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The Elevated Coach is a weekly show for any coach who leads with their heart, is driven by impact and wants to play big.
The episodes are a mix of solo episodes with your host Joel Burgess, interviews with coaches at the forefront of the industry and real-life coaching sessions around different areas of business, life and health.
If you want to stake claim to your calling as a coach, and become more powerful and profitable, then tune into The Elevated Coach Podcast with Joel.
Business is hard until you fix your one bottleneck (00:00)
Look, if you're in a service industry and the business of changing lives and you're really good at it, but running your business feels like constant guesswork, and like you're constantly figuring shit out as you go, I want you to see how simple it can be with the right systems, because business doesn't need to be this hard, and you shouldn't have to sacrifice your life and your freedom to make it work. So, grab a pen and paper, this is gonna be an interactive session, and we're gonna map out the five...
core functions that every single service led business is run on. So you can see exactly where things are breaking down in your business, what's making your business feel harder than it need to be and what to focus on first. And this is the exact exercise I go through every single eight weeks. And I take all my clients through and I won't bore you with their results, but you can click up here for their case studies like Len, who went from three K months to back to back 20 K months. So.
take a nice big exhale, you can let go of all the noise and complexity out there. And in this video, come back to simplicity, structure and systems. And if you are new here, my name is Joel, I scale coaches, consultants and therapists with inner and outer systems. And this is episode eight of my series on how to build a life-size business. And you can go to episode one up here or grab the workbook in the description below. Let's get stuck in.
So the very first step in all of this is to understand what you're aiming for. And before you switch off and say, Jola got it, I need a goal. I will put a lot of money that your goal doesn't satisfy the two conditions for a great goal. The first being a goal must change how you behave, the decisions you make today. If it doesn't, it's not a goal.
Most people's goals are fluffy and non-committal because they're safe. So the first action I want you to do, I want you to brainstorm 10 goals and I want you to lean into specificity and commitment. Put a little bit of skin in the game. So think about the income, profit, number of clients, number of followers, working hours, the freedom that you want to experience, the impact, and then start to combine them.
A terrible goal is I want to create maximum impact. Terrible because it doesn't change how we behave today. A much better goal would be I want to double my profit in the next six months whilst working four days a week and only coaching or consulting three afternoons a week. That is a much better goal because it forces you to make different decisions today. It forces you to get creative and
you will start to see your life and your business in a totally different way. One's safe, one requires a level of risk and that's where the growth is. So that's step one is to brainstorm your 10 goals. And once you've done that, I want you to look at them all and ask yourself this one question. If I could only achieve one of these goals, which would make all the others irrelevant? So this forces you to really think about what matters rather than treating every goal equally.
as important. There's this amazing book called The One Thing and it changed everything and how I approach business. And this is a question that I ask myself all the time. If I could only achieve one of these goals, which would make all the others irrelevant? And you get this right, everything else will flow from here. Now, once you've got your one goal, I want you to ask, why is this the goal I really want? What would achieving it give to me? Because the second condition for a great goal
is that it has to mean something to you. I hear so many coaches and consultants who say to me, I wanna make 10K months, I wanna make 20K months, I wanna make 50K months. And they give me this arbitrary number that means absolutely nothing to them. When you go through the thinking of what that money will mean to you and you connect it to more time with your family or traveling to beautiful places, flying first class, eating great food.
contributing to causes that are really close to you. When you connect the two and you feel that internal shift inside, that is when you've created a great goal. Now, you don't need a complex five-year vision here. You just need a clear enough target so you can start making decisions better because that's what this whole process is about. It's about a tool set to make better decisions about what to focus on next.
There's only two things you ever need to focus on in business, where you are going and what the next right thing is. Everything else is just noise. This is where you're going. So that is step one. Now that you know what you're aiming for, you need to figure out what stopping you get there because you could work incredibly hard on your business and still not get the result you want if you're focusing on solving the wrong problem. So the next step is to find your biggest bottleneck.
And I want you to consider for a moment a factory production line where each set of hands assembles a different part of let's say a widget. And each set of hands is reliant on the previous set of hands to assemble that part before it can assemble its part. And a nice healthy factory production line has a nice even throughput from one set of hands to the next. But now imagine this set of hands goes ill.
or breaks down. And what will clearly happen is the widgets will stack up until this set of hands has been fixed and replaced. And until it's been fixed or replaced, there's no throughput further down. So that is the biggest priority in that factory production line to fix. And it's very clear. And your business is exactly the same. But instead of these hands, you have a function.
And in every service led business are five core functions. You understand this, you understand business. The first function is lead gen. I define a lead as someone who's giving you permission to have a one-to-one conversation with, either by giving you their number or their email. The second function is lead nurture. So it's building trust with those leads and moving those people towards a decision. The third function is
version to turning that interested, those interested leads and prospects into paying customers and eventually clients. The fourth function is delivery. So getting clients results effectively and as fast as possible. The fifth function is retention where the goal is to keep clients, to upsell clients and to continue the relationships. And then what I want you to do now is work out your numbers for each stage.
Don't go on vibe and feelings. Look at the actual metrics. So ask yourself, how many leads do you have coming in every single week? How much time are your leads spending on brand? You can calculate ⁓ open rates of your emails or click through rates or even hours watched of your long form content. Then calculate your conversion rates. How many of your leads convert into customers and then to clients? Look at your conversion rate.
from your workshops or your sales doc or your sales pages or even your enrollment calls if you sell with calls. Then next, how well are your clients getting results? And then are they staying? Are they referring? Have you got massive churn rates? Once you know these numbers, you can ask hypothetical questions for each. So how would my business grow if I doubled the number of leads and kept everything else the same?
Or if I doubled my conversion rate, everything else was the same, how would that impact my business? So by understanding your numbers, you will quickly see what your biggest levers are and where your biggest focus and constraint is. And usually it is the one earliest on in this. It's not always the case, but it's usually the one earliest in the five core function. So the takeaway here is that you don't need to be focusing on
47 different strategies or even five different strategies. You're reading three. You need to identify the one thing that's holding your business back and then focus on fixing that first. Now that you know where the bottleneck is, the next question is what are you actually going to do about it? And this is where we use the ICE framework to brainstorm possible solutions and work out which one to focus on. Because if you're anything like me, ideas are easy.
but focus is what will stand you apart from everyone else. Warren Buffett says it best. He says, the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything. So what I want you to do here is to brainstorm all your potential solutions for solving your bottleneck and set a timer for five minutes and just chuck it all down and get as many
options down on paper. So let's imagine that my biggest bottleneck was lead gen. So I would write down Instagram, I would write down YouTube, paid ads, partnerships, and I would go on and on and on and on. And I would go on until I feel like, yeah, that's as many ideas as I can get. The next step is to score each of these ideas on three
rankings. I standing for impact, C standing for cost and E standing for effort. And I want you to score them from one to five. One being very low impact, five being potentially a massive impact on the bottleneck and ultimately the business. And think of the likely business outcome, not how exciting that idea is for you. So really separate ⁓
your emotion from it and see it very rationally. So for example, Instagram, the potential impact of Instagram is massive, right? It's used by billions and there's just huge potential there. The cost is free, so I would say five. The effort, it takes some effort, know, there's some skill involved, some, you've got to really study hooks and frameworks and...
the art of communication. there's definitely a lot of effort there. I'm to score that too. YouTube, impact, likewise, it's huge. The cost, I'm going to score that four because you need to buy cameras. You don't have to, but it's nice to buy cameras, maybe some editing, not necessarily, but I'm going to score it four. The effort, it's a lot. I'm going to score it one. Paid ads, the impact is, I'm going to say four because it's pretty linear.
You know, it is pretty much money in, money out unless you really hit a gold run on a few. So I'm to score four. The cost is obviously high. So I'm going to score that one. The effort, I'm to score that a three. It depends of course, if you're hiring someone, but with AI now, I've got some amazing systems that make the effort pretty low. So I'm going to score that three. Partnerships, potential impact. I'm going to score that three. It's pretty linear. You know, you're not going to get huge partners.
back you unless you're kind of at that stage where there's definitely a give and take. So I'm to score that a two or a three. The cost is low. The effort is really high. So I'm going to score that one. So what we've got here, the total for Instagram is 12. For YouTube, it's 10. For paid ads, we've got seven, eight. And partnerships, we've got nine. Now, of course, these are figurative numbers. They're not real. So please do.
score your ideas and don't run off this. But now you can see that you have a highest scoring solution that solves your biggest bottleneck. That's the goal here is to use rational thinking and logic, yeah, first level principles to get to a project that solves your biggest bottleneck. So by now you've got your goal, you've identified the bottleneck.
and you've worked out what solutions are worth prioritizing. And then you've gone one step further and picked the highest priority, what I call your next right thing. That's your one project to focus on. But there's one more problem to solve because knowing what to do doesn't mean you'll actually do it. So the final step in this is deciding when you're going to work on your next right thing and then building that into your week. Because Stephen Covey says it best, he says, don't prioritize your schedule.
schedule your priorities. And in episode three of this series, I talk about the trademark week and how I schedule my work and understand exactly what I'm going to work on day to day. But one of the biggest ideas of the trademark week is the idea of holding tension. The biggest tension to hold in business is the tension of short term and long term, the need for short term cash and clients to pay for bills and the desire for long term growth. So you don't have to rely.
the short term. And if you can't hold this tension, you'll forever be stuck in the feast of famine cycle flipping from one to next. The way I hold short term and long term tension is I schedule my week and divide my week into the two. So for me personally, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are my short term days. That's when I focus on creating ⁓ meaningful content, starting conversations, coaching and making offers. And then on Monday,
And Friday is when I focus on my long-term project, my next right thing. Your next right thing is a long-term project. It's something not to expect fast and immediate results. And that brings a different energy, one of patience, one of diligence, one of depth. So right now, my long-term project, my next right thing is YouTube. I'm not expecting immediate results. I'm...
doing it to really learn and study the process. And I'll only move on to the next right thing once I feel like I really understand thumbnails and titles and intros and delivery and communication. So whatever you identified as your project that solves your current biggest bottleneck, that is your long-term project. And I encourage you to schedule that in and have at least
one whole day dedicated to it. Not bits of time like here in the week, because it will just always get pushed to the side. Commit at least one whole day to your next right thing. And if you continue to trust this, your business, six months, nine months, a year, three years, five years down the line, will be in a completely different place. And the reason why so many coaches struggle is because they are
doing all these random things that they don't actually know why. This works because it works like a factory line. We identify the biggest bottleneck, we brainstorm the solutions that solve that bottleneck, we pick the highest priority, we focus on it until it is done. And once that is done, we then go through the process again, identify the bottleneck, brainstorm, prioritize, schedule it in.
That is the process. And if you commit to this, your whole business will shift if you trust and stay patient. So if you take nothing else from this video, remember this, you do not need to work harder on your business. You need to work on the right things in the right order. Get clear on the goal you're working towards, identify the biggest bottleneck that's stopping you get there, brainstorm the possible solutions, and then use the ICE framework to work out what your next right thing is.
and then put that work into your week and focus on that next right thing until that bottleneck is fixed. And then take some time off, reevaluate and repeat the process. The goal here isn't to spend every waking hour trying to grow your business. The goal is to build a business that's easeful, that brings in consistent clients, gives you predictable income and the freedom and confidence to go and enjoy life because that's what we're all here for.
Now, if you do want some support putting this into practice, into your business, just message me ECC on Instagram and I'll let you know what that might look like. And if this has been useful, go ahead, give it a like, subscribe to the channel and I will see you in the next episode on the series on building a life-size business over here or maybe over there. I'll see you there. Sending you so much love. Ciao for now.