The Surprising Offer Strategy That Skyrocketed My Coaching Business

I'm Kinsey Machos, your host and founder of the category Queen. Welcome to the podcast for coaches, consultants, and course creators who don't just want to dominate their niche, but they desire to play in their own league. My mission is to help you unlock the power of your unique brilliance and use it as a vehicle to gain recognition, reach more people, and make more money. Not too long ago, I took a bold leap, leaving behind a six figure corporate salary with nothing more than a used MacBook and a burning desire for more freedom. Today, our brand has become globally recognized, helping thousands of female founders to become industry leading experts. Join us each week as we go on a journey together to discuss mindset, marketing and money, and more importantly, the real life discussions about balancing success with motherhood and marriage.

Because we're a community of women who build and scale impact driven businesses, but do it without sacrificing the things that matter most to us. Welcome to the category queen show. Hello my fellow category queens. So excited to be here with you today. I hope you are having an amazing week. Now, if you are somebody that is about to launch a new offer, having a hard time selling your current offer, you're considering a new offer. I want this message to really land where it needs today because it's so powerful. It really profoundly changed how I think about offers and how I think about business. And it's going to help you shift into a new way of thinking so you can also create bigger leaps in your business, but not in a way that is going to sacrifice your own well being.

This is a consistent message from me that you're going to continue to hear. Because I think that too many women are doing too many things in their lives and their businesses. And I really want to continue to be proof that you don't have to do all the things to create those unimaginable results. And anytime I'm in a season of doing too much or overwhelm, I'm just continuously reminding myself of my own core principles, because we're all guilty of this. We're all guilty of doing too much and becoming the yes person and sort of getting off track. And so whatever season of business you're in, I know that you're going to find some golden nuggets in here and encouragement just to continue to stay the path of simplicity.

So one of the things that I see too often when it comes to offers is believing that more offers equals more revenue. Now, in a minute, I'm going to give you the mindset shift that really changed everything for me in relation to how I think about my offers. But I want to quickly go over what the precursor of this was for me, and also just the mistakes and the beliefs that I continue to see women make and believe that puts them into just working really hard and also under earning. And no doubt this constant theme of more offers equals more revenue gets people spiraling fast. So I want to bust that for you. And there's several ways I'm going to do that, not just in this episode, but I'm going to link up to additional episodes that will continue to anchor this principle.

But I recently did an episode really breaking down Chick fil A's business model that hit on this idea of less is more. So you can really start to believe that for yourself. I think that it's really fun and fancy to hear things like that, and I'm sure you're probably in agreement that less is more. And yet we continue to either subconsciously combat that or our patterns and our habits don't necessarily align with that philosophy. And so we just have to consistently check in with ourselves, really monitor our behaviors and our habits to really ask the question, do I actually believe this to be true? Because that's the truth that we can have or not. You can continue to believe that more equals more, but I just ask the question, is it serving you? And we just have to constantly challenge our own beliefs.

And so when it comes to offers, it's no different. And one of the core beliefs that we need to really sit into is less is more and that more offers does not equal more revenue. Now, one of the other challenges before I get into this offer mindset shift that I had for myself that is going to be so profound for you is that as women actually become better at marketing and selling, it's actually harder to stay disciplined and focus. And I see this all the time in my peers. And also, again, I have been here. And when opportunities start to present themselves everywhere, you are going to have a harder time staying on that course for your current results, like what you have on your vision board, like what you see for your business, it's going to actually become easier to create more opportunities.

Once you start to understand the fundamentals of business, how to market, how to sell, how to create a result, then you are going to start to literally see opportunities everywhere. It's like, oh, I could sell this, or I could put on a retreat for my clients and do this, or, ooh, I'm going to host a live event, or, oh my gosh, I'm going to come out with this, like, physical product or this app. Like, there's so much. And as visionaries, this is what we're best at. We're best at coming up with ideas, but we have to really check ourselves, because the more that we try to do at any given time, the less focus we're going to have. You've probably heard the saying, where your attention goes, energy flows.

And so if you're just constantly putting all of or separating all of your energy into these different little buckets, let's say those buckets are offers, then you're going to get a diluted result. And instead of creating one giant quantum leap, you might get minuscule traction across several different segments of your business. Why would we want to do that to ourselves? Again, we're crazy humans. Our brains are wild. And as visionaries, we're really untamed, if you will, kind of like those wild horses. But here's another mistake that I commonly see, and again, I find myself in these same thought patterns. So this is no judgment, no shame here, but there's a belief that because my current offer isn't selling, then I should create a new offer. And a new offer will solve the problems of my current offer.

And that is, again, so far from the truth. What happens is the same challenges that exist with your current offer will 100% carry with you to the next offer. So it's really important to clean up your mind and also clean up the strategy of your current offer before you hop to the next. And I always ask the question when people are considering a new offer, is, if your current offer was super successful and you were making millions of dollars with this current offer, what would your decision be about something different? What would you be doing differently? We always have to put ourselves in that future state and really commit to the plan that you intended to create.

If you intend to create seven figures with this one offer, then commit to that plan and give yourself permission to then reevaluate or reassess what your options are after you've hit that milestone. But I'm telling you that challenges will move with you. And oftentimes, it's not necessarily an external challenge. It's typically a subconscious belief that you just kind of, that is kind of like your shadow, and it's just following you as you're implementing these new strategies and new offers. And so it's just a constant cycle of trying to gain momentum, lose momentum, gain, lose, instead of, again, that really steady progress. So those are sort of bigger bucket items that I'm seeing mistakes and beliefs around offers and why people are creating new offers consistently or not giving the offers that they have the chance.

And I, like I said, I've been here and done this, but what happened was several years ago, when we started to really grow, I had to get more organized with our finances. And so our profit and loss statement started to be separated by offer. And you start to see your offers very differently. And that is what really changed for me, because what happened was I started to see my offers as each separate businesses. So each offer was like its own business. Because if you think about a profit and loss statement, each offer is going to show, right, what the margins are on that offer. Because each offer is going to have its own expenses, its own lift, its own operational infrastructure, its own revenue that's being generated just for that offer, right? Like there's all these line items on a profit and loss.

And when you start to divide it up by offer to see where your results are coming from and to really manage the bottom line, it is so eye opening. And this is the shift that I want to offer you. How differently would you treat your offers if you saw them as each an individual business? Because that's what they are. Each offer requires its own marketing strategy, its own selling strategy, and its own operational strategy. And what happens is when we create offers like we change our underwear, we forget to acknowledge the fact that every time we create this new offer, it also requires the time, the energy and the money to get off the ground, to maintain, to get people results within that offer and continue to grow. And I feel tired even saying it right.

And I think I've had to experience it the way that I did because I feel very resistant to new offers, knowing how much time and energy goes into them. But too often it's sort of like this willy nilly decision and not enough thought being put into it. But as you start to dissect the individual units of an offer, you start to really open your mind up about what's required of you and what is going to, what are the consequences going to be of this new thing. Too often we see new offers as shiny objects. It's like, ooh, this is going to fix my problems. This is going to be it. And we forget to really see what the consequences of that are.

Now, some of the things that I did here was to pull, I pulled some data and stats because I just think it anchors this concept a little bit better than me just being a talking head and telling you not to create new offers all the time. But if you were to start thinking about your business as an actual company and your offers as little business units within that, then there's also data that can support this idea that will help you really evaluate. Do I have the time, the energy and the money to launch this new thing?

Whether it's a retreat, a course, a membership, a high ticket experience, whatever that looks like, if you really go through this process and understanding, ooh, this is going to cost me here, there and here, you will become such a better decision maker and you will avoid so much pain in the process because you're becoming more thorough in how you make your decisions. And really putting on that CEO hat now, in order to really, again, put our CEO hat on and think like a business owner, here's some stats that can just paint this picture a little bit more logically, if you will. So, according to a survey by the CMO survey, the average marketing budget for a company is around 11% of their total budget.

However, for new products or services, the marketing budget can even be higher, often ranging from 20% to 50% of the total expected revenue. Now, you might be thinking, well, I don't have a marketing budget or I don't spend money for marketing. If you're not investing in paid ads or anything like that's totally fine. This is not what that message is for. What I'm trying to get you to see is that these large scale companies understand that in order to get a new offer off the ground, it is going to cost them more. The data shows it, and it will cost you. Now, that may not be in like the actual paid ads or you again, cost you from, you know, you might not see that on your line item, but you absolutely will see it in time and energy. And time is money, right?

If you are making, you know, if you put a dollar amount on each hour that you spend working, let's say that's $1,000 an hour, then you marketing for this offer and you're spending, you know, 10 hours a week marketing for this new offer, that's $10,000. Now, nobody wants to acknowledge that because we just think, well, if I do it doesn't cost money, but your time is the most valuable. So that's how I want you to start thinking about that. And based on that data that I just shared, you will know that newer offers cost more from a marketing perspective, even if it's just meaning your own time. Now, another interesting stat here is that a study by the product Development and Management association, the PDMA found that the average time to market for a new product is about two and a half years.

So this is a relation to time to market. So how long does it take for you to get an offer to the market? Now, again, we have the advantage as online business owners to literally wake up one day and be like, I have a new offer. There's not a lot of, in theory, there's not a lot of things that we have to do in order to be able to do that. Especially if you think about a physical product, right? Think about your offers as physical products. How much time is needed for research and development and testing and preparing the launch of that physical product? Well, even though we have the advantage of not having the nuances of time to market for as physical products, you still have to put it through the lens of a new product, right? Even if it's digital.

And if you think about how long it takes a quality product to get to market, right, I just want you to think differently. Like, if I just launched this thing, is it going to be quality? Is it going to be on brand? Is it actually going to serve my clients? Is it something that they want? And think through that process. If you were to think about it through the lens of a CEO, again, you would just holistically be realizing that there's all these little nuances within that need to be considered. So do you want to invest your time and energy in that new product?

Even if it's not two and a half years, maybe it's six months or three months, can you afford to put your energy into that while also understanding that you likely have other offers that need to be marketed, sold and launched? Again, remember that each offer is its own business. And so if you shift your time, energy, money, investment focus from one offer business to the next offer business, what happens to one of the businesses? One of the offers, if you don't have rhythm in that offer, if it's not getting clients results, if it doesn't have an automated processes around it, if it's not selling consistently without you, if it's not being marketed consistently, if. If it's not bringing in clients right, then what happens is you just killed that part of the business.

And so we have to really think about before we ever launch a new offer, do the offers that I have already, are they working? And then within that, when it comes to even the operational complexity of that, I found a data point from at Kearney, who did a study, and they found that there was a 20% increase in product complexity that led to a 10% increase in supply chain costs. So what this is telling us is that the more complexity, the more things, the more nuances that we have in our offer suite at the macro level, right? All offers, and also individually to each offer, the more increased expenses that we're going to see, right? And this isn't just financially. I am like finances come below time and energy for me, right?

If I am dead at the end of each day and I am grinding each day, and I'm energetically, totally misaligned and not fueled, then I don't care how much money I'm bringing in. And so when you think about costs, and even in the larger context of this conversation, I don't want you to just think about the financial component. It's so much more than that. And I think you're likely, like me, that you value money and, sorry, time and energy above money. And let's be honest, when you're high energy and you're in alignment with your time, and you are rested and relaxed and rejuvenated, you will always make more money.

But ultimately, if you think about each business unit, each offer unit, if you will, in context to each offer being a business, right, each offer has its own marketing and sales, its own delivery and fulfillment, its own systems, its own customer experience. And the more complexity within that, then were naturally going to see an increase in expenses. But too often were not looking at that, because youre either not at the level where you need that much visibility into your numbers quite yet, or you are and you aren't operating in that way. And it's really important to understand what your most profitable offers are. Another interesting study related to opportunity costs also helps us really depict this picture around less is more.

But a study by Bain and company found that companies that prune their product portfolios can experience sales growth of three to 5% and profit gains of ten to 14 15%, which ultimately suggests that by focusing resources on fewer high performing offerings, they can lead you to better overall business results. And again, you're probably like, well, duh. And yet, just as obvious as this is, we're continuing to do more and more. And this isn't even just in relation to new offers. This is in relation to how you sell the offers, the funnels that you put in place, all the different strategies that you're trying. If you start to put this conversation in that context, also you will start to find all the waste. Where do you need to focus more time and energy and money into doing less?

And when you have less offers, this is also going to help you solidify that piece, too. Now, I also want to share that Procter and gamble into the early two thousands, they were struggling with that product complexity. They had a lot of products across various categories, which ultimately led them to increase cost and reduce efficiency. And so in response to that, what they did was they looked at the 80 20 rule, right? What 20% of our products are creating the 80% of our results. This goes back to the ten x effect, right? If you haven't already read the book, you have to read it. I'll link up to the episode where I talk about it, but this idea that ten x is easier than two x. And this is literally the summary, but I can't even do the book justice.

You just have to read it. Everybody that reads this book is always mind blown. But it's about doing less but doing it better, right? But too often, we don't even know what we should do less of and what we should double down on. And so when you look at where are 80% of my results actually coming from, you could apply this to your offer, but you could also apply this to your marketing and your sales selling. You will start to really see where your biggest opportunities are. And this is what P and G did, right? They looked at where most of their results were coming from and significantly downsize their products.

It says here that they discovered that out of their 80 categories and 300 brands, only ten categories and 23 brands were generating over 50% of their sales and more than 90% of their profits. That is insane. That is so insane. But we find this even in our own P and L. I'm like, oh, my gosh, why am I even putting all this time and energy into this over here when all my results are coming over here? And again, I just want to reiterate that this sounds so obvious, but until the numbers are right in front of you, until it's probably explained in this way, you're likely just not thinking about it in this way. And that's totally okay. This is exactly why I'm doing this episode.

So as I started to see my offers as individual business units, I really was so much more thoughtful about my time and my energy and my money and what I wanted to spend that on. And truthfully, because I have such a full life, I have to be extra careful about the things that I introduce in my business. I want to maintain a super lean, profitable business and something that doesn't require more than 25 hours a week from me. Does that mean that I'm going to make less money? Absolutely not. And in fact, I find that the less that I work, the more money that I make. And it's because we have to double down on this 80 20 principle and really understand where our efforts are best utilized and where we should be focusing our time.

And so here's a couple questions you can ask yourself to really close this all out. First of all, what does that 80 20 look like for you? So whether that you know, whether you have the actual p and l analytics of something like this, take a look at it through this lens. But if you don't, you should be able to at least know and even just write some notes on a piece of paper. Now that you have this context, I bet it's actually becoming a little bit more obvious, like where your 80% of results coming from. Apply this to your marketing strategies, too. Right? And really think about, well, where are my primary leads coming from? Okay, awesome. How can I actually double down on that? Instead of introducing a new platform or a new funnel or a new random strategy?

If you want to do less, that just means do it better. And until you have the act, like the extra or additional resources to support you in doing more, then just get more out of what you're doing. And that's how we do less. So figure out what that 80 20 looks like for you. Also, really think about, like, what do you want to be known for? I often find people just introducing these new offers, and it's kind of out of alignment with what their true zone of genius is. And so it's a distraction. It's also going to dilute the message, dilute their audience, and so go back to, like, what do I ultimately want to be known for? But also, who is my best fit client and what offers serve them?

This is another challenge that we have as service, like service based entrepreneurs or heart center entrepreneurs. We just want to help everybody. But the truth is you can't with your paid offers now with your content and, you know, with the money that you make, you can contribute those extra, you know, finances to charities or whatever. But you're not a nonprofit. And if you're trying to help everybody, you are going to be the first one to burn out. And so when you think about the clients that bring you life and bring you energy and the ones that are best fit for your highest level of brilliance, make sure you design your core offers around that. That is going to be the ultimate thing that brings you so much more success than you could even imagine.

Additionally, what offers are not performing well or draining my time and energy. Like, I think we all get into this where we are doing something because we think we have to, and then we're like, but why am I even doing this? So ask yourself that question. Then ultimately ask yourself this. What am I most afraid of? I have to ask myself this question all the time. Anytime we're out of alignment with something, we have to just take a moment and reflect. Why am I doing this? What is this gaining? And oftentimes I find that it's usually, you know, if I'm doing activities or things that are out of alignment with me, it's usually because I'm afraid of something. Something. There's something that I'm afraid of either doing or not doing. This could be for you. Maybe you are.

You've been running a program that you don't want to run anymore. It's completely out of alignment with you, but you're just continuing to run it because you feel like you have to or you're afraid to ultimately discontinue that offer. Maybe you have an idea for an offer that's more in line with your true zone of genius, but you're afraid that it won't sell or you're afraid to try something new. Right? So at the end of the day, when we find ourselves in seasons of not getting the results that we want and we're doing a lot of things to overcompensate that it's typically because there's a fear, there's a belief or a fear that's subconsciously locked into you, that is having you behave in this way, that is forcing you out of alignment with where you're actually meant to be.

So when you ask that question, you can actually uncover a lot, which is more than just offers. So, my friend, I hope this was helpful for you. Really do this audit for yourself. Go back if you need to hear those questions again. But just a reminder that less is absolutely better. Especially if you want a lean, super high earning, super high profitable business that makes an incredible impact to your clients. I promise. It's possible. You don't have to overwork, you don't have to under earn. Alright my friends, I will see you next time.

Hey, if you're ready to stand out online and get paying clients consistently without having to fumble your way through tech run ads or create complicated funnels, I want to invite you to join us in the category queen school, where you're going to learn my simple, proven formula for getting clients online. It's risk free. You either make your money back or we'll give you a refund fund. Just head over to kinseymachos.com/theCQschool, and join today to get instant access. We'll see you inside.