the bossbabe podcast - 285. The Secret to Scaling, Delegating, and Finding More Freedom in Your Business with Natalie Ellis

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Are you ready to make better business decisions and build a wildly successful, scalable business without sacrificing all of your time, energy, and happiness? Then this one’s for you! If you’re offering 1:1 services and you’re doing really well, but you haven’t figured out how to scale yet, you’re not alone! Natalie has received tons of questions from Bossbabes like you about unlocking scale and she’s about to drop some gems of wisdom.On this week’s episode, Natalie shares how you can start fine-tuning your business’s engine, instead of your business model, so you can scale, delegate, and find more freedom as an entrepreneur. If you’re ready to consistently hit and surpass $50k months without working 40+ hours/week, grab a pen and paper and get ready to take notes. Stay tuned for future episodes of The Bossbabe Podcast as we continue unpacking everything you need to know about scaling, delegating, and becoming a high-performing CEO. Highlights: The biggest thing that contributes to consistently growing + scaling your business without working more (it’s something most people never talk about).  The secret to getting into your entrepreneurial flow state and building a freedom-based business.  What you can do right now to make more aligned decisions + drive sales *without* burning out and working more. Links: Join The Société Enroll in Bossbabe’s Influencer School Enroll in Online Launch School Follow: bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie Mentioned in this episode: The Influencer Masterclass: Join bossbabe CEO, Natalie Ellis on a free, 90-minute training to gain full clarity on your personal brand, learn how to create easy, consistent content, build an audience of raving followers + generate revenue, without the stress. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try and get 10% off your first month of therapy at betterhelp.com/bossbabe and get on your way to being your best self.

A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to bounce it all. I'm your host, Natalie Ellis, and this episode might hit real hard. So I have been offering some one-to-one coaching sessions. I joined this app, which is amazing. You can hop in and book 15 to 60 minute sessions with me, just one off.

And I've been doing it because I've been really craving more connection with our community. I love to hop on and just be able to really answer people's questions and unblock where people are at. If any of you are interested, if you go to my Instagram, there's a link in bio where you can get that information. But I want to share this because I've had a lot of people book calls with me and come with a very similar question. And so I thought, you know what, instead of all of you having to book calls, let me do one podcast where I can really go into detail and explain my answer to this problem. And hopefully it's going to really support you. So a lot of people come to me and they're currently running a business where they might be servicing clients at like a one-to-one level. Maybe they're offering services like virtual assistant, graphic design, podcast producing, or they're coaching, consulting

one-to-one. So they're offering these services and things are going well, but they're not necessarily like at, you know, 50K months, let's say they have a business that's doing really well. It's in the six figure mark. They're starting to get consistent. It's kind of up and down every single month. It's not like they've really unlocked scale. I'd say the majority of people are kind of between the 7,000 and 15,000 a month, but that's on a good month. And some months might totally drop down. Some months might boost all the way up. So the reason I said 5,000 is maybe some months they have a launch and it's like a 50K month and then it drops back down. So they haven't fully found that rhythm or that sales machine yet. They haven't unlocked what it really looks like to have that consistent revenue coming

in every single month, not having to even think about where the revenue is coming from. And I point that out because that part's really important, right? Because if you know how much money is coming in every single month, you are then able to make a lot of decisions from that place. So you can start to take a lot of stuff off of your plate and you can hire people as you grow consistently to be able to take on those things so that you're constantly elevating your role into the role of growing the business. And that's really important, but it's really important to be able to have predictable cash coming in, in order to get to that place. Because you know, you can't make a hiring decision to

bring on someone for like 5,000 a month, if that's going to really stress you out and reduce your profit margins because you'd rather you'd be like I'd rather just do that myself and know where my profit's coming from so I share that part because it's really important but a lot of people come to me they're at that level they're offering these services and they say to me okay I'm doing this and it's going well like I'm getting you know better at being consistent with it I'm well, like I'm getting, you know, better at being consistent with it. I'm getting clients, but I'm ready to create a course. And I dig it. And listen, nothing wrong with creating courses. I have sold over $30 million in courses. I love courses. I think they're incredible. And there's a lot that comes with it that a lot of people are not talking about. And I think there's this thing online, like especially on Instagram, where there's these coaches that maybe have had experience selling a course successfully a couple of times. And then

they get on the soapbox and they preach to everyone that everyone needs a course. And that's the freedom ticket that they're looking for. And I just want to come in and say, the freedom ticket that you are looking for is not necessarily going to be a course. And the reason you might think it is, is you might be so drained and exhausted by the current business that you have, right? That you think creating something completely new is your way out. It's your bridge to a way of doing things differently. And that's just not necessarily the case. Let me explain a bit more. So let's say you have an agency that offers digital marketing,

right? And so you're offering services, you have a couple of retainer clients, and you're like, you know what, it's time to create a digital marketing course. Okay, that's great. Right now, you're probably sitting in a seat where you need to be selling clients into your agency, they come in and you either service them yourself, or you have a couple of people working with you who service them for you. So you're in a role of selling and delivering. And if you want to grow the business, you know, you'll need to do more selling and probably more team management to get to that place. If you then add on a course, not only do you need to continue doing what you're doing right now, but then you also need to immerse yourself in the mastery of course land and marketing course, which is completely different.

So it's creating a course. That's great. Then it's creating the funnels and then it's filling the funnels. That's the thing that I think trips a lot of people up. They think, well, if I have a course, then I'm making money passively. Passive income doesn't exist, especially not in this sense. Passive income might exist in a sense of if you've got your money invested, the money that's coming from that might be passive, but passive income in your business just doesn't exist, right? You need to be filling that funnel consistently with traffic,

and then you need to be tweaking and refining the funnel and making sure your conversion rates are dialed in. So if you immerse yourself in that, it might take you a while to really master the traffic in the sales machine. And in that time, you might let down the current clients that you've got, or you may realize you don't have the time to keep selling new people in. And this is what trips a lot of people up. So they end up creating the course and they take the focus off of what's currently working. Both things stop working and they find themselves in a place where they are no better off. In fact, they're worse off than when they started. And that's what I keep seeing time and time again. And that's what

I really want to encourage you to think about is think about what's the one thing you want to do in your business. Like who do you really want to serve and how do you want to serve them? And that's where I want you to spend all of your time. There's not no kind of way to, or no reason to say that you having a course business is going to free you up any more than you having an agency or a one-to-one coaching business or you know a product-based business it's all about the machine you put behind your business that's where the freedom comes from and I think most people don't talk about this because most people haven't got the experience in creating the machine for multiple different types of businesses and so

they might enroll you thinking, saying you need to create a course because that's all they've learned. But actually, you won't really be able to replicate those results if they cannot teach you the machine behind the results. And that's what really excites me is the machine. Because if you have an agency, if you turn that into a machine, there's no reason that you can be, you know, as elevated from that business as you want to be. If you have a desire to have a seven figure business and work 20 hours a week, I really think that's possible. I know it's possible for you. I've done it myself. I've done it for multiple clients. It's very, very possible. There's also no reason that you can't have a course business

that's seven figures and you're working 20 hours a week, right? So I really want you to think about where is it that you want to spend your time? Is it on creating funnels and filling funnels with traffic? Is it creating content? Is it working with clients? Is it selling high ticket? Is it speaking? Like, where do you want to spend your time?

Because that should be the lens that you look through in order to be able to make decisions. Please don't make decisions based off of looking at other people's grass and thinking it's greener. And I say that because I have made that mistake so many times I could not even count at this point. Constantly looking at other people's grass and thinking that it's greener. And what you realize is they have a machine for their business. And what you're probably in envy of is their machine, not necessarily their business model, not necessarily the fact that they have a course, not necessarily the fact that they have a membership, but their business model. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my

new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place, so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet,

now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. And so just to be super transparent with you at Boss Babe, we have a membership called The Society, which is amazing. We have our courses, mainly influencer school. And I have a mastermind called CEO Mama. Thinking of creating a mastermind for seven figure entrepreneurs that maybe aren't moms too, but that'll come in future. So we have, you know, a handful of products and I've been doing this for seven years. So it's not like I just created these products right away. And basically what I did is I created one product at a time and I threw myself into making that product really be able to run consistently without me needing to be doing every single thing for it. And then I can create something new, get that up and running, get a

machine behind it, create something new, get that up and running, get a machine behind it, create something new, get that up and running, create a machine behind that. And that's really been the key to me growing the multiple eight figures in revenue that I've been able to grow. And that's why I feel like I can't tell you it's all about the machine. It is not about the kind of product or the kind of model that it is. And so just for an example with our membership, right? The membership, if we're going to be growing it, we still need to be filling that funnel every single month. And if I figured out how to fill that funnel every single month, then I can delegate certain things out to my team. And what I can work on is other things. I still have to work to keep the thing going. So for example, my role looks a lot like writing, recording podcasts, networking,

really thinking about high level things that only I can do in the business. And obviously selling like as an entrepreneur, sales are super important, revenue is super important. So that's where I spend a lot of my time. And I've delegated out a lot of the other stuff like tweaking funnels, but I've coached my team into what to look for, how to tweak a funnel, how to track conversion rates. So it's not that I brought experts in that knew exactly what they were doing, but I brought them in and I said, Hey, I've been doing this for the last two years. Here's what I look at. Here's how I've been doing it. Now let's make it part of your role. And I've taken it off my plate and I've continued to give myself promotion after promotion

after promotion. And that's how you really elevate out because you're creating a machine underneath that really works. Same thing with the course. All right. I have created so much content that sells the course. And now I'm able to put that content out on ads and the course is just selling continuously. I've created a funnel there and I have my team continuously tweaking that funnel. And so it means I can spend my time, like I said, recording podcasts, writing emails. I've created a funnel there and I have my team continuously tweaking that funnel. And so it means I can spend my time, like I said, recording podcasts, writing emails. I do a lot of coaching. That's where I'm spending my time in a way that I know only I can. I have other coaches that support me, but I love to do that stuff. I love to be able to dive into people's businesses

and support them with that transformation. And so I've chosen not to delegate that out. But also if I had an agency, it doesn't mean I couldn't do the same thing, right? If I had an agency and I was delivering digital marketing, it doesn't mean that I can, I could bring people in who deliver those services. And I continue to elevate my role to more of a sales role where I'm growing an audience and I'm bringing in the leads to my team. They're closing the leads, they're delivering it. So like I said, it is about the engine, not the model. It is about the engine, not the model. And I really don't see a lot of people teaching this. So what you can expect from the podcast, especially over the next couple of months is more of me teaching this engine. You know, I love systems. You know, I love that stuff.

I'm going to bring more of that engine in and kind of point out some places that you might not be looking under the hood in your business and bringing some examples of, like I said, my role, what we're doing. And hopefully that'll help you think through where you're at, because what I really don't want to happen is for you to have something in your business that's working really well for you. And then you go and create something completely brand new. That's not in your wheelhouse. That's not using your zone of genius and actually pulls you away from what's working and ultimately sabotages your business. I really don't want that for you. And I see it all the time. And then I come in and I'm like, okay, we need to clean this up. It's not to say you can't create, go and create

a course. It's not to say you can't go and create a mastermind. It's not to say you can't create a course. It's not to say you can't go and create a mastermind. It's not to say you can't go and create a membership, but let's weigh that up. Let's assess, does that make sense right now? Am I sabotaging any other part of my business? Is this really where I want to go and where I want to spend my time? And if the answer is, it's not sabotaging and this is where I want to spend my time. Great. Let's help you do that. There's so many ways I can help you. Online launch school actually would be a great place to go for that. And I really just want you to think about it first because you can throw yourself into mastering anything. I know you can with podcasts and books and courses and all the things you can

throw yourself into it. But when we kind of click into flow with our genius zone, you feel a lot more flow. It's kind of like skiing downhill versus, you know, if you push your genius zone to the side and say, okay, I'm bored. I'm going to go on to something else. I'm going to start from scratch or everything I'm learning all over again. Then you need to realize it's going to take a good amount of time for you to get there. So I just love to be super transparent and share the stuff that maybe people aren't talking about because it's unsexy and it's, you know, sometimes challenging for people to teach, to teach a real machine that you can plug into your business. But this is the real stuff. This is the stuff that helps you build really successful businesses that do not sacrifice all of your time, all of your energy,

all of your happiness. And that's really what I care about. I believe that our businesses can be vehicles that just provide so much joy and abundance and fulfillment in our lives versus being draining and sucking every ounce of energy we have. And I've been in both situations. And so take my lessons, obviously with a pinch of salt, not everything applies to everyone, but hopefully me sharing my lessons and mistakes will mean you can avoid them and you can shortcut your way to success.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a bit different to what, you know, a lot of people talk about, but I'm telling you so many people are booking calls with me and asking this exact same question. I'm like, it's unethical to keep letting people ask me the same question. It's ethical to do this podcast and be like, listen, just go listen to the podcast instead, because I think this is probably going to help. And if you've got questions beyond that, totally, I can help you.

But if you're interested in building the machine, buckle up because I've got some really good content coming your way. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode on the Boss Babe podcast, then I'd absolutely love it if you leave us a review. As a thank you, we'll send you our side hustle success kit, your simple no BS guide to keeping track of everything that you need to do to start and grow your business. To access this freebie, all you need to do to start and grow your business. To access this freebie, all you need to do is leave us a review, then share a screenshot of your review with contact at bossbabe.com and we'll send this must-have kit straight to your inbox. Thank you.