The Simplified 6-Figure Biz Strategy for Heart-Centered Entrepreneurs

Makena: Happy New Year, everyone! Happy 2025. I hope you all had a beautiful holiday season and a wonderful New Year. I am Makena Sage, of course, and I’m coming to you with a few special business-themed podcast episodes for the next few weeks. Gigi’s going on a lovely trip here shortly, so I’ll be solo here for a couple of weeks and really excited to bring these episodes to you.

A lot of the coaching we do with women is around business. It is around growing their business or starting a business. And so this week, in particular, this episode is going to be for those of you who are either starting a new business or you’ve been in business for a while, but you’ve yet to reach six figures.

It’s not that six figures on its own is like this magic number, right? But it is a number that a lot of people set as a goal when they’re starting their businesses. That’s something we hear a lot—”I’d love to reach six figures.” That’s what this episode is really about, and we want 2025 to really be the year that you break through here.

Next week, we’ll have an episode for those of you who are already at or past six figures and want to grow to multiple six figures or more. I’m going to take each stage because there are definitely different things that matter at the different stages.

Essentially, I’m going to be sharing my stories and some of the biggest lessons that I learned that made the difference in reaching each of these income brackets.

Before I go into this, I wanted to share a little bit of background, and that is to tell those of you who don’t know already that I have been an entrepreneur for about 12 years now.

I started my first business at the end of 2012. So, I guess it’s almost been 13 years, and going on 13 years. At that time, I was about six months out of college, wasn’t really planning on starting a business, but I started freelancing, and that’s what it turned into. I built that business to six figures in about 18 months.

The second time that I did this, that I built a business and got it to six figures, it took me about half that time. This was about six years later. I was transitioning out of that original business, which was in marketing and copywriting, and transitioning into coaching. At that time, it took me about half the time to get there, and then that business continued to grow from there.

Let’s talk about this first business first because they were different types of businesses, and I think that’s also really helpful. Now, they were both service-based businesses, so for those of you in product-based businesses, some of this is going to apply, some of it may not. You’ll have to listen and see what really feels like it resonates for you. But most of our clients are in service-based businesses.

The first business that I had was essentially a freelancing business. That’s how it started out. I was exchanging time for money, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It was actually a really lucrative business. I was doing that at first, not making a lot of money, but very quickly raising my prices as demand increased. I was making money at a higher and higher level. I started out in that business charging, I think, $25 an hour. By the time I left that business, I was charging around $250 or more per hour.

I want to share some of the lessons that I learned in growing that business to six figures and maintaining that for years. Over those years that I was maintaining, or at least between $100,000 to $250,000 in revenue per year, my working time decreased. Even though I was staying around the same income level, or I grew for a little while and then kind of maintained, my working hours decreased. I was making more money per hour, so to speak.

That business, as I mentioned, was in online marketing. It was in copywriting, marketing strategy, and I worked with speakers, authors, and coaches. I helped them really bring their message to the world online.

Part of that was helping them clarify their message and really get clear on: What is it that I have to say? What’s unique about me and what I have to share? How do I communicate that with people that I want to serve, with my ideal clients? I really specialized in heart-centered entrepreneurs—people who are mission-driven, who are out to make the world a better place—because that really aligned and resonated with my own values.

I did this business for six years, from 2012 to the beginning of 2018—about five and a half to six years.

One of the lessons I learned that I want to share with you is that you don’t have to start out charging super high prices. As mentioned, I started out at $25 an hour in that business. Now, that was very low for the kind of work that I was doing, but that’s where my confidence was when I was starting. I didn’t stay there for long. That was for a very short time, and then I progressively increased as I continued to have more demand than I could handle. People kept saying yes to the higher prices.

That’s one lesson I want to impart. I think a lot of people get into having their own businesses and think they have to charge premium prices. There’s a lot of talk about this out there. Now, I’m also not a huge proponent of charging very, very low prices because that can really set you up for failure in another way.

You want to find that sweet spot: What is the price that feels like the right price for you right now, where you can go out with confidence and ask for that? Even if you’re a little scared, you feel like you can own this, deliver value at this level or more, and people are willing to pay it. There’s a sweet spot, and you get to find that. Then, you get to grow quickly if you want to and raise your prices over time. As your reputation grows and demand grows, you can continue to increase.

That’s something I wanted to share with you in terms of really growing to that six-figure mark. You don’t have to jump in and try to match the pricing that other people are doing if your confidence isn’t there yet.

All right. Number two: your network is everything. When you are starting a new business, a small business, it’s all about people. It’s all about communicating with people, getting to know people, catching up with people, growing your network, tapping into your current network.

When people hear this, a lot of the time they think, “Oh, well, I don’t want to sell to family and friends.” And you don’t necessarily have to, right? You probably have a lot of extended people in your network that aren’t necessarily family or close friends. So, I don’t necessarily make a rule that I don’t work with family or friends. I definitely have, but, in general, it’s not who I go out and try to talk to or bring in to come into a program or something like that. That’s really if they come to me.

So, for the most part, it’s friends of friends or it’s kind of acquaintances and people like that that maybe I didn’t talk to that often. That’s where I started. I really started with people in my sort of extended network that weren’t in my close inner circle. And then also getting yourself in rooms of people who need the services you have to offer. So, this is really about expanding your network.

And so, if you are, you know, I, for example, I was in online marketing, and my ideal client were coaches and speakers and authors. And so, I would go to personal development conferences. I would go to things like this where I would be in a room with people who were my ideal client. And it was just such a natural thing to get to know people, to talk to them, to share what I did. And people would be like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been looking for, you know, a marketing strategist,” or “I’ve been looking for a copywriter.”

And it was a very natural flow. So, growing your network, tapping into your current network is key. A mistake I see that people make is that they go and they try to just put it out there on social media, let’s say, or think their clients are going to come through social media. Or, you know, sometimes they’ll come through social media or paid ads or something like that, like really going and casting a much wider net.

But in general, it’s a much more difficult way to go, in my experience. And sort of the returns are much lower because there’s this concept in marketing, which is warmer leads versus colder leads.

And so, a warm lead would be someone that you know more, or they know people you know very well. So, there’s already a connection. There’s already some level of know, like, and trust. Whereas a colder lead would be someone who’s never heard of you before, and all of a sudden they see your ad online. So, there’s not a lot of trust. There’s not a lot of, you know, that factor yet, and it takes a lot more time typically to build that with a colder lead.

And so, the conversion rate, meaning the number of people that come through that are colder, is going to be much lower than the people who come through your warmer network. And warm can even be meeting them at the event because meeting someone in person is such a different experience than just seeing an ad online, let’s say.

So, just to recap, when it comes to, you know, finding and enrolling clients in your business, I like to say that there’s at least six figures of income waiting in your warm network, waiting in your extended warm network. So, it doesn’t mean, again, close friends and family necessarily, but people you know and the people they know.

And so, it’s about how do I get connected to those people or be in conversations with those people? Or if you really feel like you need to go one layer further out than that, how do I get in rooms where my ideal clients are? So, these are some things to be thinking about when you’re looking at going to six figures and really hitting that magic number.

Now, that business, the online marketing business, was essentially like a high-paying flexible job in the end because, yes, I had to market myself to some degree. But I grew to where it was a lot of word of mouth. So, I wasn’t doing a lot of marketing. I wasn’t doing a lot of sort of business building. I was really just delivering a service, getting paid for that service. And that was it.

So, it was great. I mean, there was so much to love about it. And on the other hand, I knew deep down it wasn’t my soul’s purpose. It wasn’t really aligned for me in the long run, but for the time that I did it, it was wonderful. I loved my clients, and it was amazing to have the ability to take care of myself, to travel, to do a lot of things that I wasn’t able to do when I was quite broke before starting that business.

So, I’m really thankful for those years. They were great, great years. And for some people, if you’re listening to this, you might have a similar situation, but it may be a day job, right? It may not be a business, but it may be something that, okay, this isn’t the end-all-be-all of what I want to do, but it makes me decent money.

And, you know, it’s been great being able to do this. So, something I wanted to share about that is that if you have a day job or you have a business that isn’t quite it, but it’s made you good money and you’ve had stability, then something that my mentor shared with me that was really powerful for me when I was making my transition from that business into coaching, I was really struggling with, like, I’m so done with this business because I’d been doing it for almost six years.

I was having anxiety and panic attacks. Some of you know my story where I just started to have a lot of anxiety on a regular basis. And at one point was having daily full-blown panic attacks. And this, I now see as my body and my soul telling me, like, “Hey, there’s something else you’re meant to be doing.”

And I had a lot of fear around making a change. And so, that message had to get louder and louder and louder before I would listen. Because I was very much like a risk-averse, “I’m going to stay in what’s secure and what’s comfortable and what I know” kind of person. So, I’m having this experience. It’s very, very difficult.

And so, I’m like, “Man, I just cannot wait to be doing something different.” And once I got clear that what I wanted to do was coaching, I was trying to make this change. And I was just like, so frustrated with my marketing business at that point. And Gigi, my mentor and my mom, who’s the co-host of this podcast, said to me, “Makena, you need to get so grateful for what you have. Otherwise, it won’t let you go.”

I’m going to repeat that one more time: “You need to get so grateful for what you have. Otherwise, it won’t let you go.”

What did she mean by that? Well, there’s a principle in personal development, which is that “What you resist persists.” So, when we resist something, it actually persists. It actually hangs on, and it’s harder to sort of separate yourself from it. So, this is a little bit of what she was talking about here.

The opposite of resistance in this case was really gratitude. So, by shifting my energy to, “Okay, this may not be what I want to do anymore, but it’s been an amazing run. I’ve had incredible clients. I’m so thankful. I’ve made great money. I’ve had flexibility. I’ve been able to travel,” I really shifted my energy. I really shifted my attention to that and just felt my gratitude.

Of course, there were days that I was still frustrated, but overall, I really changed my approach. And so, that’s something I want to share with you too, is that whatever you’re resisting, can you shift to gratitude instead? So, maybe you’re in a similar situation where you’re in a job or you’re in a different business and you want to make a change.

Or maybe it’s something different. Maybe you’re resisting the situation you’re in where you’re not making the six figures you want to make yet, or whatever that number is for you. Can you instead really shift to like, what is working? Have you made some money? Have you had some success? Or maybe people are giving you great feedback on what you do? Have you learned some things? Who is the person you’re becoming in the process of building this business?

So, really shifting to what are you grateful for about where you are right now?

So, when I made my shift into coaching, I do want to talk about this transition because some of you are making a transition or starting something new. And so, at first, many of you know this, I tried and failed to make this transition in 2017. I had no real plan. This was before Gigi stepped in and was mentoring me. I was trying to do it on my own.

I got an idea that I wanted to start coaching, and I thought, “Well, when I started my online marketing business, I just kind of started, right? I just kind of told people this is what I was doing, and then clients started showing up, and it was relatively easy.” So, I thought maybe it’ll be the same way with coaching.

And I did that. I kind of announced on social media that I was going to start coaching and waited for the clients to roll in. And, of course, I talked to people and I did my thing there, but it was pretty much crickets. I got one client who wasn’t paying me very much money and only stayed with me for a couple of months. And apart from that, I was bringing in zero income.

Now, going from about $10,000 a month in my other business to zero income was devastating. I wasn’t prepared for that. And so, within a couple of months, I was like, “This isn’t working. Maybe I’m not supposed to do this.” And I went back to my marketing business, kind of quietly picked that up again, tail between my legs, and was super embarrassed.

So, what did I learn from that experience? And then stepping into coaching a year later with support from my mentor, but also other coaches that I worked with and other programs that I did. Looking back, there are some lessons I learned. And so, I really want to share this with those of you who are starting a business or really at any stage— a lot of these lessons are valuable.

One is, this was a different business model. I really needed to learn the business of coaching, which was different than the business of marketing. Of course, they’re related—there’s marketing involved in coaching—but it was a different kind of marketing. And I was working with clients who were at a much bigger scale. They were much further along in their businesses.

So, doing kind of the grassroots, getting the first six figures—I didn’t know how to do that. And so, I needed to learn that business model, and particularly, I needed to learn to improve my marketing and sales skills in that industry for that stage of business.

And so, that was really important. And Gigi, my mentor, said to me, “You know, I’m going to mentor you on the coaching side, a little bit on the business side, but you need to go out and you need to get other mentorship as well.”

So, I went out and I found a program on how to grow a coaching business from kind of A to Z. And I followed that program to a T. And that is where I really learned heart-centered sales. That’s where I learned how to tap into my network more and how to approach this.

At first, I got a lot of no’s, which I’ll talk about in a moment, but then I started to get a lot of yeses and business really started to take off.

One other thing I want to talk about before we go there, though, is that stepping into coaching was really stepping into my soul’s work. It was stepping into my purpose. And in that, self-doubt became a huge factor, much more than it had ever been in copywriting and marketing.

It’s not that I never doubted my abilities in marketing, but it was different. I didn’t have as much on the line. It was like, “Okay, this is something I’m good at. People seem to need it,” and that was that. Right? And so, self-doubt wasn’t a huge factor. But when you’re doing your heart and soul’s work, self-doubt can be big.

It can be one of the biggest roadblocks that we see in our clients to them really being able to step out and grow their businesses and make a difference, reach the income goals they have for themselves, and achieve financial freedom and make the impact they want to make.

So, if that’s really coming up for you, the biggest thing that made a difference for me there was having support. And really, through my mom, who was mentoring and coaching me, and through other coaches that I hired, this was so, so key in those early days because I always say I would have quit a thousand times.

Truly, like I wanted to quit every day because I was so nervous, and I was so like, “I don’t know if I have what it takes. I don’t know. Can I do this? I feel like I want to do this. I feel like I’m meant to do this, but I didn’t have the proof.” Right? I just had a wish on my heart and, of course, some skill in coaching. I grew up in it, but I was right at the baby beginning.

That’s something really, really key to know here is that if you’re doing work that feels very close to your heart and soul, self-doubt is going to be there. And you want to make sure you have the support because otherwise—I mean, I don’t know that I would ever have stepped into coaching fully, truly, or even if I did, it would have taken me so much longer to grow the business that I’ve been able to grow.

So, those are a few things. Have a plan in place, you know, figure out a program or a coach or something that you really resonate with and that you see like, “Oh, the way that they’re approaching this really lands for me, and this is what I think is right for me.” Not from your head, but from that resonance, that knowing, that intuition.

And then follow the model—just follow it, follow it, follow it, follow it. I mean, that’s what I did, and I have seen that when somebody does that and they stick to it, most of the time it works if they chose, again, from a place of, “I feel this is the right person for me. I feel this is the right approach for me.” Not, “I think that this person knows what they’re doing because they have all these flashy results.”

Another thing I want to share is that if you’re making a shift like this, it’s not necessarily a leap into a new business or a leap into whatever. It’s a transition process. It might take time. Now, for me, it was pretty quick. It took about eight months, and Gigi was guiding me through this step-by-step. I had that program I was going through.

At first, I got a lot of no’s. That was really hard. I was enrolling for a $5,000 program. That was a business coaching program. And it’s funny, it’s actually the prerequisite—this was the initial version of the program that I put out. Again, I put a new version of it out about a year and a half ago or so, and it’s now called Simplified Business Bootcamp.

But back then, it was called Momentum and Flow, and I was selling it at a much higher price because I was leading the whole thing live and doing group coaching, one-on-one coaching. So, there was a lot to it.

But this was the very beginning of, okay, growing your business with action and momentum, but also with flow. And so, this program still exists in a different form, but this is how it all started.

So, this was in, again, 2018. A $5,000 program—that’s what I decided to start with. And so, I went out there, I was talking to people, I was sharing about it, I was doing these free kind of enrollment coaching calls, and I got a lot of no’s.

And it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I would cry after a lot of those calls because I was so devastated. First of all, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can do this.” I was being really hard on myself. But also, I saw what women were going through and the challenges they had, and it was really heartbreaking when they couldn’t step through that fear, that doubt, or whatever it was that was holding them back from investing in themselves and from going forward and growing these businesses.

And so, I took it really personally, which now I know it’s not personal. I’m not right for everybody. But back in those days, it felt like it. So, I thought, again, “Maybe I’m not really cut out for this,” but Gigi was like, “You have to keep going.” And something in me was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this.”

Then eventually, I started getting some yeses, and oh my gosh, I was celebrating like crazy. It was amazing. And there came a point after a few months where I got seven yeses in a row, meaning out of seven enrollment calls, seven people said yes. So, that was $35,000 in revenue in a matter of weeks. This was amazing. Just like on top of the world, on fire.

And not just in terms of bringing in that level of income, but impact—being able to work with these women and support them. One of those women, I remember, she signed up. I was leading, I was trying all kinds of things at the time, so I’d lead little groups, masterclasses, webinars. I would do all different things.

And I led a webinar, and she was the only person on, which she didn’t know because it was like, you could see the webinar, but you couldn’t see who else was on. She was the only person on. She stayed till the end. I gave it my all. She signed up for a call. We had the call. She said yes.

And that was a huge lesson for me in and of itself—like even if just one person shows up and you give it your all, right? She came into my program, invested $5,000. She had just lost her job, and she wanted to start consulting. She’d always thought about doing that.

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I want to say that within like eight weeks or something, she was making, I think, about $10,000 recurring revenue per month. Like, that’s life-changing, right? She literally invested $5,000 in this program, and within, you know, eight weeks, she’s making $10,000 a month. It was incredible.

Now, not everybody got that level of results. She was poised. She had the skillset. But still, it was just like, there were all kinds of different successes. That’s just one that pops into my mind.

So, there was the revenue side, of course, that felt amazing. But there was also the impact side of seeing these women have the confidence to go out and do what they really wanted to do.

Another story I’ll share quickly, just because of this topic of having a lot of no’s before you get yeses, is that one of our clients has been going through my Simplified Business Bootcamp program in the last few months. She started, I think, in the summer, and she’s really been going through it diligently.

That’s a very extensive program that teaches everything from A to Z in terms of how to grow your heart-centered, service-based business to six figures or more. So, she’s going through the program. It takes her a couple of months. She starts applying it. She’s getting out there. She’s really diligent about talking to people.

She signed up for the version—there are a couple of different versions—so rather than self-study, she did the one where she has a few calls with me. So, we’re getting on these calls, and she’s like, “You know, I’m doing it. I’m following it to a T, and I’m just, I’m getting a lot of no’s. It just feels like it’s not working.”

And I just said, “Stick in there. You know, like, I really see you’re clear on all these things. The value is clear. Just keep going.”

So, just a couple of weeks ago, I got on her final call with me. And she said, “Makena, I just enrolled two people in my $8,000 coaching program in one day—or one weekend, I can’t remember.”

So, after months of no’s, right, the yeses just started popping off. $16,000 in one weekend. She was like, “Oh my God.” It was just proof that like, okay, I can do this.

So, I just want to share those stories because there will be times where it feels like nothing’s working. There will be times where it feels like you’re getting a lot of no’s. And as long as you have the right approach—a proven strategy, a proven structure, a way to bring people through this process—and this is something a lot of people are missing, like how do you take people from meeting them at a party or having a catch-up call with them or taking them to coffee or meeting them at a networking event to becoming a client?

Most people have no process there, right? They just kind of wing it, or they say, “Hey, do you want to do a discovery call?” And they ask them a few questions and then present their service and hope the person signs up. But again, we’re missing the sort of warmup. We’re missing this know, like, and trust factor. We’re missing how people really see the value of working with you.

So, this is a lot of what I teach—creating a client cultivation flow, which means how do you cultivate the client, right? You don’t marry someone on the first date. You don’t ask them to marry you on the first date. You want to date them for a little while first. You want to get to know them. And so, there is this process in business as well.

So, how do you do that in a really systematic way, but also a very heart-centered way? That’s really, really important—to have that in place and to know heart-centered sales, which a lot of people shy away from. They don’t want to learn the nitty-gritty of sales, and so they struggle to enroll clients.

I’m just sharing that these are some of the skills I had to learn, right? I had to learn how to package myself, my skills, what I had to share into something that really fit with what people needed and wanted.

And luckily, I had a lot of those skills coming from my previous business, so I was able to design a really high-value package going right into this business. Then there was the mindset piece—self-doubt, fear, how to move through those—and that was a lot of trial and error. And that was a lot of getting support from my mentor and other coaches, so really learning that piece.

And then it was really, “Okay, what is my client cultivation flow?” Right? How do I put myself out there? How do I connect with people? How do I bring someone through this process and use heart-centered sales to connect with them, be in service to them, and give them the opportunity to come in and work with me once we’ve had a chance to get to know each other?

These were some of the things I had to master before I ever got to any kind of fancier marketing. This is some of the mistakes that I see people make when they’re trying to get to six figures. They overcomplicate it, and that’s why I really called this the Simplified Six-Figure Strategy. That’s what this episode is about—what’s a simplified approach, right?

You don’t need tons of social media marketing. Now, I posted semi-regularly on social media when I started, just because I like to be out there and visible in some way. But I have clients that have taken my Simplified Business Bootcamp program and do zero social media marketing, and they still get clients.

So, you do not need it. I’ve just always kind of enjoyed it. I like to write. I like pictures. I’ve come to like video a lot more, so I’m semi-regular about that. I go through phases where I’m not as regular, but it’s just a way for me to be out there and visible in the world. But you don’t actually need it.

If you’re someone who hates social media or you’re posting every single day and nothing’s happening—that actually was one of our client’s stories a few years ago. She came in, she said, “I posted every day for a year on social media, and I didn’t get a single client.”

And then she came in and she started getting clients left and right because she had an actual strategy that worked. So, you don’t need a ton of social media.

Other things I didn’t do that I see people do that can be—I don’t want to use the word mistake because there is no one-size-fits-all—but it’s not the approach that I’ve seen work for most people.

So, I didn’t create a bunch of super low-ticket offers that I had to sell a lot of to reach my income goals. This is something I see a lot when I talk to people. I just had a call with someone recently, and she said, “I want to create this subscription that’s like, I think she said, $15 for the year.”

Which is amazing—like, wow, what a gift to offer something that’s $15 for the year. It seems that way, but then I said, “How much money do you want to be making?” And she said, “$100,000.” And I said, “Okay, $100,000 divided by $15 is 6,666 clients in the year. Do you have that kind of reach? Do you have a huge audience online or tons of people who know, like, and trust you who would want to buy this thing?”

And she said, “No, I don’t really have any kind of audience yet, but I just thought that people would sign up at a lower price and I could offer this service.”

And I said, “Well, in my experience, that’s not the case. We think that lower ticket is going to make it easier to sell, but it’s not necessarily true.”

So, in that, you want to find that sweet spot. Again, you don’t need to charge super premium pricing. She doesn’t need to go out and have a $5,000 program, but maybe there’s something she can offer that’s $1,000 and it’s really high value and it’s a service. That would still be 100 clients in the year, but that’s way less, right?

So, 100 clients in the year divided by 12 is only eight clients a month. That’s still high. I usually recommend trying to find some way to reach your income goal where maybe you can do it with two to three clients a month.

If your income goal is $100,000, then we’re going to divide that by 12, which is $8,333. Let’s divide that by three—$2,777. So, let’s say about $3,000 a month.

Now, that number may freak you out. You may be like, “I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere close to that.” And that’s okay. For some of you, if you’re closer to six figures, it may not freak you out as much. Or there may be a different approach. But I just want you to really start to think about how many clients it’s going to take to get you there.

And is this really, does this feel realistic to go out and find that number of clients per month? What’s my track record? How have I done with this so far?

And if you’re nervous about enrolling at a higher ticket price, it’s usually because you feel like you don’t know if you can offer that much value. I can almost guarantee that you have something you can offer that would be hugely valuable for people.

At a rate now, it may not be that. Maybe it’s $1,500 to start or something else. But again, really finding that sweet spot. And maybe if you’re just starting your business, then six figures isn’t your first goal, right? Maybe it’s going for $50,000 your first year. So, you can cut that number in half, sell $1,500 packages, and still get there with three clients a month.

I just want you to start to run the numbers. Don’t be afraid to really look at that and go, “Is selling something super low-ticket and trying to go out for volume what’s going to serve me best? And do I really see that I can do volume?”

Again, you can try it, but for most people that I’ve seen try this, it’s much harder than you think unless you have a huge audience already. If not, then you’re much better served to find something very high value you can offer. So, that’s just a little tweak there.

I created one offer to start. Most of my clients create one or two, and that’s it. Now, I didn’t create a bunch of online programs to create “passive income” because I wasn’t at that stage yet. Now we have online programs that are more passive, but at that point, the mistake I see people make is they spend all this time creating this online program.

They get this idea, they’re excited, they put time, money, and energy into developing something. Meanwhile, they’re not getting paid while they’re developing it. So, they’re putting all this time in, and then they put it out there, and a lot of times it’s crickets—people don’t buy. And then they’re devastated and think, “Where did I go wrong?”

I call that “How to Go Broke Creating Your Online Programs.” How to get paid to create your online programs is to do more of what I did, which was, I had an idea for a program. I went out there and I enrolled people in it. I led it live.

So, I led that program Momentum and Flow live, maybe five or six times. Every three to four months, I would start a new group and I’d have three to six people in a group and I’d lead it live. And I would have some topics that stayed the same, but I would refine, and I would coach, and I would work with people, and it got better and better and better every single time.

Then eventually, I prerecorded some parts of it. And that program was super, super successful. It made me lots of money, and it was very successful in supporting my clients.

A few years later, I said, “I want to go back to that and totally reinvent it, rework it, and put it out there as Simplified Business Bootcamp,” cut the price basically in half, and put it out as a self-study or a version where they can get some private coaching with me.

So, that’s the program that I have today. I was getting paid all along the way to do this, right? Because people were signing up for my program. They were going through it live. Now, I have it as a prerecorded, but I got paid to create that prerecorded program essentially, and I knew that it worked for people, and I knew that it got results.

The mistakes that I talked about—you don’t need to do tons of social media marketing. You ideally don’t create super low-ticket offers to try to sell volume or create online programs to try to create passive income in the beginning.

Finally, and this is a big one, you don’t need to spend a ton of money on a fancy website, branding, social media, or other “pretty distractions,” as I like to call them. None of these really move the needle to get you clients.

You don’t need a fancy website. I started my first business with a WordPress blog that I put up and kind of made it look like a website. It’s like a business card, right? Your website—most people aren’t going to have a lot of traffic coming to their website. You don’t need to have a lot on there. You could have a simple one-page site if you want that. You don’t even need it.

In my second business, I don’t even think we had a website for the first, I don’t know, year or something, year and a half. And then we built one. And we kept that one for a few years and then we built a new one. So, every few years we upgrade or update, but really you don’t need something super fancy there.

You don’t need to put a lot of time and money and energy into that in the beginning. You can totally have a six-figure business without a website.

You don’t need fancy branding. You can do a lot these days with Canva or taking some nice pictures on your iPhone. So, none of those are truly going to move the needle to get you clients, and they can become distractions and time and money sucks.

Other things I did do—I’ll kind of wrap up here soon. I knew my numbers and I worked backwards. I knew I needed to make at least X per month or X per year. And so, I worked backwards and I said, “What’s a package I can offer that will get me there?” So, the $5,000 package.

I can’t do math in my head, so I’m going to just look one more time. So, that’s 20 clients in the year to get me to six figures. 20 times $5,000 is $100,000. So, I worked backwards. I said, “Okay, can I get 20 clients in the year, one to two a month?” And that felt doable, and that’s what I did.

I eliminated a lot of distractions. I didn’t get pulled into fancy website and branding and all these different things. I got clear on my unique roadmap. So, really looking at, once I understood client cultivation and heart-centered sales, then I really said, “Okay, outside of just my warm network, what else do I want to do? Or how can I maximize my warm network?”

This is what we go into at the end of that Simplified Business Bootcamp program—different kinds of marketing strategies that are quite simple, but you can really pick and choose and see which one resonates for you.

Is it getting on podcasts? Is it hosting live events? Is it going and speaking in front of other people’s audiences? Those are just a few of the different strategies that we talk about and how to approach that.

So, what is your roadmap? Where are you the most magnetic? Because it’s going to be different than it is for somebody else. I learned heart-centered sales. We talked about that a lot.

So, we’ve covered a lot today. This is—again, there’s a lot that goes into reaching that six figures, but hopefully, you have some great takeaways.

Now, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed or you’re feeling like, “This is great, I want some support. Maybe I’m curious about Simplified Business Bootcamp, but maybe I’m not ready to jump into that just yet,” I have a class coming up at the end of January—January 25th and 26th—called Focus and Flow.

It’s an online workshop, and it’ll be two kind of half-days on a Saturday and Sunday for a few hours each day. So, that program, that course, is really—it’s live business training, and it’s really to support you to simplify, you know, to focus in on the 20 percent of what you do, or what you can be doing, that will get you 80 percent of your results.

Instead of being distracted and torn in a whole bunch of different directions, which is how most people are when they talk to me at first, who are trying to get to six figures or more, they’re like, “I just don’t know what to be doing. If I knew what to do, and I didn’t have to be doing all these different things that aren’t working, then I feel like I could really get there.”

So, if that’s you, and you’re tired of trying so many different things, throwing spaghetti at the wall, time-sucking, money-sucking strategies that don’t seem to be working, then we’re really going to get to how do you streamline and really focus on what is going to move the needle for you.

So, eliminating overwhelm, simplifying your business strategy. We are going to get into heart-centered sales and a touch of the client cultivation. We won’t be able to go super deep into that in just a two-day, two-half-day training, but we will go into heart-centered sales.

So, really practicing some of that, actually bringing people up and doing role plays, teaching principles. And this is game-changing, no matter what stage of business you’re at.

We have a client in our Mastermind Program, Wealthy World Changers, who came to a half-day training like this with me a couple of months ago that we led for the Mastermind. It was all around heart-centered sales. And she was like, “Oh my God, I’ve made sales out to be this terrible thing. I never wanted to follow up with people. I never wanted to bother people.”

And we really talked about a different approach there that was very authentic. And she went out and she started doing it, and opportunities and clients started showing up left and right. She was voice-noting me before the New Year, just like, “Oh my gosh, I cannot believe how much has changed from learning this different approach. I didn’t realize that I was so avoidant before, and now I’m going out there, and it feels really genuine and really authentic, and people are just saying left and right that they want to hire us, they want to work with us.”

She’s already very successful, so at any stage of business, this can be really, really powerful.

We’re also going to create what I call your Money Magnet Roadmap, which is, again, what is your plan to reach your goals? So, if your goal is six figures, or if it’s $50,000, or if it’s $500,000, whatever it is this year, having that step-by-step plan, how do you see to get there in a way that is doable, in a way that fits with your unique magnetism?

That’s something we’re going to work on so that you walk out of this class with that step-by-step plan, knowing exactly what you need to do to reach your goals for this year.

And then finally, it’s really about taking you from this place of stress and pressure, which is a lot of times, unfortunately, where people go in January. They get out of the holiday break, and they just go, “Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure,” and bringing you back to a place of creativity and fun and joy in your business, because that’s why you’re doing it, right?

That’s why you created a business you love. So, we want to get you back to the fun while also doing the things that move the needle to get you results.

I wanted to share this with you because it’s so important—such an amazing class, first of all, and it’s also really, really affordable. The price is currently $147 at the time of this recording. It’s going up to $197 on January 15th, but since you’ve listened to this episode, I want to give you a special discount code and actually give you $50 off the current pricing.

So, if you’re signing up right now before January 15th, then your $50 off would give you a price of $97 for the weekend. If it’s past January 15th, then that price would be $147 with the code. And the code is PODCAST—just all one word.

So, when you go to the page, you go to sign up, there’s a place where it says, “Have a coupon code?” You’re going to enter the code PODCAST, and it’s going to give you that discount. The link is wayofthemuse.com/focus —wayofthemuse.com/focus.

So, I did mention my Simplified Business Bootcamp program. That’s what we talked about a lot today. That’s really my comprehensive program on how to build a service-based business to six figures or more without complicated marketing.

This is everything I learned from doing it myself and coaching hundreds of other entrepreneurs. So, if you’re just curious about that, you want to take a look at it, it’s wayofthemuse.com/SBB. So, Simplified Business Bootcamp—S like in Sam, B like in boy, B like in boy.

But even if you’re interested in that program, I do recommend, if you can, coming to Focus and Flow first because I’m going to be running—I’m just going to kind of sneakily tell you guys here—a secret flash sale on that program during that weekend that you aren’t going to want to miss.

So, even if you’re looking at Simplified Business Bootcamp, the Focus and Flow weekend is the perfect time to come in, learn, get to know me, see if you want to go deeper, and then we’re going to be running a super fun flash sale.

So, if you can’t make it to that weekend and you still want to be in on the flash sale, just email me at makena@wayofthemuse.com and let me know you want to still take advantage or you’re curious about it when that all happens.

So, if you have any questions today, I highly recommend coming to Focus and Flow. You can ask them there live on the line, or you can email me again at makena@wayofthemuse.com.

A couple of closing thoughts before we end for today. One, take a deep breath and just know that if you have a business in your heart and soul, or if you’re already running a business that you love, you absolutely have what it takes. You have what it takes to grow it to six figures if you’re willing to go all in.

So, just let that sink in. You do have to go all in, in the sense of energetically. It doesn’t mean it has to be the only thing you’re doing. A lot of our clients are building businesses while still working day jobs, and they do that very successfully. I teach strategies to help you do that in just a couple of hours a day, let’s say.

But you do have to be all in with your energy, all in with your intent, and there may be some skills you need to learn. So, that’s really what Focus and Flow is about. That’s really what Simplified Business Bootcamp is about.

And you do most likely need to simplify and eliminate distractions because if you’re pulled in a whole bunch of different directions, it’s just not going to serve you in really getting to where you want to go.

And then finally, you will need to learn sales. This is such a needed skill, and practically any service-based business is going to serve you so well for life. I used to think I was terrible at sales. I used to think that I hated sales. And now, I’m like, I love it. Selling is just serving when you’re doing something you love, and there’s no pressure behind it. It’s just making invitations.

A lot of times I’ll tell people to think of it— instead of the word “sales,” sub it out for “making invitations.”

All right. So, you will need to learn that. Hopefully, you’ve taken some things away from today. We’ve covered a lot.

Next week, we will have a podcast on the Multiple Six-Figure Roadmap. So, really how do you get beyond six figures, go to multiple six figures or more? Some of you may feel kind of plateaued at that level. This is a lot of our clients—they’re at this kind of six-figure level, or even just a little higher than that.

Or maybe they’re just at multiple six figures, but they feel like they’ve been stuck at a plateau for a while. So, that’s where we’re going to really help you get your passion back for what you do, if that’s been fading, and really see what it is you need to grow it to that next level.

So, I’ll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you for being here, and talk to you soon.