Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses

The 3-Phase System: Build a Scalable Coaching Business Without Burnout

• Gary Redmond • Season 2 • Episode 13

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A three-phase system can take you from zero audience and zero clients to a freedom-based coaching business that scales to $50K+ monthly without burnout or sales calls.

Phase One focuses on building audience through content and conversations


• Pick one platform where your target audience is active (LinkedIn works well for targeted connections)
• Post consistently for 30-60 days with unique insights about your process 
• Build your network by adding connections and engaging with content daily
• Start conversations with people who engage with your content
• Conversions happen in conversation - aim for 10 good conversations per week
• You don't need thousands of followers to generate clients

Phase Two creates leverage through email marketing


• Create a results-driven lead magnet to build your email list
• Cross-pollinate from social media or use ads to grow your list
• Write 15-minute daily emails using the five-lever framework (story + insight + offer)
• Your email list becomes your most valuable owned traffic source

Phase Three scales without complexity

• Remove sales calls by using Google Docs for asynchronous selling
• For established lists, run cohort-based launches with urgency and capped spots
• Package your expertise into group programs at 40% of one-to-one rates
• Focus on content and delivery rather than constant selling

To implement this system, honestly assess which phase you're currently in and focus on optimising that phase before moving to the next.

If you want help implementing this system or want to chat about your coaching business, email me at gary@garyredmond.net or join my free community.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. All right, so today's topic I wanna talk you through the three-phase system to go from zero to freedom in your coaching business. So if you're just getting started or you're stuck spinning your wheels, this episode is going to walk you through the exact system that I use and teach to go from zero audience and zero clients to a freedom-based coaching business that can scale to 50 grand a month or beyond, without burnout or sales calls. So it happens in three phases. If you follow them in order, you'll build a real business with real freedom. But before I get into that, I want to talk about how I sort of discovered, then forgot and then rediscovered this sort of process. So I'm always been quite good at phase two, which I'll get into in a few minutes. But basically, when I first started with my coaching business, I it was like 2019, 2020 and Facebook groups were all the rage and, like, there was plenty of groups online with my ideal target market in there, which was a subscription box business owners and subscription box founders. So what I essentially did was I used to post content into these groups. I I'd post helpful articles, put a lot of effort into them, I would engage with people who commented on the post or whatever, and then I would also answer questions in there. Okay, and when I did that, I had my own Facebook profile optimized to get people into my own Facebook group, so I was sort of building my community there, okay, and then what I did on the back of that was I converted people from when they joined the Facebook group, I asked them for their email, which helped help me to build an email list. And then I was able to, you know, run, launch, continue to do that for probably like a year. And then, when I had a big enough email list and a big enough group, I was able to have sort of my own audience and I was, um able to sell my my courses, my webinars, things like that, in order to basically sell my coaching services via email. Okay, so, um, at the sort, I did that for two or three years and then I kind of I kind of spent a lot of time over the last year or two trying to pivot my offer, but the last year, anyway, trying to pivot my offer to more coaches and stuff, and I kind of got stuck again in terms of, like, I know what to do when I have an email list of people. I can, you know, send emails, I can run offers, all those sort of things.

Speaker 1:

But really my big struggle was building the audience. And also building an audience can be easy if you have money, because you can just run ads. But if you don't have money, then you want to basically figure out a way where you can build your audience using content and using connections, the same way I did before. But the problem is now Facebook groups have completely died. Instagram doesn't really work that way. You kind of need to run ads to grow your following there. And Twitter you know Twitter's dying as well Not dying, but it's declining in users as well.

Speaker 1:

So basically, I decided to go with LinkedIn and, like, over the last few weeks and few months, I've been learning more and more about you know the three phases that you go through from having zero um, you know zero clients, zero, like you know, um, which I did in this new, in this new niche for a while Um, and then building it up and what's the most efficient way like time and money wise to build up an audience and get people you know into into your people, into your ecosystem and become clients. So the first one is, if you're starting from zero with essentially no audience and you're struggling to get clients or you're under 5k a month, what you want to do is you want to, in the first phase, you want to pick one platform. So the first step is to pick one platform. Okay, don't platform hop, okay. And that means and I've done this before, by the way everything you'll learn on this podcast is, you know, experience of mistakes made by me. Okay, so I was on LinkedIn. Sorry, no, actually I didn't really go on LinkedIn, and the reason why was because I just had a lot of people in there in my network from, like, my old subscription box business and I kind of didn't want to start talking about coaching and stuff there. But anyway, I'll tell you how I landed on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

So I went on Twitter and I liked Twitter because you didn't have to like become a graphic designer, you didn't have to record reels, but what I found was just that, like you don't really know. You know, growing your audience on Twitter is you kind of can pick up a lot of people who are just not your target market and you know Twitter might be right for you, but in my opinion, I was writing tweets and I wasn't really getting much engagement. Like, another big part of it is going to be actually engaging with other accounts and I just found that I was writing there, for this is this year, like for, like you know, a couple of months, and just the route was really really slow. Okay, instagram, facebook I don't just facebook is kind of done for me. I'm not really interested in facebook anymore. I don't even go on it. Um, instagram, is you really need to be recording reels? Basically, like I was in the facebook headquarters here in dublin in march and they basically like told us that reels are the future in terms of advertising and also organic. Okay, so that could be totally fine If you start to record high quality Reels and you actually start getting engagement with them and you have the time and the money and the time and the energy anyway to record Reels on a Saturday or in the evenings or whatever, then great, okay, reels are the way to go, but if you're just going to be going on Instagram posting pictures and carousels, you're not going to get anywhere.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so it brought me to LinkedIn, and the reason why it was LinkedIn is because, like you can add, you can go and use sales navigator, which is the paid version of LinkedIn, and you can basically search for people who are your target market and then add connections, requests with them. Okay, so, very similar to what I was doing with the Instagram, facebook before Also I forgot to mention was when people would engage with my content. I'd often add them as a friend and when they accept my friend request, they would see that I have like a group myself and they would join. So it's kind of like brute force really. You put out content, people engage from other groups, excuse me and then I would just like add them as friends. So the reason why LinkedIn is working for me, because two reasons you me, because two reasons you can just brute force it for a while. Like, if you have no audience and you don't want to run ads and you don't want to record reels and you don't want to go on Twitter, you can actually just go on and add people coaches, consultants, or if you're targeting I don't know if you're in fitness or you're targeting fitness coaches or you're targeting whoever you can just search for people who have the job title that you're looking for and you can just add them, basically, and they'll accept you most not a lot of them, not everyone, but a lot of them will accept you, particularly if your profile is optimized and then they're now seeing your content and you're growing your audience.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so do that. And also posting content. Okay, so you wanna post consistently in phase one. The second step of phase one, after picking your platform, is to post consistently for 30 to 60 days. And it doesn't 30 to 60 days, and it doesn't have to be daily. Obviously, daily can help, you know, just to keep the algorithm boosted, keep eyes on your content, but it has to be consistent. Okay, the only thing you do when you're, when you're, when you're posting your content, you know, don't be another 10 steps to your first sale, kind of guy, you know, and focus on your own process, your own offer, and I don't mean to just shout about your offer. I mean, whatever you offer, there's going to be a process that people are going to have to go through in order to achieve the result that you sell. So, if you talk about your own unique process, your own unique stories, your own unique insights into why your method works, it's a lot more valuable on LinkedIn, particularly than just posting tips. And I just remembered one thing that I forgot to say in the last section was another reason why I picked LinkedIn was because the type of content that I wanna produce, which is like words with maybe a picture it works really well on LinkedIn, whereas words with a picture doesn't work well on Instagram has to be videos, okay. So that's another reason why I just forgot to mention that, okay.

Speaker 1:

So the third step, then, is going to be building your network daily. So I kind of touched on this already. But you want to add connections, you want to leave comments on other people's accounts. Particularly when people and other people in your target market start accepting you, you'll start to see their content. You want to engage with them. You want to get them used to seeing you. You don't want to just build up a list of followers. You kind of want to build up a list of fans if you can, if you want to react to people's posts and engage with them and give your own two cents. And again, the reason why I think this works really well on LinkedIn for me, versus something like Twitter, which is similar, is you know that you're building up, you know who you're adding and who you're connecting with and you know that they are your target market. So it's kind of just more targeted everything you do. Okay, you're not just kind of growing followers. If you're running ads on Instagram, they could be random people, they could be in your target market, they could not be. You know, with LinkedIn it's just more targeted.

Speaker 1:

And the final thing then you need to do this for 30 to 60 to 90 days continually grow your audience, continually engage, continually post content and continually like, build up that sort of goodwill and and and sort of you know being well known and seen in your network, and then what you can do is you don't have to wait 30 days to do this or 60 days or anything, but when people start to engage with your content or they start to, you know, reach out to you or add a connection request with you or leave a comment or a like, that's your signal to open conversations with them. You know, you can just send them. Hey, thanks for you know. Reacting to my most recent post, how are things going with you? If you know that the people who are engaging with your content, liking, sharing, commenting on your content and they're your ideal audience, it's a pretty good signal that you've built a pretty engaged audience and you can reach out to them and open a conversation. And, as we always say, conversions happen in conversation.

Speaker 1:

So, yes, you will need to probably have good DM skills not the topic of this podcast. But when you start to get in these conversations and you move people to the point of sales calls, well, you've now built a system that's going to get you from zero to 10K a month. So pick your platform, post consistently, build and engage with your network and start conversations with people who engage with you. You don't need 10,000 followers. You just need 10 good conversations per week, per day, whatever it is, and you will get clients as long as you follow the steps. You have the right target market in your audience and you're building up goodwill with your audience by engaging and posting good content and getting in conversations with people. So that's phase one Now when I start to work with someone, if you already have phase one down, then totally fine, I'm going to go through the other two phases, but at the end I'm going to explain how sometimes you feel like you're in phase two or phase three, but you're actually just not doing phase one correctly.

Speaker 1:

Phase two this is where you're trying to build leverage. This is when your email list comes in. Now, I'm obviously an expert in email marketing. I've been doing it for almost 10 years and sold millions online through email marketing about e-commerce and coaching. But you've now got some clients, you've got some traction okay. But your life is spent in the DMs and your life is spent producing content, which is fine if it's getting you some results, but we want to start to build a business that actually has some leverage, okay. So what we want to do is we want to start to build your email list.

Speaker 1:

Now, there's two ways to build your email list and one of them. Okay, let me start at the very start. So the first thing you need to do to build your email list is you're going to need to create a simple, results driven lead magnet. Okay, it is which. A lead magnet is something that you're going to give away a valuable piece of content or training, or can be a quiz or whatever, or an assessment, and you're going to give it away in exchange for people giving you their email address. So now that you've created this lead magnet and you've created a way for people to exchange their email address for this lead magnet assuming that it's relevant to them and it's what they actually want and it's valuable to them you will start to get emails, but only one of of two ways.

Speaker 1:

If you already have an audience or you've done phase one, you can start to cross-pollinate your audience from your social media following to your email by posting about your lead magnet every day or every week. You can plug it into the comments of your highest engaging posts. So if people start to pop off on a post you know, every day or every week, you can plug it into the comments of your highest engagement engaging posts. So if people start to like sort of pop off on a post, you can say hey, if you want more tips like this and join my email list. And you can also do what's called auto DM posts or action posts or whatever you want to call it two-step posts, and basically it's like hey, I have this really, really valuable thing, just comment keyword below and I'll send it to you and then you can DM them and you can send them the link to your lead magnet and they'll have to opt in on that link. That works really well because you can also follow up with them in the DMs and it's kind of like a mix between phase one and phase two.

Speaker 1:

So the second phase is to build leverage with your email list. Now, the other way you can do email, like the other way you can grow your list in phase two, is just to run ads. So you know, if you already have an audience and you can cross pollinate, obviously that's going to be cheaper. But if you don't, if you want to just build your email list, you can run ads. Now, in the past I've been guilty of kind of skipping phase one, to be honest, especially when I started going into, like this different niche and the ad cost did add up pretty quickly. So, um, it's just mentioned as another way you can do it.

Speaker 1:

If you want to just kind of you hate dms, you hate content, you still will need to produce content when you're writing your emails. But you know, if you don't want to, if you don't want to be on social media all day, or at least for a couple of hours a day. Then you can just, you know, run ads if you have the money. It's all about whether you have more time or more money. So the reason why we want to move people onto your email list from your social media is that's your owned traffic. Okay, like that's a list that you know you can't be banned from. The algorithm won't change. It's your email list. Okay, it's the most important digital asset you own when you have an online business. So we've started to build your list. We've either decided to cross pollpollinate or to run ads.

Speaker 1:

But now the third thing we need to do in phase two is to actually write 15 minute daily emails that actually get sales. So you want to follow the five lever framework that I've talked about before on this podcast. If you want to join my school community, which will give you a free course on writing emails in that in that way, then you can click the link in the description of this podcast and you'll get a free course. But basically, these emails don't take long to write. They're about 15 minutes you want to use. You want to use a story and you want to use an insight a story which contains an insight relevant to the to your prospects problems, desires, whatever it is, and then you want to transition to an offer at the end of the email. This offer can drive replies where you can. You can get people on the calls or you can just sell directly, okay. So when you start to build up your email list alongside your social media, you now have two sales channels instead of one.

Speaker 1:

Okay, an email, in a way, is a lot easier to manage because, again, you don't need to be worrying about algorithms. You don't even need to be worrying about DMs. You just simply send out your emails and, if they're crafted in the right way, they will generate replies and those people can be converted to clients. So you know, if you're using social media and email, this is when your sales start to become predictable, okay, and you start to basically really scale up past the 10K a month mark and you're starting to build a system. You know what you can do eventually is to you know, stop selling in the DMs or stop basically trying to get people to book calls with you in the DMs, and just all of your social media efforts are designed just to build your email list. So now that we've done those two things.

Speaker 1:

We're going to talk about phase three, and this is where you can go 20, 30, 50k a month or more without adding complexity. So if you start to get to phase three and you start to to sort of you still rely on dms and stuff like that, it becomes the point where you'll have to hire people to manage your, you know, appointment setters, you'll have to hire closers, you'll have to hire people basically to manage the conversations that you're having, assuming your social media following starts to grow into the thousands. You know there's there's a certain level of just there's just not enough hours in the day to manage so many conversations, to manage so many sales calls. And this is where, in phase three, the freedom really kicks in, if you choose this path and choose this right model. So what I do and what I teach clients is to basically remove sales calls from your process.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so what you want to do is you want to continue to send the emails that you were sending, the story-based emails, but your offer should be contained in a Google Doc and you can just get people to reply and you send them your Google Doc and you have the conversations via email, because the offer sales call is really just designed to give people that you know, talk them through your offer and give them a reason to act now. But if your google doc is already clear and gives them a reason to act now, the actual sales call is not necessary. Okay, and you can just have conversations with people through your inbox and and, if you want, you can still use your dms as well if you are getting conversations being generated on social media. But you make the doc do the heavy lifting. So instead of you know, hey, do you need help with this? You know, yes, I do. Okay, what's your situation? You know what's stopping you from getting you to your goal. Usually, where you previously would have offered a sales call, here's where you just send a Google doc and the person has a decision to make a choice, to say yes or no, and then you move on.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so that is the start of phase three. The second step in phase three would be to, if you already have an email list of 5,000 people or more, you want to, what I would recommend is to run a launch. Okay, so you can package your expertise. If you have a recurring offer or you have sort of a you know, like high ticket offer, you have a recurring offer or you have sort of a you know like high ticket offer. That's high touch. There's also a really common, a really like sort of what's the word? Um, useful way to kind of package your knowledge is to run maybe like a cohort or a group coaching experience which will allow you to sell to many people at the same time and package maybe four to six to eight weeks of your, of your time and of your expertise and sell it at a price point of between $500, $2,000, whatever, or more dollars, because it's a cohort and it's a sort of a sprint. And when you're doing a launch, you want to obviously create your offer, you want to put it into a Google Docker, onto a sales page, but then you want to do a pre-launch, you want to set a deadline of your launch and you want to cap the spots and you want to create urgency.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you're going to be, let's say, for me, I'm a coach. I help people with online marketing, email marketing in particular. So what I could do is I could do like I would have recurring clients or whatever. That's totally fine. Like you know, I would have, you know, recurring clients or whatever. That's totally fine. But not a lot of people are, you know, ready to pay the kind of you know, or ready to pay, or just don't suit or just not really a good fit for your recurring offer. Okay, basically usually around price or whatever they're willing to pay. So what you can do is you can do okay, like I'm going to do a six week group program here and I'm going to charge it at 40% or less of my usual rates, but instead of getting one-to-one time we're going to do a small group. So in the end, as a coach, you probably get the same amount of money, if not more, and you're able to help more people, but they just don't get one-to-one time.

Speaker 1:

So it's just a way of basically packaging your expertise in a different way and doing a sprint with people. You go through your usual process, maybe do one call a week, two calls a week, and do it for four to six weeks. Then you launch this to your email list and when you're launching this to your list, as I mentioned, you want to cap the spots, you want to create urgency and this way you're going to be able to generate new clients and cash from your email list with no sales costs. So this model then gives you fewer, if not no, sales calls. You've got more leverage and you've got more energy to focus on your content and your delivery. You can keep your recurring clients and you can also run these launches every two or three months as well. Your social media if it's generating conversations, you can sell via Google Docs or you can just direct people to your list and do all your selling to your email list.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and this is how I've seen coaches scale from 10 to 30 to 50K a month without adding complexity, actually by removing complexity from your business. So to recap, that is the three phases. So phase one content and conversations equals clients, early clients, at least. Phase two build a list and sell via daily emails and Google Docs. And phase three scale launches, asynchronous sales, google Docs, no sales calls. And look, I appreciate that when I start to work with someone as well, a lot of people think that, oh, I want to go build my email list.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but in reality, if you're below the sort of 5 to 10k mark, usually you can get a lot more mileage from just being consistent with your content and being consistent with your conversations and optimizing your offer.

Speaker 1:

Of course, there's more that goes into these businesses in terms of margins, offers and obviously you know delivery, all those sort of things, but in terms of just totally client getting, you want to understand what phase are you in right now and what is the next step for you.

Speaker 1:

So if you have a small audience, I would say, unless you have money to invest in ads, your focus should be on generating conversations through content and social media.

Speaker 1:

If you have already have an audience there, your focus should be on transferring them to your email list and using cross-pollination or ads or a combination of both. And if you already have a big list in your social media you know, maybe you have a big list and you don't want to do social media that could be an opportunity for you to get some conversations going there. But if you're already kind of getting some good traction with your coaching business, the best thing you can do is to transition to a zero sales call model and focus on Google Docs launches and asynchronous sales. So that is essentially it. If you need help or want some help implementing this or you want to chat to me about your own coaching business, you can send me an email at garyredmannet or you've got my free community, an email course where you can learn the five lever framework in the school group, which will be linked in the podcast description below. So that's it for this week. I'll chat to you in the next episode.

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