The invisible work that made me $35K this week

This week I signed $35K in private coaching.

And none of it came from some groundbreaking new strategy. It came from the invisible work. The boring stuff nobody posts about on Instagram because it won't get likes.

In this episode, I'm breaking down what actually makes you money as a coach - the unsexy backend work that keeps revenue consistent and predictable instead of chaotic and stressful.

If you're always chasing new eyeballs and ignoring what's already right in front of you, this one's for you.

👉 Grab my PDF: How I Launch High Ticket - my full scripts and process for high ticket conversations 

👉 DM me on Instagram - what boring thing are you doing behind the scenes that actually makes you sales? Let me know. 

Transcript

 Okay guys, you are not going to believe what happened to me this week, and I feel it actually is gonna tie in perfectly with what we are gonna talk about today. But I really need to vent this out somewhere and you guys are my outlet. Okay? Oh, so I live in a building that has a co-work space, a meeting room, a dining room, whatever you wanna call it.

Basically a co-working room. And you can book this meeting room through my building, and I did that. I booked the building room for my VIP session with my client, and I really, really love inviting my clients to my home space. Obviously, my clients aren't actually coming into my house, but it's just the apartment building itself.

There's a BIE pool area, there's a little lounge area to kind of sit at. There's a public toilet that's always looked after. And it's just a beautiful vibe, so it saves me from needing to book meeting rooms elsewhere and my clients love it and all the things, it all ticks its boxes. And I've done this everywhere, actually, wherever I've stayed.

When I was back living in Melbourne, we had this huge, huge space where I could host like 20 or 30 people at one time, and I held multiple workshops in that building when I was living in Austin, Texas. I would utilize the building rooms wherever we stayed and have VIP and events as well. So nothing has really changed there.

It's always been my vibe. It's always been the way that I have loved to invite my clients, sort of like into my home space anyway, I had done everything properly. I'd gone through the body corporate. I got approval from the president of the building who I happen to be mates with now. He's just the best.

And I made sure that it was all cleared, you know, all the things. And guess what happened? We are mid session, me and my VIP private client, we are deep in a really powerful conversation. The laptops are open, iPad is out, whiteboard is being whiteboarded on, and this older guy from my building, so a neighbor essentially, who I've only ever had two conversations with barges in without knocking.

It. It wasn't like a barge in door, it was like a slidey door. Slides the door open. There's also a sheer curtain. So he slid the curtain open and he says, what do you think you're doing? And me and my client just look at each other like, is this guy nuts? Like, and she goes, do you know this person? I said, well, I certainly do.

He's a neighbor and he. I wanna remind you, looks me in the eye and he points at the sign on the door and he says, the sign on the door says dining room. That's the name of the room. And proceeds to tell me that this room cannot be used for any other purposes other than eating and having food. I calmly explain to him that we were eating and I showed him our breakfast platter and our coffees.

Excuse me. That we are finished and now we are pre proceeding on. And that also, I had the room approved, that I had everything booked, that everything had been signed off, that I had doubled down on all the things. And he said to me, who approved it? And I said The name, the president of the building. And he declared in an angry shock.

That person doesn't have the authority to make that decision and stormed out. By the way, that decision is to have me. Book the meeting room and I'm like, well, I'm looking to myself. If the president doesn't have the authority to say yes to the meeting room being booked, then who the hell does? Anyway, mind you, some context, I live in a very posh building.

Most of the people that are in the building are older people who have obviously, you know, whatever, like they've, they've been in powerful jobs and roles, or maybe they. Hit gold in the stock market. They're very wealthy people and they just have nothing else to do. I think, I feel like it's come down to this that they have nothing else to do, but to stir up some shit and cause drama.

So me and my client were sitting in shock, in total shock for a moment because it was so bloody rude and so unnecessarily hostile, and honestly just bizarre. But you know what? Like I did take a good couple of minutes to just. Come and check my energy and it's so hard to not get so angry and wanna run after him and just like, ah, and just verbal diarrhea back.

But I, I also had this like client in the room. I was trying to be professional and at the same time, I had to still continue delivering on the day. You know, there was still many, many hours left of the day. In the meantime, this bloody guy just keeps walking back and forth, back and forth. Like I said, it's a slidey door with like a sheer curtain situation, but I could still see his outline walking back and forth, pacing out the front.

And then he finally just stopped and he must have got in touch with the president of the building. And then ever since he has cowered away from any eye contact from both me and Michael. You can imagine when I told my husband he was fuming, I could see his fists were kind of clamping up. And I'm like, don't you even just leave it?

Just leave it. But you know what? What would you do in this situation? Would you just call their apartment and just be like, I need a word, and after reflection and just give them a spray? Or would you just release the energy and move on? I would love to know. Come let me know on Instagram. 'cause oh, I tell you what, it depends on the day, but I, I have these moments where I just fantasize about what I would say to him.

But what struck me afterwards wasn't even his behavior. It was how easy it would've been to let that energy derail that whole day, that whole session. The whole vibes of. Abundance and being who we are meant to be as coaches and purpose-led leaders in this world. And I definitely could have spiraled, maybe I did for a little bit for, for three or four minutes.

'cause my client was like, rubes, are you okay? I am. I am not okay. But are you okay? And then we were just sort of laughing and needed to go for a walk after that. But I also for a split second, kept saying, I'm so embarrassed. I'm so sorry. I'm so embarrassed. And she's like, you've got absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about.

And if I did let it throw me off for the rest of the day, my authority in that moment would've just completely, it wouldn't have been fair on my client for me to have continued in that energy. So you have to just think about the things that are stealing your focus. And obviously this one was right in my face for some reason.

Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a road comment that's been said online. Another thing as well, I woke up the other morning and I am very naughty, naughty. I always check my phone first thing and I've always been that way anyhow, checked my phone, always going through like, you know what sales we are getting overnight, what messages I'm getting open Instagram, check my dms.

Anyway, I had this one particular I'm gonna call, call it a spam account. I'm not sure if it was anyhow, and they had gone through about 20 of my posts and literally left the most terrible comments under each of my posts. Like, go kill yourself. You're a scammer, you're a scam artist. Uh, you know, all these horrible things, like you have no idea what you're talking about.

Go f yourself. Absolutely horrible. Anyway, it reported it to Instagram. Instagram came back to me the next day and said, this person has not breached any of our bullying rules. And I'm like, you guys are just shit. Anyhow, I could have let that ruin my day, my week, my month, and decided not to post anything.

And I think that this is actually the perfect metaphor for what makes a coach or a service provider, and greater than that a business owner. Really have this different view of how we show up, how we protect our energy, and essentially what makes us wealthy and what makes us rich, and what makes us the type of people that are so apart from what you may perceive as the standard world reaction.

And I will say that it's not always the things that you are outwardly thinking of yourself. How you are reacting in that moment. You know, maybe it is someone trying to disrupt you in the room. Maybe it is someone leaving rogue messages all over your socials. Maybe it's a client that just isn't really, you know, your vibe, but you're trying to hold everything together.

So I wanna talk about that because I do feel like there is a through line with whatever it is that's interrupting your energy and you just doing the things that's going to ultimately make you. So abundant, keep you signing clients and essentially keep you in a place where you feel rich both inside and out.

So apart from that sort of crappy start to the week, I went on that week to sign $35,000 in private coaching. None of them, by the way. Came through any sort of groundbreaking new strategy. It came from what I call the invisible work. The kind of work nobody really cares about, the kind of work that isn't sexy.

Like if you shared this work on Instagram in a beautifully done carousel, I can almost guarantee that people will not be interested in this carousel. Therefore, it'll tank and you'll tell yourself that nobody cares about your work because it is actually so damn boring. It's the kind of work that honestly makes sales and for the most part, for the most part, the core things that I'm gonna share with you today, you've already heard.

So let's treat this episode as, okay, like I needed to hear that again. I needed that reminder. Number one, follow up with clients. That is it. One client had emailed me. A few days ago saying that she was really keen to sign up to private coaching with me. So I sent through some information and I hadn't heard back from her in about three business days.

So at that point I went back to her and I said, Hey, hope you're well. Just wanted to check. Did you receive my last email with all the information to do with private coaching? She wrote back and she said, oh my gosh. Thank you so much for the reminder. I've been crazy busy. Like serendipitous. 'cause I also thought, I wonder if Ruby's written back, but I haven't seen anything yet.

So it's a very casual approach to a follow-up. Nothing too scripted, nothing too salesy, it's just I just wanna know that you got the information that you needed. Very clean energy, no weird energy, and it was perfect. It was absolutely done. I actually have a bit of a hot tip there, so if you have, it's a little nuance.

If you use an Alli one platform like I use Kartra, you might use Kajabi, et cetera, it's fantastic because I can often really see the whole history of anyone who's emailed me or what they've bought, and it gives me more context around the type of client that they are. But sometimes, sometimes the all-in-one platforms, their emails kind of get a little.

Categorized into wrong places in people's inboxes. I don't know exactly the full, you know, text speak as to why. But for example, sometimes it can go into spam, it can go into promotions, it can go into the socials folder and it doesn't get seen front and center. So when is something as important as a private coaching invite or inquiry?

I am certainly almost always following up with my Gmail personal account. This puts me at the top of their inbox. It also feels, I feel quite human. There's like a symbolism around that of I'm emailing you from my personal email. It's less systemized, it's more personal, and I've definitely noticed a much higher response rate that way.

The trade off is, is that you don't always get the clean record of that email sitting under the client's file in your CRM, which can matter for tracking an admin, eh, but you know, I think you just need to decide what's more important in that moment, like a pristine backend record. Or actual revenue and personalization of you reaching out to people.

So it's pretty boring in this sense, but I just really want you to follow up with people. Don't take a no response as a no. I really would love for you to start training your belief system that a no is often they've missed it. They're busy, they're living their lives. A lot of my clients have 3, 4, 7 kids.

Like, I'm not even kidding. I have clients who have so many kids in their life. And so many responsibilities that it's easy to miss these emails, so make sure that you follow up. Okay. This brings me to my second point. Some of my strongest private client relationships have actually extended way beyond the interactions in Kartra, the interactions in Gmail, the interactions that we've had in our Zoom rooms.

So the thing that I really wanted to bring to life here is. Things like what makes your relationship have depth? I personally love following my clients on social media, wherever that is, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, sometimes I'm not able to get to everybody, but especially my private clients and my clients and my masterminds.

We definitely make sure we follow each other. And there's some things like there's some private clients of mine who just really value a dumb Instagram chat. I don't know how else to explain this, but it's like we send each other really stupid memes. We laugh at ridiculous reels together. We have these inside jokes from each other's stories.

Sometimes I am literally in tears laughing at something. A client of mine sent me. And other times it's something really factual about manifesting generators or about Sagittarius Sun or a Pisces moon. And whilst all of this might sound really trivial, it's not. That's relationship equity and you cannot always be in person because so many of my clients are based all around the world.

You may as well build a connection in the small everyday ways that is available to you. Now you need to ask yourself, where are the boundaries and what does that look like? But to me, I see it as not just relationship depth, but just having fun. It's playfulness. It brings some fun energy to the business.

You know, like I guess if I think about my time being, working in corporate and being a colleague, I was always that colleague who was arranging to go out for drinks or dinners after work, or gonna play trivia bingo. Like I would always be up for a laugh, a party. If there was some sort of like comedy festival on, I'd be like, guys, we need to get tickets.

Let's all go. Absolutely nothing to do with work. Even if I was their team manager and I had 16 people reporting to me, I'm like, guys, we're all going. We're finishing at four 30. Let's head, you know, so something along those lines of how can you bring that into your business and cultivate the relationships that you currently have with your clients and also clients who have maybe worked with you in some capacity in the last three to five years.

This brings me to my next point around people resigning. With you and how you have that happen. Okay. There's something that always happens in my world. I will have clients who stay with me for a long period of time. Maybe it's three years, maybe it's five years. Then they might take a little bit of a rest, which is cool.

You know, they're integrating them. Might wanna explore other mentors or other areas of business to invest in. But I'm always keeping in touch, like again, linking to that last point. I'm always still sending them stuff or. Just sending them a like on their story or saying hey, you know, every couple of months to keep in touch.

But what is probably one of the most underused revenue leavers in the coaching industry altogether is learning how to resign past clients. These clients, you know, hoping that you've finished well with them, that you've delivered on the things are the clients who already have immense trust in you. How it might work is sometimes I'll just message someone that I haven't worked with in a couple of years and say, Hey, Nicole, I was thinking about you.

Hey Michelle, I'd love to know what you're up to now. There's no pitch, there's no pressure, nothing like that. And very often that conversation naturally leads back into working together again in some capacity. Sometimes it's immediate, sometimes it's weeks and months later. As another hot tip. I always, always write down something that is.

You know, that has really tied us together whilst we were working together. So, for example, that might be, you know, the client that I was working with at the time had a certain type of Asian background and then we were talk, I'm an, you know, I'm an Asian, I've got come from an Asian background and so. We might relate on certain things about Asian families, and I might remember that we might talk about how we both had Cavalier King Charles Spaniels growing up, and then we might talk about that.

So I would just have these little notes on my clients. I could also include their kids' names, their husbands names, who they worked for. What they were building at the time. Uh, you know, like building in their business. But also quite honestly, like some of my clients are like renovating their kitchens and their homes and years later I'll, you know, reconnect with them and say, how did that kitchen reno go?

By the way, did you end up getting those subway tiles put in? And those sorts of things. And they are literally so shocked very often. I feel a lot of coaches, especially the ones that. Always have an abundance of clients, have this ability to really have that people connection alongside whatever it is that they are ultimately helping their clients with.

Like outside of their methodologies and their systems and their courses. They have this human side to them. And the thing is, past clients, what makes it easy to resign them is, you know, they already know your standards. They trust you. They've hopefully had results with you. It's not strange at all to have clients say to me, you know, like, I've worked with other coaches since working with you, and I've never quite had the same results.

Like when I was working with you, I've never, ever made as much money as I have since working with you. I saw an old DM screenshot that I took the other day, and it was a beautiful client of mine and she said. Ruby, I just feel like whilst we've just finished a two year stint together, I need to come back into your energy once every three months because there's no other coach that has this level of energy like you do.

So they already have evidence that I deliver for them in some way. And seeing all your clients resigning is significantly easier than acquiring cold leads off the internet. Most of us, most coaches are programmed to believe that you have to spend 90% of your energy chasing new eyeballs, and almost none of them actually nurture their existing ecosystem.

And that might come in many different reasons and many different forms where you might say, I've only ever had three to five clients. How can I keep nurturing those people? Why wouldn't you? Would be my response. Why wouldn't you? If anything, it would be my entire mo. To look at ways that I can keep these five clients on with me for years and years to come, not just for a three or six month package.

We've gotta think bigger than that. And then from there, I would be saying to them, Hey, if you know one other person that would benefit from my services, can you just let me know just one other person? Or if you know one person that would really love working inside of a course like this, or inside of a mastermind like this.

I would love for you to, you know, pass my details onto them. You would be shocked and amazed by how many great clients you get from that referral process. And I'm so grateful for my clients who have always referred me forward. I think my best client, uh, in terms of referrals. Had brought me in 27 referrals from a very specific part of the world.

And it was so funny because at one stage I had like 35 Danish clients all at once. It was, it was actually the best. It was so fun. Okay, so, uh, next up I've got two more. So we've got five in total. I've got two more backend offers. Now I wanna explain this properly because it is such a key concept. A backend offer is what somebody moves into after they have already bought from you.

So it's either the next level or kind of just this, it's sort of not a great term, but you'll know what I mean. It's like a holding pool. It's where they've finished like six months with you and then they go into this holding space and they, it's not like you're holding them there hostage. You are literally just allowing them to.

Sit in the spa and relax and chill and integrate, but they're with all the right people to do that work. You know? So it's sort of more of that vibe where you put them into a space where they can reflect, they can still have access to you. You are grateful that they, they're still in your world. So in many cases I might have private coaching and a mastermind.

And after that environment, they go into the greater Mastermind chat room, or if someone has a VIP intensive with me, they also go into the mastermind chat room. If someone's done a group program with me, they would go into the mastermind chat room. So I'm, I'm using this as like the same consistent example, and it's not called Mastermind chatroom.

I don't have a product like that, but it is a space where all of my clients go into after having worked with me. Most coaches are obsessing over the front end, so things like how to get the first sale and how to get the first client, but they never design the staircase inside of the business, or this sort of vibey lounge room where all of your clients can sit.

If someone gets a result with you, that is the momentum at its highest. So you want them all to hang out in the room at the same time. And you know what? Like I feel like there's something so important to be in that space. Backend strategy dramatically increases lifetime client value. And if you don't have that, this is a really nice reminder that you can build that out.

Now, this is obviously gonna be, for those of you who already have some clients in your pipeline, you're working with maybe five, 10 clients and bringing them all together would be an amazing offering that you can do. And as you grow over the years, like when I first started, I didn't really have that many people.

But over the years now it's grown and it's been amazing. I, you know, host these like year end sessions called The Great Gathering. And I bring all of my clients in. Anyone who's ever bought from me, they get an invitation at the end of the year. And then we just do a really beautiful wind down setting intentions for the new year.

So think about what can you offer a lifetime client, but also what is lifetime client value to you, and how do you also wanna put that through your business? How does that become something that is a stable part of your business and also a scalable part of your business? Finally, we have to discuss retention.

Retention is not some sort of accidental thing and it's, you know, something that has to be actively worked on. I know that it can get awkward you guys to offer a current client a retention package. And I will say like that's something that over the years I have always been very awkward about, but I've worked on it so much now that it's just become part of the process.

And because it's part of the process, I don't overthink it. If someone's coming close to the end of a, you know, a session with me or towards the end of a package with me, I'm always gonna offer them something else. I never, ever leave going. Okay, bye. See you. Whenever you're ready. I'll, and, and this is how it goes.

Can I just say, it goes like this? So let's say my client's name is Lucy, and I say, okay, Lucy, this is, as you know, our last session. We're just closing off some things, making sure that you are completely set up. How are you feeling? Do you wanna kick on? Do you feel like there's some. Areas that you would love to have further support on.

It doesn't need to look exactly the same way as what we've done in the last six months, but do you wanna just do like one catch up a month for the next three months and we'll have slightly longer sessions, but there'll be more tactical, and is there something that you would wanna look at? So I do have some ideas there for you.

So then she might say yes or no. If she says no, that's all cool. Again, put her into the holding room with everybody else. Let her know that she can still message me anytime. Would love to answer any questions, get to know the others. If she says yes, I would still put her in the holding room so that she can get to know everyone else.

But I would also say something along the lines of, okay, cool. So. These are two areas that I feel we could work on. One is we could build out your podcasting ecosystem and really look at your long form evergreen strategy. We can work that into all the short form you've already got built up. And secondly, I really know that what you are actively working on is building that bridge from low ticket to high ticket.

And this is what we would do. So it's very specific strategies. Again, retention is not. Accidental. You have to create an environment where staying makes sense. And I think a lot of why coaches and mentors don't do this is either they're telling themselves that. It's sort of awkward and the client's gonna come to you anyway if they need something from you.

No, they don't know what they need. Half the time. You need to take the lead and be the authority and the leader, but not in like a really pushy way. Just in a way that shows them what else they can get. What is like, what else is beyond the standard menu? What looks, what it looks like for them, you know, in 12 months time, plant the seeds for them and.

And if you don't know what to offer your client after what you've already done, that's probably showing a limitation in and around your office suite and maybe even your mindset of how far you can help a client go. And if you don't know how to do that, one of the things that I would, you know, definitely have you look at is how often are you celebrating wins with your clients?

How much are you tracking progress with them? Because I feel like if you are able to track their progress to be like, okay, you've. A lot of the times when I'm sitting down with my clients, for example, I'll say, do you know what? This time last year you said that you would love to make $10,000 a month? Do you know that you have just made that three months in a row?

So I'm really good at reflecting that back to them. And at that point, you know, we're celebrating their wins, but they're also suddenly looking at the container that they've been in with you as, wow. Like I've been in the trenches and I haven't even looked up, but I have achieved that goal. And so now I'm ready to go to the next goal of what like 20 K months would look like, you know?

So really help them see what that feels like. Now in a marketing conversation, this is what we would call future pacing. So I'd like for you to future pace, like show them what that looks like. The next level long before. Their next container ends. So when I say long before, it could be something that you start planting seeds around a month before, then two weeks, give them a little reminder, and then on the last call ask them, like, use that example.

Please feel free to, because when you build retention very intentionally, not accidentally, revenue becomes just so much more of a relief. It feels calmer, it feels more predictable. It's not something that. You know, this sense of, oh my gosh, I've got three private clients finishing this month. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

Like if I have a client freak out about that, I'm just like, well, have you not got a retention thing happening here? Because we, that's then what we need to look at. We don't need to look at your front end. We need to look at what are you doing to keep them moving forward in your energy. So if you are looking at your business and you're wondering why income is feeling very stagnant and inconsistent, I want you to ask yourself, how much invisible work are you actually doing to make you rich?

Are you following up? Are you reconnecting with your past clients? Even if it's like sleepings, you know, on Instagram? Are you designing your backend holding space pathways? Are you building. You know, this sort of sense of, okay, retention is more so helping them future pace to see what is possible. So this week when I signed all of my amazing clients, it didn't come from a space where it was all front end.

A lot of it was clients who I've either already worked with, retention, uh, reconnecting with their contracts, um, redoing their contracts and bringing old clients back into my world. But it all came from the boring everyday things that as a coach and a business owner I'm doing behind the scenes and it's all in very unseen places.

Okay, so. Just like the very unsexy parts of running an online space and running a business in general that I think, you know, if anyone ever says to me, you're so lucky, or you just have the hype, you just have the following. I can honestly say hand on heart. Well, yes, but do you know that most of my income comes from the very unseen stuff and the invisible things?

So before you jump off, I wanna ask you something. If you are getting value from this podcast, can you please leave me a review? Wherever it is that you're listening, you could literally just have like a one sentence and uh, just sort of tell me why you love this podcast. It would be so, so appreciated, and I've just chosen to actively ask.

It's always so awkward, but I'm gonna actively ask. In this next season because it genuinely helps get this into more coaches' ears. And if you are here, I know that you care about building something sustainable. And I know there's so many others out there who do too. But I have no idea that this podcast exists.

So that would go such a long way. Also, please go to the show notes and grab my PDF how I launch high ticket. If you want to know how I approach people, what it is, I say exactly my entire process. This is the PDF that you need. It's uh, literally the behind the scenes. Like I just wanna really wanna warn you.

It is like my actual document, so you'll be getting Google Doc, like you'll see the screenshots. It's nothing highly designed whatsoever, so it is super affordable. It walks you through my full scripts. How I structure high ticket conversations. And if you've ever wondered what I actually say, it's in there.

Okay? So make sure you go and grab that. It's something that I know will absolutely change the way that you are approaching your high ticket private client conversations as well. I want you to remember this, wealth in coaching is rarely built in the spotlight. It's built in the boring, it's built in the unseen.

It's built in the casual reconnections that you have with people who have already loved being in your world, okay? You never know. That meme that you send today to a past client is exactly what needed to have happened. To open up doors, new doors, referral doors. You never know where it's gonna take you, but do it with intention, do it with authenticity, and I just really am so excited to see what you do with this information.

Do the invisible work, because the invisible revenue is what follows in the best possible way. I'll catch you in the next one. Love you guys so much, and yeah, I'll see you then.