this reflection at the end of the year is a great time to rethink things, for rolling them out next year, testing out your ideas figuring out what you need to tweak from the data and then tweak them for next.
For this important getaway you'll want to bring things that will spark your creativity. I mentioned journals journals are great, or just notebooks, even sticky notes, big, giant sheets of paper. If you've got room a whiteboard, it depends on if you're flying.
You probably don't want to drag a whiteboard on a plane with you, but if you are driving someplace and you can just fit it in your trunk, that would be another great thing. Just whatever that you like to spark your creativity brainstorm with. Now, you may find that you want to purchase a planner. Either with predated pages or one that allows for more flexibility, where you can put in your own dates the ones that are not dated tend to be a little less expensive. It's those ones that are the planners that have the pre. Those can get really spending, but you know, there are a ton of planners out there and I went down a rabbit hole on Amazon, recently looking for mine. So look at what the options are because you really want to find one that inspires you and will also support all your goals and fits your personality.
You know, if you want a hot pink planner, get a hot pink plan. this tool should bring you joy rather than dread. Like when you get it out, you should be like super site to put things into this thing.
If the planner doesn't include a calendar, where you write in the dates, then you'll want to make sure that you bring a calendar with you. It's so important that you have a calendar on this retreat, and it could be a calendar that you write in or a calendar that you're just going to reference.
You may even find it helpful to get one of those big oversized calendars where you can write in, or you can even get a whiteboard version of a calendar
it just depends on how you like to function if you like things on paper or if you like things digitally. I mean, you could certainly map things out on digital calendar, but I like to be able to see the whole year at once and be able to move things around.
Now, if you are a fan of digital tools, my favorite is Miro because there are tons of built-in templates that you can use to do all kinds of planning. The possibilities are endless with this program and you can easily create your own templates and save them in there.
Plus when you get back from your retreat, you can actually invite users such as like a VA to access your boards, your templates that you've created. There is a link in the show notes for Miro. I am an affiliate. I love this program. It's definitely one of my favorite planning tools. And you can also print from it.
It's super cheap too. The calendar is going to be the foundation for your planning. And you'll want to map out your launches, your social media, your strategies, your business, milestones, that's probably one of the most important tools that you're going to need on this retreat
like if you do public speaking, you want that on there. You'll want to also time block your days to allow for adequate time to work on your business. Here's something else, be sure to include your vacations conferences and any meetings that you already have on your schedule. Fill those in first, you want to make sure that you actually take vacations and you have time set aside for the conferences that you want to attend with time blocking, you may end up wanting to batch your days, such as certain days of the week are just for client sales calls where another day might be for social media or putting on webinars or doing Facebook lives or whatever it is that you want to be able to do. And you just want to commit to certain days of the week, the month quarter, you can batch out these things on your calendar. I know a lot of people that are in podcasting that like to do a bunch of podcasts and one day you can do that. So if you're in podcasting, maybe that's the way to go with calendar. Blocking here is a painful thing that I learned this year. Oh my God. So I've gone on a bunch of trips this year.
The mistake that I made was that I did not block off time on my schedule. For the day before I went on the trip. Because my schedule was open, I had clients booking time with me. People that I coach booking meetings with me. Prospects contacting me and setting up meetings, all of this when I'm scrambling around trying to get things done , for my clients and other tasks that I had on my plate for that.
You don't want to be doing this right before a flight? Because what happened to me was I was like up until midnight, trying to get things done. Like, do I have all the cords for my computer? Do I have my toothbrush? Do I have instructions for my cats? I mean, it's ridiculous. All the things you have to do before a trip and just make sure that you have this blocked off on your calendar, do not make my mistakes I really hope that you do a CEO retreat. And if you do one, please let me know. You can contact me on Instagram @zeitzwolfe you can DM me there. You can find me on LinkedIn @heatherzeitzwolfe, and I would love for you to join my Facebook group called Get the Balance Right; it's for female entrepreneurs. So join my group and you'll have access to me. You can ask me questions you can post about your business and more people can find out about you
Please join the Facebook group, Get the Balance Right. And post on there. If you did a retreat, I would love to know.
From this Episode
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Rachel Cook. Welcome to my podcast. I'm so excited that you're here today.”
Racheal Cook: “I am so thrilled to join you, Heather. Thank you for having me.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Why don't you tell the audience just a little bit about yourself and the program and the podcasts that you've developed.”
Racheal Cook: “Yes. I am a consultant in business growth, strategist by trade and training have been, since I finished my MBA in 2005. And over the last 12 years, I really found a. Passion and for helping women entrepreneurs to create sustainable businesses for themselves. And when I was coming into this whole space, I, always felt like kind of the odd person out.
It was. Dominated by men. There weren't many working mothers. there weren't many people talking about how to build an incredible business while living a beautifully full life. And so that's what I have been doing. And an over the last few years, we've really narrowed in on. What is now the CEO collective, where we help women entrepreneurs to start and scale primarily service based businesses.
And my podcast promote yourself to CEO is on year six. Now, if you can believe it. Couple of name changes in there, but that's primarily what I've been doing is helping women step into that role of CEO and learn how to not just do it all on their own so that they can find that freedom and flexibility that they were really looking for when they started their business.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “That's fabulous. congratulations on that. So many years of your podcasts, it's incredible.”
Racheal Cook: “It's been a journey I have to say. And you probably have found this too. All the different things I've done. I mean, I have done videos and Facebook lives and. blogs and everything, but there's something so cool about podcasting because it's like you get to go into people's daily lives. And that's what I hear from anyone who listens to my show.
They're like, well, you went on my run with me yesterday and I'm like, good. Does that count for me too? Or you took me to, you know, on a road trip. And I was like, Oh, I'm glad I got to ride along with you. They really take you with them. And it makes this different connection than I think you can get in any other medium.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “I know. It's really interesting how, like it's so intimate and when I've gone on trips before and listened to podcasts, as I was walking around the city, the theme song of that podcast now, whenever I hear it, I think of that trip that I took.”
Racheal Cook: “Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I love doing the podcast for sure.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “I want to dive into this idea of entrepreneurial poverty.”
Racheal Cook: “I'll give you a little context, a little story of how I kind of went down this rabbit hole. in 2014, I was invited to go speak at the U S chamber of commerce. It's in Washington, DC in this amazing, beautiful historic building, lining the national mall. I went into speak at this big event and it was hosted by the us chamber of commerce, but for their center for women in business.
And as I started talking to the people who. Ran that whole thing. I got some interesting statistics from them. What I discovered was that only 12% of women entrepreneurs are breaking a hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue. Only two to 3% are breaking a million dollars in annual revenue. On average women owned businesses, undercharge 28% less than men doing the same type of work.
And it started to get me thinking because. I know I left the traditional corporate consulting world because I was feeling a lot of the things we talk about that women face in the consulting or in corporate world in general, where you feel like you can either go down your career path, that you really.
Can see yourself going down or you can completely stop everything and become a mom. And that was the decision that really had me wanting to get into doing my own thing, because I wanted a family and I could not see anybody like me who was doing it well, doing that career well while also having small children.
And so I started going down the rabbit hole some more and I was like, okay, how can we really have it all? Is that even a thing? Is that possible? And what I discovered is women are not only paid less and make less than their businesses, but they usually have less time freedom than they had hoped for.
And they also start to have less energy long term. And this becomes a trifecta of what I call entrepreneurial poverty because we, a lot of the women I work with started their business for more freedom, for the ability to make amazing financial independence for themselves and their family. For the flexibility of building there.
Business the way that they want, but what they often run into and the statistics support me in this is they're not making as much money as they had really hoped they are depleted because they are doing so much all by themselves. So they have no energy to continue to do the things they want in their life.
I realized there had to be more of a holistic approach to building businesses because the messages that are out there in the world that are primarily shared by men, They're not facing the same things that we face as women. They're not facing the same challenges. you rarely hear about men having to choose between being a parent and being ambitious in their career, or men have to take a step back in their career because they have to take care of aging parents, which I've also been in that sandwich generation.
Right. I both have small kids and a disabled mom. These are all issues that impact women. Far more than they do for men. that's where I have been coming in to say, okay, we need to escape entrepreneurial poverty. We need to talk about how can we build more sustainable businesses that don't require us to work 24 seven that don't require us to be on demand to everybody and make sure that there are businesses that are predictably profitable so that when we need to take time off, whether it's for a vacation.
Or because you're ill or because you just want to have some time with your friends or family or whoever you care about that it doesn't impact your business.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “I do people's tax returns, so I see a lot of small businesses and how they're spending their money, how they're not receiving enough revenue. But I find they will pay other people, contractors, employees far more than what they receive, because they think Oh, I've got all this income coming in, but they're not really looking at what the net income is; it's actually pretty tragic. they might be happy that they don't really have to pay much in taxes, but that's not really a good thing.”
Racheal Cook: “No, absolutely. I think this is one of the things where, I mean, and you see this with taxes. No one really understands how taxes work. Well, when you start a business, no one really goes into business thinking. How do I make sure I have this salary? I want first, what is the salary I want first and then build the business to support that.
Usually what happens is entrepreneurs wait, and they get whatever scraps or leftover at the end of the month. Like, Ooh, I have a little bit leftover. I can pay myself this month and we need to build it differently. one of the first things I always do is sit down and say, okay, you're CEO of this company, what is your CEO compensation package going to look like?
And then we're going to get the company to fund that for you. this might look different for everybody, but I would never go take a full-time job if they didn't offer me a paid vacation. If they didn't offer me benefits if I didn't have some good perks to the job. I made sure I listed out all the things, like if I were to have my dream job, what would I want to get paid?
How much time off would I have? What would my flexibility look like? how much would I have in retirement? How much would I be able For life insurance or disability insurance or any of those things. And I actually thought through all of those little pieces and that's what I encourage my clients to do, because if we can't get clarity on how you're going to take care of yourself, you will not have longevity as an entrepreneur, especially.
And this is something I get really passionate about. Women are more likely to either be divorced or outlive their partner and more women in old age are in the poverty level, three out of four women are under the poverty level. Once they get past a certain age, it is because we don't have these financial things in place.
And we haven't made sure that we have those things in place. So if we want to make sure we're building that security for ourselves, we have to think like this. We can't just hope and cross our fingers that the business will make that happen.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “You have CEO score card, what is that exactly?”
Racheal Cook: “I developed an entire system to help my clients understand the value of their time because often we only think of the time that we're actively getting paid, like our billable hours or what our clients have paid us to do work with them. What we don't tend to account for is all the other stuff that takes up running a business.
And the truth is not all tasks are the same value for your business. It is really hard to understand that though, until you do two things until you track your time and energy. And until you pay attention to how much energy are you giving to lower value tasks versus higher value tasks. So I actually put together a scorecard approach, which is something that comes from my consulting days, but basically you track all your time.
And then for every task you did, you give it a value? There are $10 an hour tasks. These are usually admin tasks, customer service, very basic level tasks. Then there's the hundred dollar an hour tasks. These are usually a little bit more skilled, but they're not really growing the business or kind of just maintaining the business.
Then we get into the thousand dollars and $10,000 an hour tasks. Now as the CEO, you don't want to spend time in the $10 an hour bucket. You want to spend it in the higher level, $10,000, an hour bucket, or a thousand dollar an hour bucket. These are going to be sales related tasks, strategic planning, related tasks, leadership tasks, or making sure that your business is going out there and getting the visibility it needs in order to bring in the sales that you want.
the scorecard approach is really about. Giving ourselves a frame of reference to understand what your sweat equity is like. Are you putting your time and energy in the right place? Because if you were getting paid, let's say a million dollars a year, or if you were running a million dollar a year business, and would you answer all your emails to yourself?
Or would you be doing your bookkeeping yourself? Well, if your goal is the million dollar a year business, we have to shift how you're showing up today. We can't wait until you get there to finally get that support or to finally put the systems in place.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “So if entrepreneur is in that growing stage, where if they hire people, then they might go into entrepreneurial poverty. it's finding that, balance. Now I realized that if they just got a few hours off their plate, then that would free up enough time to do these, higher level activities. How do you balance that?”
Racheal Cook: “Yeah, I believe in sustainable growth. I have definitely seen businesses implode because they try to go after growth at all costs. And these are the businesses. It sounds cool. Right? Like double, triple your business in a year. But when you understand what goes on behind the scenes, if you were to double or triple your client load, do you have the infrastructure or the systems or the customer support team?
Are you able to deliver all of that? Like there's a lot that goes into rapid growth. So I tend to look for about 25 to 40% a year. I feel like is more sustainable. So if you're aiming to grow at about 25 to 40% a year, You'll double your business in a few years, which means you can take your time finding some support and hiring people a little bit at a time, and then helping them grow with you.
You don't have to invest in help. And these days, I mean, this is something that was such a shocker to me. When I started building out my team in my mind, I thought I have to have employees and it's going to cost so much money for me to have support. And then I realized, Oh, there's people who they actually just want to support me.
They want to be my assistant. They love the idea that they can do this work from home. It takes a couple hours a day. And if they free up that couple hours a day for me, I can spend those couple of hours on sales calls or working on my visibility for my business. it was really about buying back my time, like $500 a month at a time until I could free up most of my time and energy.
Now, if you were to look at my calendar, I really don't spend any time in admin or operations at all. The day to day is handled. Someone else is taking that on. I didn't start there. It took me a couple of years, but I did start with an assistant who could tackle the one thing that was becoming a bottleneck for me.
And that was managing my inbox, managing customer service, managing, scheduling all of those things and just getting some help about five hours a week was the first step towards getting my time back to focus on the higher value tasks.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “On your podcast, you talk about predictable profits and not constantly being in this hustle mode. And I believe that hustle mode, although it sounds cool to hustle, it's really not a good. Situation to be in constantly. Can you explain a little bit more about the importance that you feel, predictable profits gives you?”
Racheal Cook: “Yeah. What it gives you is peace of mind knowing that you're not going to have to start each month at zero. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs go through this the first of the month. They're like, okay. Fresh start. I've got to go out there and get clients.
I got to fill my calendar. I got to make sure everything's happening. They don't have any revenue already booked for that month. And I see this a lot, especially for people who are service-based, who are healing or helping entrepreneurs. They're constantly trying to sell one hour at a time of their work.
that is a really hard place to be. Because what if you can't fill all those hours that month, what if you have clients who are canceling on you? What if you just want to take a break or plan for maternity leave or anything? It's almost impossible. If you don't have something already coming in, you're not giving yourself the flexibility you need in your business.
what I love is that at the start of each month, I've already got all of my expenses, including my salary covered. That's the power of having predictable profits, because I planned my business to give me that peace of mind. I know what it costs to run my business, pay my team and pay myself. I've designed all of my offers.
In a way that make it really easy for me to get paid that make it really easy for every month. I have that recurring payment coming in. this is one reason I'm a huge fan of retainers or payment plans or things like that. Because over time as you continue bringing on more clients, Then you have that consistent revenue coming in.
So a great example of this. you work , in taxes and, and all of the financial side of things. Usually when I've worked with a CPA in the past, it's been, I don't really have much interaction with them until tax time. And then , they do their thing and I get a bill and that's it. But I imagine that's a really hard business model because you're really only getting a lot of cash once.
At one time of the year? Well, I started working with a new CPA and he said, okay, rich, this is the new system that I'm putting in place. I was like, let me hear it. He was like, I have a rate for, doing the final tax preparation stuff. But what I really want to do is put you on a monthly retainer and this covers our quarterly call to make sure that everything is in order.
I want to put it on auto-pay. And that way we've already got this built into the system. I don't have to wait or. try to remember to call him to book that quarterly appointment to make sure we're all good for whatever we need to turn in quarterly. It's already scheduled and he doesn't have to wait around until tax time for all of his revenue to come in.
He's already planned it by making sure all of his clients who he's working with in this way are paying him a little bit each month. It smooths out the cash flow and just makes life. For everybody a little bit easier. And I think that's a shift for a lot of us to think about how can we make sure we're getting paid from our clients every month instead of just these big spikes here and there.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Yeah, I have opinions about that once a year type thing with the CPAs. I think that model is it's completely broken and people need to have interaction with their accountant CPA bookkeepers all throughout the year so that they can make actual decisions that will be effective. And instead of the end of the year, it's just a reactive situation, which is terrible.”
Racheal Cook: “Well, this plays out in almost every industry that I see is a lot of times people are reactive in how they're interacting with their clients. They're waiting for something to break for their client to show up, think about like a physical therapist or a chiropractor. if they're waiting for their client to be in so much pain, that then they show up and spend a lot of money.
Are they really doing that client? The best service they can compare to saying, Hey, I have a membership program that you can join and you can pay monthly and you'll get this many sessions to come in each month. It gives them the steady cash flow, but what it also does, it gives their client the proactive support.
They need to make sure that they're really getting the results that they're looking for. And that's a big shift. That's a huge shift for a lot of people to be thinking in that way.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “On your podcast, you were talking about having your clients have one offer how do you get your clients to get started with just one offer? I'm sure a lot of people say, Oh, I've got all these different services that I can provide.
I want to put all these things on my website. how do you get them to just narrow down to this one offer?”
Racheal Cook: “Well, sometimes we don't start with just one, because sometimes you need a little trial and error to figure out what's going to work and what's going to be the offer. and sometimes what we start with, isn't ultimately what we end up with. we adapt and we iterate and we evolve as we go. But what I find is for each offer, you have.
You have to not only build out a marketing system and a sales system, but you also have to have a delivery system on the backend of it to make sure everybody's getting what they want to get them results. So the more offers you have. The more of these systems. You have, you have three different offers.
That means you have nine different systems happening at the same time. If you have more than that, it gets even harder because now are we effectively marketing that offer? Are we becoming known for that offer? Do we know how to sell this? the most efficient way? Do we know how to get the best results for every single person?
It's almost like the more offers you have, the more diluted you start to get. And it's harder to become known for something that's the big thing. so I tend to say, what can we do to build a foundational offer that you're going to get known for? And let's really take our time. Let's take a year, two years to build out all the systems that you truly need in order to scale that one offer to six-figures.
If we don't have all the systems in place to scale that offer to at least six figures in revenue, then just adding more offers. Isn't really going to help us because it's going to dilute your marketing efforts. It's going to dilute your sales efforts. But once we have that systems in place, once that's working for you really easily, then you might be like, okay, I need a next offer for the people who've gone through this.
What's the next thing. And then you build that and you scale that. And make sure that it's all running as smoothly as possible. I think it's really easy when we look at especially businesses. Like let's think about Amazon, they have everything you could possibly want on Amazon, but if you were around when Amazon started, you know, that they started with just books.
They got really good at just books and you know, what they were doing the whole time, they were getting really good at just books. They were perfecting their marketing process. They were perfecting how they sold things. What they really perfected was the logistics on the backend to deliver things as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible.
We don't see that now and how much time energy it took them to get all those systems down. But once they got them down, then it became really easy to say, Oh, you know what? If people like books from us, I bet they'll also buy this from us. And they slowly started to add out the things, but only once they had these other systems in place.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Exactly now with these offers, people always talk about how you have to have three tiers of your pricing. So with this offer, could it have three different options within this offer? Are you talking about just like one core offer?”
Racheal Cook: “I think the answer is it depends because it depends what you're doing. I like having maybe two options. Three can get a little trickier because the more options we give potential clients, the more decisions they have to make. So I'm a big fan of streamlining things, so that there's not as much friction in the decision making process.
So let's say your offer. Let's say you're a coach and you are coming up with a signature coaching process. You want to take people through. So maybe you have this signature process, you built it out into a coaching program and people can join. This coaching program for a thousand dollars? Well, they could also buy that same coaching program.
And now you've added some one-on-one support on top of it. Let's say for each month that they're in this group program, they could also get an additional one or two sessions with you. One-on-one. Now you have one core offer. The sales, the marketing mechanisms are the same. The delivery mechanism is mostly the same, except for that little add on.
And that can be a great way to serve people a little bit differently and give them a few options without it causing too much complication in your business.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “I love that when it comes to pricing the offer, how do you figure that one out is that trial and error as you're trying to sell this thing?”
Racheal Cook: “Pricing is like a whole nother conversation. I bet you see this because you look at people's numbers. All day pricing is an art and a science. But there is, there's a lid for every pot. There's a price for every person. Right. I think if you know your dream clients really well and you know what the values are for your business and what the results are that they're getting it really just pick a price.
I tend to just say, pick something and start there. And you don't know until you've tested with your market, how they're going to respond to it. I've had. Conversations with people where they would look at, let's say my, CEO accelerator, which is the mastermind experience I run. And one year I had somebody on one sales call for it and be like, okay, this will be a major investment for me and my business.
I've never spent this much working with somebody for a whole year. The next call was, I can't believe what a great value this is. it's all perception. when I sit down to work out pricing with my clients, I really think about like, what is the time and energy you're putting into this? How many clients do you really need in order to achieve your own financial goals and what are the things they're going to value the most out of this experience?
So we have to kind of make all of those things work in order to land on the right price. What I don't like to do for pricing is look at what everybody else is doing and then say, Oh, well this is probably worth $97. Like let's actually figure out what, what it's worth because. If you look at it in the market, there's probably somebody selling something for 97 and another person selling the exact same thing at nine 97 and another person selling it for, you know, 9,997. It's just, they're all probably talking to slightly different audiences and have different values put on those.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “And you don't want price to be the differentiator between who's the lowest provider.”
Racheal Cook: “This is where understanding your customer is so important because. There are always going to be bargain hunters. If you are building your business around bargain hunters, it is not going to be a fun experience because the bargain hunters are the ones who want the absolute most for the least amount.
And we want it to be an equal exchange here. If I'm showing up and giving you an hour of my time, it's not just an hour of my time. It's my MBA. In 15 years of experience, it's working with thousands of people. How do you compensate for that? Well, I can't just look at any other person and say, Oh, well they charge $250 an hour.
So that's what I should charge. I have to really think through, okay. If I'm giving them an hour of my time here, how do I need to be appropriately compensated for that to make sense?”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Exactly Rachel, how can people work with you? you have all kinds of programs and they can listen to your podcasts, but what are some of the programs that you have right now?”
Racheal Cook: “So we've actually just streamlined everything down. Thank you. COVID very much. currently the best way to learn more about working with me is to head to Rachel cook.com. I am primarily working with women through the CEO collective, which is a 12 month experience to create sustainable success in your business.
You can come learn more about that@rachelcook.com and you can also find me on Instagram. It's my favorite place to chat.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Awesome. Thank you. Rachel, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. it's been a total delight.”
Racheal Cook: “Well, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on. And I look forward to hearing from anybody who that a little nugget from our conversation.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Awesome.”
