The Black Girl Business Bar

In this episode, I explain why working with 1-to-1 clients is preferable for new online business owners and everything you learn from working with and managing clients.

Show Notes

New online business owners have to build their foundations before they can sell popular products like courses and masterminds. 

In this episode, I explain why working with 1-to-1 clients is preferable for new online business owners and everything you learn from working with and managing clients. 


Other resources

More on Khalida
 
Khalida DuBose is a business coach specializing in mindset and simplified business strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color online business owners nail the foundations of running a successful business and cultivate a rock-solid mindset as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com. Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com.

The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host
Khalida DuBose
Business + Mindset Coach
Producer
Zuri Berry
Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

When I was a freshman in college, I failed in math class twice. I got a D in the same class and because I thought I'm not a quitter, I was ready to sign up for that class a third time to prove it.

But instead, after finals, my math professor came to me. He sat down and very calmly said to me, Khalida, you're smart. And I can see you trying so hard, but you've also skipped steps. You need to go to the class before this one and make sure you understand the basics of that class before you move ahead with this class, or you're going to continue to struggle and fail.

I was humiliated. I went directly to the campus computer lab and registered for the prerequisite class that was starting that fall. I felt stupid. Like, I should know this stuff and I was frustrated that it would be an entire year before I would be back in his class for a third time.

But I sucked it up. I took the class and I passed it with an A. The following fall, I re-enrolled in his class and I passed that class with an A. And for the remainder of college, I passed every single one of my math classes.

He was right. I had forgotten some of the basics, and if I'm being completely honest, some of them I didn't even know. I was grateful he called me out and even more grateful that I didn't let the embarrassment stop me from going back and making sure I understood the foundations.

Welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host, Khalida DuBose. And I am so happy to be back after a much-needed four-week break during which I completed Ramadan, celebrated Eid, and got many things organized ahead of a very busy. But I did miss recording. And so I am super excited to jump back in and today starting us off, kicking us off.

I am going to be talking about skipping steps in your business. Specifically, offering more before your business is ready.

So trying to add too many things before your business is ready, is a huge mistake and it will set your business back and keep you stuck for a long time.

And starting on the wrong step will do the same thing. Which brings me to a very unpopular opinion, which is you need to work with one-to-one clients before you try launching group programs, masterminds, or courses. I said it. Why? Because there are levels to your business and the first level is working with clients one-to-one because there are a lot of things that you need to learn about signing a one-to-one client.

So when you're new to business, it feels like that's not enough. I totally get it. It feels like that's not enough. And what might be messing with you, with your perception of success, and what you think you need to do, is that you have this idea that you need to scale.

I had somebody inbox me a few weeks ago and asked me, how was I scaling or how could he scale? Right? You're thinking right now, that I need to be making 5k months. I need to be making 5k a month. I need to have 10 K months. You know, this is what we hear in the online space a lot. And you think you need to do that right away. And you don't.

You don't.

You need to know that that's not the reality. There's nothing negative about working solely with one-to-one clients. And in fact, many people make multiple six figures working only with one-to-one clients.

So this is what I do in my business. And this is what I recommend for my clients. Get fully booked in your business. And then when there's demand, start thinking about offers, that will allow you to work with more people for the same amount of time, i.e. scaling in your business.

I'm going to break this down for you a little bit more. Here's my thought process. If you're not booked with one-to-one clients yet if you haven't worked with one-to-one clients and everybody's fully booked. The number will be a little bit different. But if you haven't gotten fully booked, you know, in like A certain period of time, worked with those clients, and then gotten booked again potentially. Then you're probably not ready. And here's why.

You haven't had enough experience managing clients. Okay. The keyword here is experience. You don't fully understand their problems because you haven't seen enough of their problems yet. Okay. Again, this is experience.

And finally, you haven't helped them fix those problems. So you're not even ready to codify the methods.

So when you work with a one-to-one client, you typically will work through whatever's going on with their business and help them out, and then they'll get a result. And when you do that over and over and over, you start to see themes of what's happening with your clients. You start to see themes of what's happening with the people that you want to work with. And all of a sudden, you know, okay, I can put together these resources, this is how I'm going to deal with this problem. This is what works for the clients, you know, 90% of the time, et cetera. And then you can codify those methods and make sure they're working.

But if you try to skip the step ahead and you haven't even figured that out, all of a sudden you're putting together this mastermind or this course, etcetera, and now your clients have less access to you, which means they have to work more independently and you're not even sure if those methods work.

So you might be thinking well, does that mean that I can get that experience a lot faster if I just have a group or I do a mastermind or I launch a course. And I completely understand why you're thinking like this. When I first got started, I was thinking the same thing. Yup. I launched my business by creating a course. And of course, I enrolled in a course, which promised to show me how to be successful in a relatively short amount of time. I was sold on the fact that I didn't need an audience. I didn't need an email list. I didn't need experience or anything else. Just the idea and the willingness and those I had. In retrospect, the people who are the most successful in this course were the ones who had all the things that the course told me that I didn't need.

That's marketing for you. And while I don't think that it was blatantly misleading, I think the creator needed to tighten up who the course was best for, to help the customer make a more informed decision about their purchase.

So I want you to think about it like this, trying to start with a group or masterminds. This is skipping steps. You don't have your solid foundation yet, right? You can't start building walls without the foundation. And so you're making the process so much harder for yourself. You're likely still refining your marketing at this stage. This is evident by the fact that you're not attracting clients or even seeing the right people in your audience.

So you might be intermittently attracting clients, intermittently you know, having people come to you and want your help, but it's not happening on a regular basis yet.

And outside of marketing, you're not able to manage people. So we all have this idea that, yeah, I can manage this many people, but we don't really have the practical knowledge. We don't know what that's going to feel like. So you need to know how to manage people. You need to understand what's going on with them and really be able to solve those problems before you move on.

So let me give you an example of this happening in real-time. I had a previous client who started her business by creating a course, just like I did. Her plan was to market it, enroll clients, and start making money. Simple enough. She figured that with every launch she would iterate and make the course better so that her clients would continue to get good results. Okay. She proceeded to create the course. Then she went to market it, but she never sold it and she couldn't figure out why.

So after several months of, you know, kind of this lukewarm marketing, she was referred, somebody referred a client to her and she signed her first one-to-one client. She stopped marketing completely because she was exhausted and she worked with that client.

But once the contract was over for that client, she had nothing. So she went back to trying to market the course and it never sold.

Her problem just persisted, you know. So she never got anywhere. She never enrolled anybody. And by the time she met me, she was very frustrated and ready to give up. We started working together. I, you know, helped her with her marketing, help her understand marketing and what she was doing and why the course wasn't the best route to go. And she signed two clients in her first two months. Okay. This is a super common occurrence. Because you're in the online space. And many times you're listening to marketers selling the idea that you can create a course and make all this money. That you can use masterminds. That you can scale. Right? That you can make money in your sleep.

All the things that we all hear. And that is fine, that's fine for them. And that's fine for their audiences. But you need to understand what level of business you're at and make sure you proceed accordingly. So, my previous client, her focus area was that she really needed to master so many of the foundations before she was ready to move to the next level. And she's still working with one-to-one clients by the way.

So my advice here is to go back to your foundations and nail them. If you don't know where to start, then I'm going to let you know that this podcast is a great place. Check out my catalog and you'll get a lot of good information here. Secondly, you also should consider hiring your own one-to-one coach to get the experience that you're going to give to your clients. If you've never worked with a one-to-one coach, you might have kind of eliminating belief around what it's like.

And finally, be disciplined. Stick to one thing at a time. Right? Don't try to skip the steps. Stick to one thing at a time, make sure you understand your foundations in every area of business, master it, and then add on to it.

All right, lovelies. Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If you found today's episode helpful or had any aha moments, tag me on socials and let me know. And as always, friends, we are dropping episodes on your favorite podcast player every Tuesday and episodes on YouTube every Thursday. We can't wait to see you back then.