I mean, when I say we hit over $1M a month in recurring revenue, people picture one giant offer. It was a stack of them. And the funny part is I didn’t count a single dollar of upfront cash to get there.
I mapped the whole thing out on the whiteboard for this one, the offers, the funnels, the org chart, and what I’d do if I had to rebuild it.
The offer ladder
Fitness at $3,200 for four months got to around $150K a month. Then consulting trainers at $10K for four months. Full transparency, that’s why a lot of people switch into that space. You can charge more, which means more ads, a bigger team, more room for expenses. Then people outside fitness kept asking for help and, being a little naive and young, I said yes. General consulting at $16K for four months.
So mostly I scaled by pricing higher. Then the back end showed up:
- White label GoHighLevel software at $97 a month. Still have it, still great.
- A done for you ad agency, Elite Ads, around $5K a month on average.
- Sales placement. We don’t do that anymore, I hated it. If you place someone who isn’t competent, which most people aren’t, the client is unhappy and it’s on you.
- One on one with me at $100K to $200K a year, usually six to 10 people a year.
- Next Level, the ascension program at $48K.
The recurring math
We’d sell about 100 people a month into the $16K program and collect about half up front, so around $800K. None of that is recurring, so I don’t count it.
About 30% of those 100 ascend into Next Level at $48K. Thirty people a month at 48 grand, stacked over 12 months, works out to about $1.4M a month. The one on one, call it six people at 200K a year, is another $100K a month. About nine of the 30 would buy done for you ads, and even if I pretend everyone left after three months, which isn’t true, that’s about $135K a month. Then about $100K a month from the software. Add it up and it’s around $1.7M a month in recurring.
It took about 12 months to build up. And stupidly, I didn’t start doing back end programs until later in my career. That was a massive mistake. Most of the money was sitting in clients we already had.
Where the customers came from
Mostly paid ads, because it’s predictable. Organic is great if you have a massive following, but I can depend on ads. We spent about $200K a month on low ticket and $300K a month on high ticket.
Low ticket was ad to sales page to thank you page, then email, text and calls to upsell into high ticket. Price points like $47 to $97 up front, then $97 to $197, then $497. On cold traffic I want 1 to 3% buying the first thing, then 10 to 20% taking each upsell. That gets you to about a $250 average order, around 800 buyers, and about half your spend back up front. If people buy but nobody ascends, you’re in trouble.
High ticket was ad to DM or VSL, then a call. Leads around 20 bucks, about 15,000 of them, about 1,000 calls at roughly $300 each, about 100 closes. That’s the law of 10, it shows up almost every time. CAC around $3,000. I like CAC at 25% or less of the price, so on a 10K offer you want 2,500, on 20K you want 5,000. Hitting people two ways, the VSL and the DMs, also made us pretty unique. We had 14 setters messaging basically 24/7. Most companies can’t do that kind of volume.
What the team looked like
At $100K a month it was two coaches, one sales rep and two setters. That’s it.
At 100 plus staff, I sat at the top with what I’d call the core four under me, so to speak: sales, operations, marketing and fulfillment. I was the sales manager myself with six reps, one call a day for an hour to train them. Sales managers usually want 15 to 25 grand a month, I didn’t think it was a full time job, and honestly sales is my thing. Two setter managers ran the 14 setters in shifts. Ben ran marketing, funnels, ads and tech. He’s been my right hand guy for like six years and still works with me. My brother Benson ran fulfillment with a bunch of coaches under him.
My one regret is ops. I called Ben a COO but he was a CMO. So I was doing operations myself, which to me means people, and that’s a lot.
Why coaching businesses churn
The hard part with coaching and consulting is that people leave either way. If they get great results they think they learned it all, when usually it’s just doing the same things more. If they don’t, they think they need a new shiny object instead of getting better at the skills. That’s part of why I got into private equity and profit sharing. Software, hedge funds and insurance keep people forever because they never stop paying. I pay like a hundred bucks a month for Claude, and that kind of business just keeps adding customers.
So we built the experience to keep people longer. A detailed intake form, because different coaches were giving different experiences, and I’d walk through the forms with them until they saw the same patterns. An onboarding call that answered all their questions. Basecamp for docs, files and chats. One on one calls, group calls, curriculum, in person events. But being blunt, the number one thing for recurring revenue is getting people results.
If I had to rebuild
Solve a painful problem people will pay meaningful money for, usually $5,000 plus. Package it so the value keeps coming. Build one predictable way to get customers and a sales process you can repeat. Make fulfillment good enough that people want to stay. Write down what works so you can hire people to own it. Then find the biggest constraint and fix it.
And don’t obsess over a million a month if you haven’t hit 10K. Get to 10K consistently, then 30, then 50, then 100. Every level shows you a new problem. That’s the whole game.
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