Re-Release 01: (Ep. 57) Why You Need to Focus Your Offers

Before we dive in, I have an important announcement to make. It has been an amazing, beautiful, hectic whirlwind of a few months for me and my team at Hello Seven. We worked our asses off to launch the book in May. And thanks to you, all of my faithful listeners, readers, and friends in the Hello Seven universe, we made it a bestseller and it’s having an impact on so many.

From the bottom of my heart thank you so much for all of your support. But to be very honest with y’all, mamma is tired, okay? I need a break and I believe that rest is a revolutionary practice that all of us, and especially Black women, need to reclaim. So I am going to be taking a break from the Hello Seven Podcast for a little while. But don’t worry, in July we’ll be re-releasing some of our favorite OG very best episodes and I will be back with a vengeance in the fall.

Do you feel like you are stretched way too thin? You’re trying to cram 100 tasks into your schedule every day and you never finish everything, and you always feel behind and late and discouraged? You’re probably trying to sell five different offers and services and your brain is pulled in so many directions.

You’re constantly launching something new because your previous launch didn’t go that great and you need to make some more extra money. Or you’re constantly working but you never feel caught up. You feel like there’s just not enough of you to go around. You feel like you’re doing 10 things in a mediocre way, rather than doing one thing with excellence and you’re not making as much money as you want.

If that sounds familiar, if that’s you, this episode is the medicine you need because we’re going to talk about why you need to focus, simplify, and edit. And how, when you do this, you will immediately start making more money.

Welcome to the Hello Seven Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Rodgers, wife, mother of four children, a lover of Beyoncé, coffee drinker, and afro-wearer, and I just happen to be the CEO of a seven-figure business. I am on a mission to help every woman I meet become a millionaire. If you want to make more money, you are in the right place. Let's get it going.

What I want to do is start with a story about my own business and my own journey from going from unfocused and overextended lawyer making, you know, less money, to a lawyer making a lot more. So, I want to talk to you about how you can really increase your income by focusing. Because focusing is really the beginning of so much growth.

So, let me tell you something. In the early days of my law practice, I had 17 million different services. I was not focused. I was all over the place doing lots of things pretty well but not doing anything with excellence. And the things that I was selling are things like contracts and business formations and copyright and licensing deals. And I would take litigation and I would take the occasional family law case.

And so, I was saying yes to everything. And that’s normally how it is. In the early days of your law practice, you say, or in any business, you say yes to a lot of things. Every opportunity that comes your way you’re like, “Yep, I’ll take it. Yep, you want to put me in front of clients, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

But what happens is, in order to grow, you have to start saying no because you get too busy. You’re pulled in 1000 different directions. It’s incredibly hard to systematize your business because you’re trying to do so much and it’s hard to create systems for 17,000 offers. And so, you suffer and you get overworked and you get exhausted.

And I call business owners at this stage busy bees because that’s where you’re at. You said yes. Your business is really starting to work. You might have hit 100K, but you are busy AF and you’re not making nearly as much money as you want to be making.

And so, the solution is simplifying and focusing. And what I found in my practice was that I was doing all of these different things and I was just exhausted and I felt like I was doing everything pretty well. But again, nothing with excellence. I didn’t feel like I was working as amazingly as I could because I was doing too much.

And I wanted to be better. And I wanted to make more money. And I wanted to have life be more simplified. So, I did a couple of things. There were stages to this focusing.

So the first stage was I decided to take all of the services that I offered, contracts and business formations and trademarks and copyright, and I would put it all into one offer and I called that my annual program.

And so, instead of selling people one-off trademarks or one-off contracts or one-off copyright registrations, I would invite them into hiring me as their attorney for the whole year. And so, I would handle their trademark, and their business formation, and their contracts, and all of those things, but I would do it under my annual program where they paid for the year.

And it was like $1000 a month was the starting place. And then there was a $2000 a month level and a $3000 a month level. And so, it was like pay this monthly fee for the year and I will take care of the most immediate things and I will take care of all of the other things that are key to laying that business foundation for your company. And I will be available in between for like unlimited legal consultations. And so, that was my offer.

And that was where the majority of my income came from and that’s what enabled me to start to systematize my business and really streamline and simplify. And so, that was great. And that went really well for a while. And that really enabled me to scale my law practice.

And so, a couple of years later though, I had launched Small Business Bodyguard, which is my digital product that made me money while I was sleeping and it was a really successful launch. And it helped entrepreneurs lay the foundation, the legal foundation for their businesses, but to do it DIY, with contract templates and instructions and all of that. So, we had that product.

Then I had annual programs. And then I just kept saying yes, even though I had these two great ways to simplify. Small Business Bodyguard as one offer, and then my annual program which is done for you, and Small Business bodyguard was the DIY, right?

And if I would have left it at that I probably would have been in much better shape. But a trademark litigation case would come in that could bring in thousands of dollars, and I would say yes. And sometimes I would say yes for the money. Sometimes, I would say yes because I felt bad for the client and I didn’t want to say no. And so, I just kept taking on additional things outside of the annual program and outside of Small Business Bodyguard.

And I remember one year, my team and I, we went to the Ace Hotel and we decided to look at all the data. We were doing some planning. It was the end of the year. And so, we went to the Ace Hotel, I don’t know if you guys have been there, in New York. They have a great lobby that has co-working space, basically. And you sit there and you sip coffee and you get your work done. Remember how that used to be?

So, anyway, years ago, that’s what we did. We went to the Ace Hotel. We set up shop. We got our coffee and we started looking at the data in the business and really seeing how much were all these different offers actually making us, all the different things we had done over the course of the year?

And when we looked at it first of all, we didn’t even realize we were selling so many different things until we actually stopped to like gather the data and really look at it. And then, we looked at for each month of the year, how man of each of these things did we sell? And then, you know, for the overall annual revenue, what percentage of our revenue is coming from Small Business Bodyguard? What percentage of our revenue is coming from our annual programs? What percentage of our revenue is coming from random litigation that we’re taking?

And when we looked at it, we found that the things that we were hustling the most for and working the hardest for actually brought in the least amount of money over the course of the year. And the things that were way simpler, and part of the reason why they were simpler is because we had a ton of experience with it, we had streamlined it, we had systematized it. Or it was my digital product, Small Business Bodyguard, which was another example where selling that thing was easy for us and we made a lot of money doing it.

And that was the light bulb moment for me. That was when I realized that I didn’t need to sell 17 things to make good money and to make ends meet. I actually could sell just one or two things and make all of the money I needed to make.

And so, I decided to focus. And so, sitting there at the Ace Hotel with my team we decided to cross all of those things off the list. You know, like that one-off license agreement that we did where there was a ton of research involved, there was a lot of back and forth with the client. We got the client great results, but we made, you know, $3500 for an enormous amount of work. Whereas when it came to trademarks, we sold a lot of those and they made up the majority of our practice and the majority of our revenue and it was relatively streamlined. And we had figured out a great process for it.

So, we were like, “Why are we selling licensing agreements? Why are we selling all of these random things? We need to streamline the hell out of this practice.” And so, that is what I did. I wish I could tell you that I chose just one offer and went all in. I did not. I chose two.

So, I went from 17 to two, which is a vast improvement. But I know that my practice would have grown even more and life could have been even better for me back then if I would have stuck with one. But I chose two. And those two were trademark services and Small Business Bodyguard.

And so, at the end of that year, I went all in on my digital product and I went all in on trademarks. And I say all in, but I still had two offers, so I still was divided in terms of time and energy because I had to do launches for Small Business Bodyguard and then I was also creating content and videos and all kinds of stuff to promote my trademark services.

And so, my house was divided. We all weren’t focused on one thing. We were all doing different things. And so, we were still busy, but we were not as busy and as stressed as we used to be.

So, with that, when we focused on trademark services, we raised the price and we decided to sell trademarks and trademarks only in the law practice. And then, in terms of DIY, the only other thing we were selling was Small Business Bodyguard, that we were really pushing. And that was great.

And that simplified things and the practice wound up scaling to $700,000 a year. And that really came from streamlining. And I will tell you, we streamlined, we simplified for a while, and then I started complicating things again. Anybody else relate to this? Where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to get focused. I’m going to get streamlined. I’m going to do one thing.” You do it for a little while and then next thing you know, you start creating more things and launching more crap?

Unfortunately, this happens all too often. So, anyway, I started creating Legal Nunchucks for Coaches and Legal Nunchucks for Photographers and Brand Boss, which was my DIY trademark product. And I started complicating my life again and started getting busy and stressed again.

And then, eventually I just realized, I really wanted to move into business coaching. So many people were asking me to teach them how I was scaling and growing my practice so much. And so, I decided to move into that.

But I have to tell you, here’s the key takeaway. It’s not about the fact that it was a digital offer. It’s not about the fact that it was a trademark. The key thing was that it was one specific offer or, like, a narrower offer. And I just decided to focus and go all in on that. I decided to bet on myself, take a risk, and really commit to one or two offers in my business and not do all the things for all the people.

It’s kind of like people throw a couple of coins your way and say, “Dance fool.” And you’re like, “Okay, I’ll dance for those coins.” And maybe that’s what you have to do in the beginning, but you absolutely don’t want to keep that same energy when you’re looking to scale your business and make more money.

So, really thinking about what would happen if I delete my other offers and focus all of my time and attention on growing this one offer, that is the question that I want you to consider for yourself. Something in your practice or in your business is probably already performing pretty well. And just imagine how well it could perform if you gave it your undivided attention.

And so, again, that’s what I did in my practice, with trademarks particularly. And the streamlining led to more growth, new tax bracket. We made more money. And I think if we would have streamlined even more, we would have made even more money. And the same thing has happened in my coaching practice. When I started coaching and I started transitioning into coaching, I was doing one on one coaching packages. I was doing VIP days. I was doing masterminds. I was creating courses around coaching.

And so, I did it again, 50,000 offers, couldn’t help myself. And that kept me very busy and very stressed and hustling all the time to try to serve my clients and keep them happy. And then again, I had that moment where I was like, “Oh my god, no more. I never want to do this again this is too much.” And I decided to streamline into one specific offer. And that offer was my mastermind, Million Dollar Badass.

And so, I streamlined it to that and I focused on Million Dollar Badass for three years and, you know, my practice grew to a million dollars that first year that I focused my coaching on my mastermind. And we did that for three years.

And now, we’ve transitioned into offering a membership community, and now that is our flagship offer and that is our one and only offer. So, that is the only thing that you see us selling. That is what we’re talking about all day every day. And that is what we’re doing every day to serve our clients. It’s the program that we’re spending all of our energy on.

My entire team is focused on improving and making it better and adding additional benefits and features to that program. And so, we’re not all over the place and our business is growing exponentially. So I’ve had ebbs and flows, right? I’ve had periods of doing too much followed by a period of focus where there was a ton of growth, both in my law practice and with my business coaching.

So, I really want you to consider focusing in your offers. I’m sure you have fears around focusing and I’m sure that you’re convincing yourself that you can’t do it. But I really want to encourage you to give it a shot, right? If you want to become a millionaire, you need to commit and focus. You will not become a millionaire by being a sort of good web designer, right, and a decent piano player and a fairly good life coach who does floral arrangements on the side. We all know those people.

So, you need to pick something, run with it, focus on it, and build mastery, excellence, greatness, okay. You need to pick something and then become the best in the world at that one thing. That is how you will make serious money.

Think about Netflix, think about Peloton. They are the best in the world at one thing, and that is the same thing you can do. If you’re wondering, like, how do I become the best in the world, that’s how you do it. Imagine doing the same thing, really focusing on one thing, getting really amazing at it because that’s all you do every day. That is the kind of stuff, that is the kind of thing that causes, you know, millions to happen, that causes massive growth.

Now, I can already hear y’all complaining and raising a ruckus and saying, “But Rachel, I am multi-passionate. I have so many passions and interests. I can’t possibly pick one thing.” And to that I say, great. Be multi-passionate, in your personal time, friend.

I love real estate. I love travel. I love great food. I love music, I love all kinds of things and I have many passions too. But you don’t see me out in these internet streets trying to sell cooking programs or running a travel agency, right?

When it comes to my business, I focus on one thing, which is teaching women how to build wealth. That’s my thing. I am fully committed. I am all in 1000%. This commitment is what has enabled me to grow my company so explosively.

So, if you want to simplify and focus your business, where should you begin? What is step one? Well, step one is look at your data, like I did way back when. What is your most profitable offer to date? What is the thing that you currently sell that is bringing in the most money? What is your most popular blog post?

Look at the things you’ve written about. What are people really drawn to and what brings all the boys or girls to the yard? What is the free webinar you offered that had way higher attendance than any others? Look closely at that. This could be the topic or the offer that you need to focus on.

So, look at your data. Review it both revenue-wise and even with your content and see what has drawn the most people in, see what customers are most excited about. And that might lead you to the thing that you want to focus on.

Thanks for listening. Now, before you go, it’s an incredibly exciting time here at Hello Seven, that’s because my new book, We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning more, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power, is on bookshelves now. You can pick it up form Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, or your favorite Black-owned independent bookstore.

When you buy, you’ll be getting my playbook on how to make million dollar decisions, how to increase your income right now, no matter what your current profession and no matter what’s going on in the economy. And why earning more money as a woman is not selfish or greedy, but in fact a revolutionary act that brings the economy into balance and creates a better world for all.

Go to helloseven.co/book for more information and links. Go get the book now.