A Minimalist Approach to Online Business - How we DOUBLED our revenue!

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I’m Sunny Lenarduzzi. Welcome to The Sunny Show weekly newsletter for the bright side of being your own boss and building your own life. My definition of being your own boss means showing up for yourself so you can show up for everyone and everything else, personally and professionally. So, congratulations on showing up, boss. I promise to support you on your journey with every single episode. Let’s begin...

What do lemons have to do with building a multimillion dollar business? Well, I have a glass of lemon water every morning. And every morning when I slice the lemon and squeeze the lemon, I squeeze the lemon for every last drop. And that is one of the key ingredients to creating a minimalist approach to online business. A couple of years ago, I decided to shut down entire wings of my business and stop doing all of the things, which at the time felt really terrifying because I had whole parts of my business that were running and operating but also making me feel really exhausted and depleted.

So I went from doing one-on-one work and agency and all this stuff, I'll share more in a second, to creating a 100% online course business. And at the time I was terrified, I didn't know really how it was going to go about it and what this transition was going to look like. But now looking back, it was the best thing I ever did, and I want to break down exactly how I approached it, and how by switching to a minimalist approach to my business, we doubled our revenue from 2.7 to 5.4 million in one year.?

Before I get into how exactly I created a minimal business, I wanted to just show you what my business looked like in 2018, as I was slowly starting to make some changes and transition out of just a lot of chaos, and trying to do everything and do too much. So in 2018, I had one online course, I had one-to-one clients, and I was doing everything, and customizing my work, and customizing my feedback for each individual client. And it was wildly time consuming.?

So I ended up trying to figure out how to scale this one-on-one business, and I figured, "Okay, if I can just train people to be a second me, then I can have them work with my clients." And to be honest, it sounds like a great idea in theory, but it turned into just more people to manage and even more touch points with my clients that made things more confusing, more overwhelming, and required even more of my time. And then I did a Done For You Agency for a few very well-known clients. I won't say who they are, but some of the biggest of the big names came to me and said, "Hey, we'd love for you to just do this for us." And I thought, "Okay, if you'd like me to do that, I'll do it because you're a big deal." Also a great mistake that I made because that again just required so much of my time, and I was just getting more and more spread thin, and I had 20 people on my team at the time.

So what does it look like today and how have I made significant changes? So, two online courses, and one of them, the Authority Accelerator, creates 95% of our revenue. YouTube for Bosses is 5% of the revenue, full transparency. So I have shifted the model, and that is all that makes up our revenue at this point. And it's so simple, so streamlined, so easy, and our impact and results are far greater than what they've ever been before, and 12 people on my team. So I minimized the team down to 12 and super efficient. We refer to everyone on the team as a Swiss army knife because everyone knows how to do each person's job. And that makes us a really lean, mean tiny but mighty machine. And I'm way happier, if you can't tell. So that's the difference in what it looks like. Now, let me show you exactly how we did it.

Step number one was really getting clear on who I didn't want to work with, which I know sounds a little bit weird, but who I did want to serve and who I didn't want to serve. And I realized that through a lot of experimenting and testing, and the big thing that I figured out was that I didn't want to work with people who are solely in it to build an audience, I wanted to work with people who were going to use their unique expertise and their unique genius to really create an impact. And that doesn't require you having a massive audience.

So getting clear on the fact that I wanted to work with service-based entrepreneurs, I didn't want to work with people who necessarily sold physical products, even though I could. And I think one of the biggest lessons for me that I often tell my clients is, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And that is the mess that got me into having a Done For You Agency, doing one-on-one work, having too big of a team for me at the time, and trying to do everything, and spreading myself so thin, and really getting laser focused on just the things that I wanted to do. And the way that I wanted to show up created so much more space for me, and it attracted the best clients. I love my clients and I don't know how many people can say that. And I'm at a place where I can be very particular about who I work with.

So I think a big piece is not just who's your ideal client, but who is your client that you never want to work with, and you don't want to work with?

Getting clear on that is just as important. On that same note, the second step was less clients, less work, and more value. So what I mean by that is I had this thought process in my head that if you're a real entrepreneur, you're working all the time and you're taking everything that you can get.

What I really came to understand is that the smartest and the most successful entrepreneurs are very choosy when it comes to the work that they do and the impact that they want to make. I realized that by trying to do everything, and saying yes to everything, and feeling just lucky to be here and lucky to be asked to do anything, I was really doing myself a disservice. But more than that, I was doing my clients a disservice because I was exhausted. I wasn't really able to put my all into the things that I did really want to do. And so instead of me doing the work for clients, I realized that every client had the same strategy that I was applying for them. And I'd created this signature strategy that I could use for anyone who wanted to work with me. It didn't matter what they wanted, I pretty much had a method or a strategy to get them where they wanted to go.

So I reverse engineered it and I realized I don't necessarily have to be doing this for my clients, and I don't know if I want the clients who require and depend on me to do it for them. I think I want to work with people who are going to take this, implement it for themselves, and have me more so in the position of giving them that advice, consulting, really making high impact decisions with them instead of doing the mundane work that I really shouldn't be doing, and ensuring that they're equipped with the tools that if I left and something happened to me, God forbid, they could still use the strategy and be very successful with it. And that's really when I fully dove into and committed to creating an online course business. So, that was really step two.

Number three, I stopped marketing so hard, which sounds super weird considering I'm known as a marketer. And what I mean by that is I really got clear and intentional about how I was showing up, and where I wanted to show up, and where I didn't want to. So I used to have a podcast, and I really enjoyed doing it, but at the same time, just looking at the stats, it wasn't providing the return for me that made it worthwhile considering how much time it took for me to create the content. So I stopped and shut down the podcast. I decided to take a lot less time out of my day in a week to be on social platforms. And I really just focused on the ones that allowed me the biggest return without a lot of effort.

So YouTube and email marketing to this day are our top two. And it's also why I am not on TikTok and I'm not on Clubhouse, because I don't want to be a content machine. I've been in that position before and I can tell you that it became so exhausting that I felt like I wasn't actually able to do the thing that truly is at the core of marketing my business, which is getting really phenomenal and transformational results for my clients, because I know that before social media even existed, I used to grow my business just by word of mouth. And I did that for a couple of years. I didn't have a brand, I didn't have followers, and I've watched our clients without any brand or followers be able to grow successfully by really focusing on transformation and on client results.

So if you have that, marketing happens on its own. You're going to get new people coming into your services, your products, whatever it may be, because you're the best of the best. So marketing, I see it as a great tool and a vehicle, but I don't really want to be on social media, 24/7. I don't really want to be a marketing whiz at every single platform, I want to really own and dominate the ones that I'm good at and get the biggest return and squeeze the lemon for every last drop of the things that I actually do want to focus on.

Next thing is minimizing expenses. So I recently again talked about this when I talked about financial freedom, but I will use things until they fall into the ground. So this computer I've had since 2015, and I will use it until it breaks. And it's the only thing that I really have running my business, and in terms of team, and expenses, and subscriptions, and all of those things, I constantly audit what is actually necessary, and I create cash flow wherever I can, and I cut down expenses wherever I can, because I know that cash flow and profits, that's the key to security in any business. And you always want to be focusing on that, runway and building runway in your business so in case you have a time when you want to pivot things, or you want to change things up, or you want to transition your business, or you have a hard month, or you need to take some time off, you have security.

And focusing on the basics of what makes a good business and really focusing on client results, all of this has allowed me to shift my business from the 2018 model to the 2021 model and grow our Authority Accelerator program from zero to nearly 2000 clients in just two years, which is crazy. So,? I am at a place now where I just know what's necessary and what's not. And I think the biggest thing that I want you to take from this is really focusing on what's the lemon and how much can you squeeze out of it, and thinking about every single thing in your business as the lemon and how many drops you can get out of that one lemon.

Because when you think about things that way, you don't focus on the unnecessary, you only focus on what's necessary.

So if you're at a place where you're like, "I'm so ready to shift and make my business more minimal and simplistic," and you're a service-based entrepreneur, click the link below and apply it to speak to my teams so we can support you in that journey. We'll see you in the next one. Bye!

To apply to the Authority Accelerator today, please go to: https://sunnylenarduzzi.com/apply