Key learnings from investing ￡70k in coaching

These are the ways I have invested money in the past 3.5 years of transitioning online, learn from my mistakes of over ￡70k.

#1 Business Coaching person 1 ￡12k

Pros:

• Helped me rebrand my business and become clear on my target market

Learnings:

• Was too focused on facebook ads for scaling up
• Relied on organic content posting without any strategy to scale up effectively.
• Wasted a lot of my time on methods that was difficult to measure.

#2. Organic Lead Generation Program 2 ￡7k

Pros:

• Helpful to understand organic marketing and messaging sequences
• Great sales training and funnel building

Learnings:

• Focused too much on low quality people replying to messages
• Focused too much on pitching people without building rapport

#2. Organic Lead Generation Program 2 ￡7k?

Pros:?

• Helpful to understand organic marketing and messaging sequences
• Great sales training and funnel building

Learnings:?

• Focused too much on low quality people replying to messages
• Focused too much on pitching people without building rapport

#3. Facebook ads ￡15k

Pros:

• Understood how to build an ads funnel
• Understood key metrics to aim for

Learnings:

• If organic facebook marketing isn’t working, paid ads won’t help, you’ll just see more flaws in your business. “read that again - it’s one of my most important learnings”
• Don’t hire someone who will work with you until you get results. (I worked for someone for 3 months … then stayed with them an extra 6 months an extra ￡6,800 wasted of ad spend)

#4. Business Coaching High Level Mastermind ￡12k

Pros:

• Helpful to understand the foundation to scale to 6-7 figures online.
• Great tools to better leverage my time in the business
• Focus on building relationships vs selling people.
• Great tools on how to run a mastermind and ways to leverage testimonials.

Learnings:

• Way too much focus on fitness businesses (was sold on credibility but realistically the techniques didn’t apply to my target market of tech founders / consultants)
• Too focused on facebook groups and instagram
• I needed to find ONE platform to scale up sustainably

#5. Hiring a setter in my business ￡5k

Pros:

• This was a really good investment to find a great person to help me level up my business.
• Great to understand how to better manage a setter and what to aim for
• No longer need to speak to people and have a systemised way to book leads.

Cons:

• Very little support
• Setter wasn’t trained on my brand so still required hours and hours of fine tuning messages.

#6. Business Group Coaching High Level Mastermind ￡6k

Pros:

• Can ask questions and be part of a community of those expanding

Cons:

• Not 1 on 1 so wasted money month on month not utilising resources
• Didn’t have anything new just spoke about same processes.
• If you aren’t clear on your niche. Marketing needs to be magnetic to your ICP - ideal client profile. You must be specific

#7. Hiring a Marketing consultant ￡15k

Pros:

• Developed in house systems and SOPs
• Created a unified brand
• Developed a great content strategy for moving forward.

Biggest learnings:

• I need to take more of a responsibility of my brand
• I need to be more clear with which platforms I want to leverage for the business.
• Money is better spent on advertising than content. I really needed to focus on volume to scale up further.

Key learnings overall

• Past credibility doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing today. Ask about recent success
• No one has all the answers, you need to learn from different people to level up your business game
• Organic messaging is key to get right. Once that is working you can scale up with automations, systems and ads.
• Once you find a strategy double down on what works
• Make sure you aren’t complacent and evolving the strategies you have through time

Key areas I’m focusing on now to scale up further.

• Organic Linkedin content that adds a tonne of value to my audience
• Linkedin cold outreach building rapport through systems and personalised messages with a human touch
• 10 step authentic messaging method to move people from a stranger to booking a call with me and the team.
• Email outreach to add value and niche further with my audience
• Core referral systems in place to add more value to those who already have a WOW experience.
• Linkedin Ads - this is currently absolutely crushing it with a 20X ROI in month one. will keep you updated as I want to make sure it’s replicable for everyone before sharing.
• What you measure you will improve, make sure you’re measuring KPIs consistently in your business.

Remember that entrepreneurship is a journey of growth. Here’s to the next year of learnings, I’ll keep you all updated.

Warmly

Ben Ivey

P.s. Click here to download our new guide to to book 5-7 quality calls each week on Linkedin.