Graham Cochrane (00:02.614)
If you're stuck at six figures and you're wondering why you can't break through to seven, you might be falling for some of the biggest myths about scaling your business. Even worse, many times the coaches you hire or the courses that you buy hold you back because those people buy into the same myths themselves. So today I'm exposing four common misconceptions that could be holding you back from cracking that seven figure mark.
And more importantly, I'm going to show you exactly what to do instead to unlock that next level of growth.
Graham Cochrane (00:43.298)
But before we jump in, fun announcement, there's still time for you to sign up for my absolutely free, brand new live training, how to turn your exhausting business into an effortless business where I'm gonna show you how to love your business again, scale past six and seven figures, all while working less than 20 hours a week. Bold promise, but I'm gonna show you all of that. This will expand on what we're talking about today. It's a free training, it's happening tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 29th, 1 p.m. Eastern. Click the link in the description below or go to effortlessmasterclass.com. I want you to come because we're gonna talk about some really, really important stuff. This is brand new material that I've been teaching to my private clients. I have not taught this publicly anywhere else. So you're gonna be one of the first to get it and it's incredibly beneficial, practical, and this will completely reframe the way you think about your business and scaling.
It's absolutely free. Just go to effortlessmasterclass.com. Come hang out with me. You can ask questions. We'll do live Q &A as well. I want you to be there. Okay, let's jump into the myths. And what I want you to do is think about which one of these you've believed yourself, you've heard, you're actively believing, a coach told you to focus on. And remember, context, you've reached six figures in your business. How do you get to seven? Okay?
Because reaching six figures is amazing. It's absolutely amazing. And you have proven that you have an offer that people love and you know what to do to make money. Scaling to seven feels different. And for a lot of people, it feels unreachable. And you might even scale to multi-six, but you can't seem to get to that seven figure mark. So if you're that person, this is for you because you're probably handicapped by one or more of these myths. So I want to expose them and then give you a flip way to look at it.
Qualifying this, I've done this multiple times. Okay, I've built two seven-figure businesses. I have a multi seven-figure year business right now. I've done this in two different niches, hobby niche, business niche. I've done this for 15 plus years now. So I figured it out. I've cracked the code. I wanna help you unlock this, okay? Here we go, myth number one, you just need more leads. I don't even think people have to tell us this. I think this one feels obvious.
Graham Cochrane (03:06.286)
If you've reached $100,000 a year or more in your business, aka six figures, you are getting leads, you're converting them into an offer, and you're making money, and you're thinking, okay, I'm selling 20 copies of my course a month, if I could just double that and sell 40 copies, then I'll make more money, which is true. So there you go, I just need to get more leads. And so that's why people come to me like, hey, Graham,
Should I run ads? Should I be posting on social more? Should I double down on YouTube? Like their brain goes to more exposure, more leads, coming through my funnel or my process that will lead to more money, right? I already have something that works. Let's just put more people in the front of that thing and we'll make more money. The problem with this is that it's flawed. The reason it's flawed is that it's overly simplified. Not that simple is bad. I have a very simple business. But the logic here is overly simplified because think about this.
Are all leads created equal? No. If you've ever run a giveaway where if people sign up for your email list and follow you on social and do all these things, they'll get entered to win a bunch of free stuff either from you or from a partner that has, you know, I don't know, swag or gear or stuff, whatever. And you got a thousand new leads.
or 500 new leads or 10,000 new leads? Were those leads quality leads? Were those leads your ideal customer? Chances are they weren't. Underneath the thousand new emails you probably got, you may have gotten 10 better quality. So the myth of you just need more leads is flawed because it's not nuanced enough. What you need instead are better leads.
You actually don't even need more leads. You might be getting more leads than you need, but you have no idea if they're the right leads. What you need is to know exactly who your perfect client is.
Graham Cochrane (05:09.496)
When you know who your perfect client is, then you can go get in front of those perfect prospects.
and bring them into your world. This is why it's fascinating to me when people say, grandma, I wanna grow on YouTube, I wanna grow on YouTube, my channel's not big enough, I'm not getting enough views, I'm not getting enough downloads on my podcast, I'm not getting, I always remind them of my friend, Iko. Iko was in my mastermind for a while, got to coach her, and she's my favorite example. And Iko, if you're watching or listening, you know I love you, and you think you're a legend, you're legend, because Iko,
is a coach that helps native Japanese speakers with their English pronunciation. She doesn't teach English. She teaches English pronunciation for native Japanese speakers to help them with their accent. Think business owners doing international business or football or baseball players coming over from Japan to play baseball in the US or actresses or whomever wants to do more interaction.
the English speaking world from the Japanese world and they want to work on their accent. Her YouTube channel, when I was coaching her, had 500 subscribers. Her email list was a couple hundred people. In fact, every few months she would clean out her email list and she would delete or unsubscribe anyone who wasn't opening all her emails. So instead of deleting the 20%, she would delete the 80%.
She would say, you don't even deserve to be on my email list if you're not gonna open my emails. I love that. So she had a tiny email list of 200 people, a tiny YouTube channel of 500 people, but you know what she had? The right leads. She was attracting the right person, her perfect client. Her small channel, her small list was attracting the perfect client, enough so that she was doing $30,000 a month. She went from one to 5,000 a month.
Graham Cochrane (07:13.416)
to $30,000 a month as well on her way to seven figures. She's scaling, not by getting more leads.
by getting the right leads. So now you don't need more leads. That's not what you need. You need to put on your big boy pants and your big girl pants and figure out who is your ideal client and how can I attract more of them?
If I gave you 10,000 of my leads today, that wouldn't mean Jack squat for your business. You could go and get 100 of the perfect leads and make way more money than if I gave you 10,000 of my leads because my leads are probably not your leads. Does this make sense? So myth number one, you just need more leads. No, you don't. So anybody that's helping you believe that myth probably has something to sell you that will get you more leads. Add people on YouTube or on Facebook or on
Instagram, all we can run ads and get you more leads. Social media experts will get you in front of more people, more followers, get you more leads. That all makes sense if you believe that more leads equals scaling to seven figures and it doesn't because you need the right leads. You got to be very specific about what you're doing here. Myth number two, you just need to work more or work harder.
Graham Cochrane (08:28.066)
This one messes with people because when they realize that it takes me less work to make a couple million dollars a year than it takes them to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, their minds are like, whoa, how does it make any sense? Because they are living under the heavy burden, heavy yoke of this myth of some work equals some money, more work equals more money. All humans typically believe this because again,
We're lazy and we haven't done the hard work, air quotes, the nuance to work of figuring out what work matters. So no, you don't need to work more because most of my clients that are, I'm making 150,000, I'm making 200,000, I'm just gonna double down, triple down, make more content, send more emails, run more launches, make more offers, be on social more often. And that activity might lead to some more sales, but it doesn't get you to a million dollars a year. It doesn't scale.
Doesn't 5X, doesn't 10X what you're doing. And if you push that hard, you will die. You will crash. You will hit the burnout barriers, I like to say.
So that myth doesn't work. The reality is you need to work more efficiently. It's interesting. You can get to six figures just putting your head down and doing hard work. That's what I love about business is you can be rewarded for your hard work. If you want to scale though from six to seven, it's no longer about hard work. It's about efficient work. And this takes thought and this takes analysis. It's not hard, but it's actually easier to just work more.
than it is to figure out what is the 20 % that drives the 80 % in all categories. Content, conversion, offer, email, open rate, retention, ascension, nurture, like, you have to do the work of figuring out the 20%.
Graham Cochrane (10:26.082)
What's interesting is if you look at the 80-20 rule and you look at, well, 80 % of your revenue is coming from 20 % of your efforts and your tasks, well then you could actually stop doing 80 % of what you're doing and only reduce your income by 20%. But now you have four fifths of your time back, you could actually double down on the 20 % and you'd be technically working less than half of how much you were working before, but getting almost twice the result. This is the power of efficiency.
This is the power of being smart. So no, working harder is not gonna lead to seven figures. I don't know a single millionaire that just put their head down and worked harder. They figured out what really mattered, what was essential and what was just work for work's sake, as Tim Ferriss would call it. And that's how you scale. You gotta get efficient. You gotta understand you're 20%. Myth number three, I love this one.
because sometimes my clients will tell me they'll spend a lot of money, they'll hire me, I'm working with them, and all of a sudden they're like, all right, Graham, I know you're just gonna tell me to have a high ticket offer. Here's the myth, you just need high ticket offers, or higher ticket offers. They come in, no, you're gonna say, just need a more expensive offer, duh. I'm like, no, no, that's not the answer at all. Because again, that is incredibly un-nuanced, it's incredibly...
Generic just because you have a high price offer doesn't mean it's good Just because you have a high price offer doesn't mean people are gonna want to buy it. I could tell you right now I have a million dollar offer, but if it's not worth it, no one's gonna buy it High price isn't the answer You need the right offer. It's all about the right offer. So the guys and gals that scale to seven figures They actually get more
detail oriented and more nuanced. They might have a couple of core generic offers that make them 150, $300,000 a year, even $500,000 a year. But to get to a million or two million or 10 million a year, you have to actually go deeper and get more niche and more nuanced and say, okay, if I get even more specific and I create an offer that solves a very profound but specific problem for a very specific person who's hopefully your ideal client, they will pay more for that offer because it solves
Graham Cochrane (12:47.842)
their specific problem. This is the power of having a specialist versus a general practitioner when you think about your doctor. You have a family doctor that's a general practitioner, he or she can help you with all kinds of things, ailments, parts of your body that have issues. They're worth a certain amount of money. But if I come to them and the doctor, you know, I pay the doctor to look at me and they do a full analysis, they do blood panel, they do everything, and they say, you know what, you have a heart condition.
And while I can make some suggestions on some medication or some things you could do, you probably want to see a heart specialist, cardiologist. Well, A, yeah, I'm to want to go see the specialist because that's all they do. They specialize in the heart. So I think I'm going to get better care there, not because this doctor is not smart, but because this other doctor over here has decided to focus on the heart against all other things. And guess what? I'm going to pay that doctor a lot more.
because that doctor is a specialist on the heart. She's a cardiologist. So going from zero to six figures, you're a general practitioner. You're a family doctor. You help people get well. Fill in the blank, whatever that is. But if you really want to scale to seven figures, you have to be a specialist. Okay? So when I just helped people make money online, it was very easy to get to six figures.
When I decided to help people scale their online businesses and work less than 20 hours a week,
that's very specific because not everybody wants to work less and make more. You think they would, but they don't. A lot of people want to be told how to make as much money as possible and how to work hard. And I don't believe in most of that crap. So I'm targeting the people that want to do this organically. They want to do this effortlessly. They want to do this with an evergreen style business. They want to do this while working less and less and less every single month, every single year. And they don't want to be satisfied with six figures. They actually do want seven or more, but they want to work less. I'm going to speak to that person.
Graham Cochrane (14:53.186)
and show that, guess what, I'm an expert in that. I've built two seven-figure businesses that require five hours, five hours a week to run. They're gonna pay me more to learn how to do that, because that's what I'm an expert at. A lot of people who are making millions, they work 80 hours a week. You're not gonna learn to work less from those guys. So the people that want what I can offer come to me and they'll pay a lot of money to work with me because I'm an expert in that. I'm the cardiologist.
cardiologist in that. that make sense? So for you, you want to create something that I call a magic offer. Magic offers are the right and most powerful scalable offer for you. If you come to my Effortless Masterclass, I'm going to teach you what a magic offer is and how to think about it because these are very different than what most people are doing with their offers. So it's free. Come to the Masterclass, go to effortlessmasterclass.com and check it out.
we'll talk about and unpack what a magic offer is. So you don't need higher ticket offers, you just need the right offers. Think about who you really wanna serve, what will they pay more for, and how can you become an expert in that field so that you can charge the right premium for the right person who's like begging you to take their money, okay? That's what you need. And myth number four, this one's huge, we're gonna park here for a second. To scale from six to seven figures, you just need a bigger team. You just gotta delegate.
You gotta hire people, you need a team. This is probably the biggest myth I heard as I was growing. And this is also some of the most unsolicited advice I would get in the early days. My first business, the Recording Revolution, I was a solopreneur for the first seven years of the business. I would like to point out that I was doing five to $600,000 a year as a solopreneur, okay? I did not have a.
I did have a customer service person. I got to six figures without anybody on my team, but I hired a customer service person to handle my email, because email is getting crazy. That's about $500, $600,000 a year before I expanded the team even more. And I hired a marketing director, and he helped me scale to seven figures. I learned a ton from him, because again, I didn't have any mentorship, I didn't know what I was doing. I learned a ton about the business model, but I also learned a ton about myself.
Graham Cochrane (17:17.356)
that I've carried through with me as well. So, I did use someone to help me get to seven figures. I then learned all that, reverse engineered at my second business, and I scaled to seven figures as a solopreneur the second time.
Graham Cochrane (17:34.03)
I then fell for this myth again because I was being told, to go from seven to multi-seven, you need a team. And I was like, okay, maybe this is the point where I need a team. So I hired up and we had a team of about seven. I had a content producer. I had two video editors. I had a community manager. I had a CMO, a chief marketing officer, a CPO, a chief product officer. I had it all.
and we didn't make any more money. So I got rid of everybody, wiped the slate clean, and all of last year it was just me and my customer service rep. And we did $2 million, multiple seven figures. So I am living proof that you do not need to hire more to get to seven figures because I've done six, seven, and multi-seven with just one part-time, five to 10 hours a week contract. Okay.
So A, I'm living proof of this, but when I was starting, this is where I was going with this, I would get on people's podcasts, I would connect with other entrepreneurs, and they all say, Graham, it's really impressive what you've built. You're doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, you're a solopreneur, that's great, you should be proud of that. But bro, if you really wanna scale to a million dollars a year, you're have to start thinking like a CEO and hiring people. And need a team, you can't do it all yourself, you need to stay your zone of genius. I was like, that makes sense, that makes sense. I'm here to tell you.
15 years into this, almost 16 years into this now, that the team is not the solution. Now, I'm not opposed to a team, but what I have found, and now coaching other clients, is that hiring someone, once you're at the six figure mark, can actually cover up the weaknesses and the blind spots in your business, and you won't figure them out.
by hiring people. It's like a band-aid for a bad system because you don't need to hire more people. You just need an automated system. That's the reality. To scale from six to seven, you need systems. You need a system for getting leads, the right leads. You need a system for developing offers that are so magical. People are throwing their wallets at you. You need a system for nurturing leads to that offer. You need a system for ascending people from that offer to the next offer.
Graham Cochrane (20:00.248)
You need a system for retention if you have a continuity program or membership. You need a system for everything. And in the early days, you're just doing the work and you technically have systems because we develop them without realizing it, but they're probably janky, probably leaky like a leaky bucket, and they're probably not scalable. And that's why you feel like you're hitting a wall and you think, just need to hire people. But if you hire people and pay them to run your broken leaky systems, guess what?
You're now paying people to lose money for you.
And the problem is, is if you make a little bit more money after hiring people, it covers up the fact that you have a leaky system. And you're not gonna be making more profit, because now you have higher expenses. And so it becomes this dance where now you're, and not only that, you're spending more time managing the people, or hiring or firing the people to get more people that are better than the previous people. What I would rather you do is not hire a single person until you have dialed in a beautiful automated system.
This is why I love having an evergreen business because an evergreen business can scale and doesn't need humans. I want the most efficient, automated evergreen system possible. And then if I reach the actual literal end of its ability to scale, then I will hire somebody, the right person to take it to the next level. Or even if it's scaling perfectly, but I just no longer want to do certain parts of it so I can focus on other things in the business.
plant new seeds that might pay dividends later, then I will hire somebody to, as my friend Dan Martell says, buy back your time. So I will hire somebody to do something that I could do. It won't make me more money, but it gives me my time back and my time is the most valuable asset I have because I'm the thought behind this brand. I am the brain, I am the creativity, I'm the dreamer, so I need my time back. But hiring people is not the solution. Dialing in your systems is. There's a difference. Does this make sense?
Graham Cochrane (22:01.74)
And what's crazy is there's so much more automation at your disposal to take your systems and run with it and scale. So I don't want you to hire people because that's gonna cover up the bad systems until you've got really efficient, scalable, automated systems, you really wanna focus on dialing those in. And then yeah, you can hire some people to run the parts of it that need a human if you really want to, or if you wanna buy back your time, but that's not the solution. You can get to seven figures without a big team.
a real lean, simple team of one or two contractors can get you there. I've done it twice. Okay? So which of those four myths are you falling prey to? That you just need more leads? That you just need to work harder or more hours? That you just need higher ticket offers? Or you just need a bigger team?
Put in a comment below if you're watching on the YouTube version of this, which one of those myths you're struggling with. And message me on Instagram if you're listening to this on the audio podcast at the Graham Cochran and let me know which of those myths you're struggling with, we can talk about it. But here's your next step, bro. Come to the free masterclass. Go to effortlessmasterclass.com, click the link below. If you've missed it live, register there so I can get you a replay of this.
I want you to watch this thing because I've been developing new curriculum, new frameworks that I've been working on with my private one-on-one clients. It's the first time I'm teaching them publicly here. It's going to help you go from an exhausting business to an effortless business. And it's going to help you scale past six and seven figures, loving what you do all while working less than 20 hours a week. That's the whole goal of this entire workshop. We're going to uncover three really, really powerful things that you can implement right away. We're going to do an exercise
on the live training, five minutes that can completely transform how you show up in your business and unlock more creativity, which is gonna help you scale. So I want you to come, it's free. I'm excited about this material. I've been waiting to share it with you. I've been tweaking it and dialing it in the last few months privately with clients and we're getting awesome results from it. So I wanna share it with you publicly as well. So go to effortlessmasterclass.com or click the link in the description or the show notes below and hopefully I will see you there. Have an amazing rest of your day.
