This Is How I Hit 10K Months In My First Year Of Business
I love reading about other people’s first year in business and getting the behind the scenes lowdown on the steps they took to grow.
And so, this is the story of my first year and a bit - from August 2018 when I ‘birthed’ the business to December 2019, which signified the end of my first full year.
It’s the story of how I made the leap from my corporate 9-5 to running a 6-figure business that I love.
So let’s pull back the curtain and dive in.
1: Invested in an awesome Business Coach for a 6-month partnership
I don’t believe you have to invest in support straight away in your business, but I do know it’s been the single biggest contributor to me growing my business so quickly.
Prior to hiring a coach, I’d been thinking about starting my business for over a year. I’d begun and almost finished my coaching qualification but realised I wasn’t any further forward in actually starting my business.
In August 2018, I reached out to someone I’d been following online and whose content I resonated with. We had a 1 hour call and as we chatted through what I wanted to achieve I remember feeling this huge sense of relief. The idea that I didn’t have to do this alone was a fricking revelation and for the first time ever I started to believe that I could actually do this - leave my 9-5, and craft a business which makes money around my family.
I invested £8000 which was huge for me. More than I’ve ever invested in anything other than a house and a car.
It turned out to be the best decision ever.
It took me from thinking about starting a business to taking serious action. I was totally motivated to do the work because there was no way in hell I was going to waste that kind of investment.
Lesson for you here: investing cold hard cash changes things. If you’ve ever heard the expression, ‘skin in the game’ - that’s what it’s talking about. As you have something to lose, you get off your procrastinating arse and get in the arena.
Let’s be clear: you don’t have to invest £8000 to invest in yourself. Even investing oooo I don’t… £49 + VAT in an incredible membership like mine changes the way you show up ;)
2: Got 70% clear on my niche...
Before working with my coach, I had absolutely no idea who I wanted to help. I just knew I wanted to coach people, which isn’t really a thing. People don’t buy ‘coaching’. They buy what it can do for them. So you gotta pick a niche, which honestly felt bloody terrifying.
I knew how to coach - I didn’t feel massively qualified to help people achieve a specific result.
In my heart, I wanted to help mums start their own businesses and make the same jump I was making. I’d come from a corporate job working in marketing and sales so it seemed like the area I’d have the most credibility.
But the imposter syndrome was reaaaaal… who was I to coach people on that when I’d barely left the starting blocks myself?!
I remember saying to my coach “I don’t have enough experience to start serving here yet” and him saying to me “do you want to go away and keep learning until you’re ready, or do you just want to start, learn as you go, and find a way to serve in integrity?”
Needless to say, I chose the latter.
3: ...and created a shitty first draft of my offer
To craft v.1.0 of my offer I headed into Facebook groups and spoke to my ideal clients - mums who wanted to leave their 9-5 and go full-time on their business - to find out what their number one struggle was.
The message was loud and clear: attracting clients.
I could already see a whole host of other coaches serving in this area which gave me the validation I needed to know the niche was viable (your first ever niche and offer is not the time to innovate- look for evidence of other people successfully serving here already).
I didn’t overthink it - I took this market research and this became the result I spoke to. And when I say ‘spoke to’… I didn’t promise this result. I said: I help you get better at marketing and sales so that you can attract more clients. So for all of you that feel like you can’t speak to a result yet because you haven’t achieved it, know this… you DO need to speak to the end result, but you DON”T need to promise it.
I then mapped out the 4-6 areas that I could help my ideal clients with. And when I say I mapped it out, I didn’t create a fancy document or even write it on my website (I didn’t have one yet). I just wrote out the core areas in my notebook: what I believed my ideal client was struggling with, where they wanted to be and how I could help them get there.
This is what it looked like:
3 month package for £1250 helping mums in service-based businesses get better at organic marketing and sales to attract more clients.
Covering these topics:
Craft a compelling message which you’re excited to shout about.
Market your business to position you as the go-to person in your field.
Sell your services confidently, in a way which makes it easy for clients to say ‘hell yes!’
Quieten the self-doubt, believe in yourself and step into being the business owner you know you can be.
Do it all in less time, so you never have to choose between your kids and your career again.
Instead of holding out for perfection, I just took the messy first step knowing that I could come back and improve it over time.
4: I quit my 9-5 a lot sooner than I expected
I hired my coach in August 2018 and had left my 9-5 by December 2018.
Doing the full-time gig alongside getting the business off the ground was intense. Early starts, late nights, working weekends.
Instead, I made the decision to leave and instead I took over the running of our family Osteopathy business from January 2019 which provided me with a much welcome small income to tide me over. I knew I could support myself with that and savings for about 8 months.
5: I offered free sessions, crafted a sales script and spoke to as many people as possible
The temptation when you start your business is to stay behind the scenes for as long as possible: create your website, work on your offers, get your planning/onboarding/contract sorted out.
The problem is… none of this stuff will get you clients.
My coach challenged me to book 30 calls with people I could help and maaaaan this was super uncomfortable. I was still working full-time and knew all my work colleagues would see any content I put out on Facebook.
Luckily, I’d had the conversation with work about my goal to start my own business as a coach and they’d been super supportive, so I knew that wasn’t a real barrier (just my ego having a field-day).
Plus, I had that £8k investment under my belt and I sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it. So I just fucking did it.
I posted on my personal facebook and told everyone I was starting my own business and I offered 1-hour free sessions to help them move forward. You can read my blog on this whole process here.
The purpose of the free session offer was to speak to as many people as possible. Why? Because putting yourself in the position of speaking to your ideal clients is the quickest way to get clients.
Putting out this free session offer meant that in my first few months of business I was having multiple conversations every week with people who might want to work with me. It was absolutely game-changing.
A key part of this was actually figuring out what I was going to say on this calls. So having a sales process which provided incredible value and allowed me to position my services was pretty crucial. Once you have this, you just rinse and repeat.
In January 2019 I did 16 of these free session calls. I offered my services to eight of them, and I got two clients from it. That’s a 25% conversion rate, and I made £1,589.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses….
And by that I mean by first client experiences were pretty fricking laughable.
My first client paid $1,000 to work with me for three months (I discounted it ha). She came to two sessions, then ghosted me. Like… I never heard from her again.
I sent her a gift in the post and months and months later received a really nice email from her apologising for what had happened. Not an ideal first client experience!
The second client pulled out after the first session because her car broke down. She didn’t have the money to pay for the repair so asked for her money back - another less-than-ideal outcome.
My third client was an absolute dream. We worked together for 3 months, and then another 3 months and are still friends today. She got awesome results and it was a huge confidence boost for me.
6: Started sharing my message to my existing network (family and friends) even though it was super uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, I started sharing my message and my content to my family and friends on my personal Facebook profile. This was again SUPER uncomfortable.
In those posts, I was doing live videos, sharing my opinion, leading with value on the subject of marketing and sales. At the beginning, it honestly felt like I was talking to myself. I got a couple of likes from family, friends and work colleagues.
Why start on my personal Facebook? Because I didn’t have an audience anywhere else. The result… everyone in my network became aware of what I was doing, told friends and old high school friends starting businesses came out of the woodwork too. I learnt that there’s so much leverage to be had by starting with your warm network.
7: I created a website I was too embarrassed to share
Oh boy, I remember how badly I wanted to create a website and my coach had me wait and wait and wait. Now I know why.
When you’re not that clear on your niche and your message and you’ve got dreadful DIY branding, creating a website didn’t result in the beautiful finished article I had in mind.
So I created my website and then didn’t give anyone the link because I am dreadful at design and I didn’t want anyone to see it.
However, it did allow me to start blogging consistently and I wrote a blog a week from the very early days.
8. Worked on my mindset, a lot.
I thought I was hiring a Business Coach for the strategy but honestly, I hopped on most calls in the grips of self-doubt feeling like I was free-falling off a cliff.
I didn’t think I was good enough. Questioned why anyone would ever want to pay me. Doubted my prices, my integrity, my experience. You name it, I beat myself up about it.
My coach spent a lot of time talking me down, bigging me up, making sure I knew the next steps to take and I’m eternally grateful.
Mindset was my biggest struggle in my first year. Now I’m resilient AF (most of the time).
9: Started in-person networking.
This is something that I really recommend doing at the start of your business (pandemic allowing). Something different happens when you meet people in person. There’s such an opportunity to form deep connections and relationships.
Clients come from conversations. Networking puts you in a position where you’re having conversations that have this ripple effect from when you first start networking to when people start to know you better. If you go to the same networking event, the people there see you again and again and again. Over time (it’s not immediate), people learn what you do. For me, that’s where some of my first clients came from. I built that initial know/like/trust factor with people in my local area.
Plus, you build up a stellar referral network. Refer generously to other professionals and trust that the good will come back around.
10: I went all in on one social platform and mastered it (kind of)
So often I see people try to spread themselves too thinly across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. It’s hard enough to master and get traction on one social media platform because all of them require totally different strategies. Trying to do that when you’re also new to marketing, sales and all the rest of it is pretty overwhelming.
I started with Facebook. I went all in on my personal profile and started posting on my business page. I also massively leveraged other people’s facebook groups. I was networking, adding value, making friends, and posting on promotional threads.
Each time, I was pointing people towards my business page with a very simple top-level pitch. It read “For tips and strategies on how to improve your marketing and sales to attract consistent clients, come follow me over on my business page”. I led the pitch with the value that I could deliver to them.
So many people don’t write like this, they write about themselves first. But the simplicity of my pitch and the fact that it was about the reader very quickly led to people clicking through and following me based on that.
FYI, I don’t actually recommend pointing people to your Facebook business page as I don’t believe it’s the most effective place to build your audience. Why? Because posts on your business page reach only 2-5% of your audience. Basically, FB want you to pay for ads. FB groups are far more effective for audience growth and using your personal FB to share your message is a great strategy too (n.b. you’re not actually allowed to sell on your personal FB so don’t do this).
Full disclosure: I also started an Instagram account and wasted a whole bunch of time half-arsedly posting there, gaining followers but never feeling like my heart was in it. I ditched Instagram in 2020 and focussed on what was working for me: Facebook. Heed my warning. Focus on one thing.
11: Started a Facebook group
In February 2019 I started my Facebook group Mummy’s Got Clients which now has over 2,000 people in it. I used other FB groups to promote it heavily and I went all in on creating a supportive community grounded in value.
I do not buy into the whole “hold back or they won’t buy from you” fear. I did value-packed half-hour trainings and it meant that the first people who joined became my biggest fans. I’ve built really deep connections with them and they are still in my world today. They’ve watched my business grow from the beginning and this 100% came from leading with value and not holding back.
12: Hired my second coach for a 6 month partnership
I’d got the investment bug. After approximately 1 month going it alone after my previous coaching partnership finished, I found myself on the phone to another coach merrily signing up in Feb 2019.
I didn’t have the cash and opted to pay the pricier monthly instalment and strive to make the money each month. And I did.
I got waaaaay better at sales - like, really good at it - and it’s now one of my fave things to teach.
I was spending most of the money I was making directly on coaching and don’t regret a second of it. It was these two 6 month coaching partnerships that gave me the confidence to take the action I needed to become the business owner I am today.
13: Ran an in-person workshop
In April 2019, I ran my first in-person workshop called ‘Natural, Authentic and Easy Marketing to Get Consistent Clients’. I sold 15 tickets and made £150. I also had to rent the space which probably cost me most of that £150, so I pretty much broke even. I charged just £10 for the tickets as my money mindset was all over the place and I did not believe anyone would pay to come! I couldn’t quite believe that 15 people actually bought a ticket.
I wrote way too much content for this workshop -about 5 hours of content for a 2-hour workshop. Needless to say, I didn’t even get near to finishing it. Even so, I got really lovely feedback (apart from the not-fitting-it-all-in thing).
Some of those 15 people became fans and came into my online world. It was a massive confidence boost for me.
14. Ran first challenge and filled my 1-1 roster
Following the success of my first workshop, I felt called to do something fun in my facebook group. I decided to run a challenge.
I ran my first ‘Get A Client In 5 Days’ challenge in May 2019, which focussed on quick bitesized actions my audience could take to generate leads quickly.
140 people sign up - and I was frickin’ delighted! This challenge totally changed my business. It led to my best month in new sales (£9,300) and I gained three new clients off the back of this challenge.
By this point, I’d shifted from a 3 to a 6 month coaching programme. I’d realised 3 months just wasn’t long enough for my clients to achieve big results and a longer programme meant fewer clients too.
My initial 6 month programme was £2500, which then increased in £3200 in May 2019 (I kept eeeking it up!).
The actual landing page I used: (it’s a Convertkit template):
The following month I gained five new clients and had my first £10k month (I actually made £13,800 in new sales that month). When I looked at where these clients had come from, I realised it was a stacking up of the workshops, the FB group, and the challenge. I was building momentum in my business with each of these actions.
Building momentum in your business is totally within your control. It’s about doing things that you don’t do every day - challenges, workshops, partnerships - rather than just the regular social media marketing slog. The everyday work takes a long time to pay off, but it’s when you go above and beyond and do the bigger stuff that it can really lead to big results quickly (in my experience).
15: Had a professional branding shoot
I genuinely couldn’t find a photo where I wasn’t holding a glass of wine. It was seriously affecting my confidence of showing up online so I went all in and invested in a full day branding photoshoot, make up and all in May 2019.
It was super fun.
Shout out to Ursula Kelly from Studio Softbox for the great pics.
16: … and invested in professional branding
Which took me from the DIY monstrosity on the left to my now branding on the right.
17: … and invested in a new website
One that I was actually excited to share…
18: Ran another in person workshop
In June 2019, I ran my second in-person workshop: How To Sell Services of £500+ With Confidence And Ease. This time I charged £25, I sold 18 tickets, and made £460 (minus the room hire).
It felt like such a huge mindset leap to be charging a little bit more this time. The workshop was a hit and I was pumped that I’d made a profit! It felt awesome.
19: I ran a second challenge - and launched my membership
This is where you can start to see the momentum stacking in my business. In September 2019 I ran the same challenge again in my FB group ‘Get A Client In 5 days’. This time I had 165 people sign up. I had a FB group of around 500 people at that time, and I decided to launch my membership.
I’d been to-ing and fro-ing over the membership because I knew that a group coaching programme was probably more sensible for me at that time. After all, it would require much fewer leads to make it a success. But I felt in my gut and in my bones that the membership model was right for me. Mummy’s Got Clients had become a super engaged FB group really quickly so it just felt like the right next step for me.
It was very rough and ready, no bells and whistles, but I launched my membership off the back of the second challenge. From the 165-person challenge, I had 43 people join. That was an awesome conversion rate, and by adding my 1:1 clients into it as well, this took the membership up to the limit I’d set myself: 50 people. It was my second really high-achieving income month (I made £13,596) and the momentum didn’t stop there.
My membership is now the heart of my business and on writing this in March 2021, we’ve now grown to over 200 members.
20. The start of consistent £10k months
After this, I decided to launch my first group programme in November 2019. It was a soft launch - I reached out to a bunch of people I’d had sales calls with that year that had been a “no - not right now”, who I thought might be a good fit for the group programme. All five of them said yes.
My first ever group programme was 6 months long with a £2500 investment.
This helped me hit another £10k month. At the end of my first year in business, I’d made £61,872. I’d wanted to beat my corporate income and I’d done it - it felt incredible.
When I look back at my KPI (key performance indictor) tracker for 2019, you can clearly see how the big actions I took began to stack up and create momentum. See how my highest-earning months came just after months when I took massive, scary action?
And as for August… I took that off, cos why the hell not!
And that’s a wrap for my first full year in business!
It’s been pretty nostalgic looking back and writing this.
A question I get asked a lot is: how long does it take to get consistent clients?
It’s one of those ‘how long is a piece of string’ questions. For me, I started my business in August 2018, I left my full-time 9-5 in December 2018 and was full-time on my business in January 2019. I knew I could last 8 months financially without making any money and this really allowed me to focus on serving without this huge pressure. I had consistent clients by May 2019.
I had the support of experienced coaches, I took continuous massive action and I invested heavily. I definitely didn’t do it on my own.
So how long does it take? I’d say 6 months - 18 months as an extremely rough guide.
I’m super open about all the behind the scenes stuff in my business, so if there’s anything you’d like to know, come join my free Facebook Group and ask away.
Ready to start your own journey to £10k months?
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