today’s episode, I talk all things marketing. I am breaking down the six steps you need to take to elevate your marketing, stand out in your niche, and be known for your offers. I share examples on how to refine your niche, create more uniqueness in your brand, and why this is important when scaling your business and offers.
Welcome to Show Up Real Podcast. Before we get started with today’s episode, I want to invite you to a very special event I’m putting on for women of color coaches and service providers who want to scale their business to six and multiple six figures without burning out and really building a business they are so, so proud of. I’ve been able to grow my coaching business to nearly 800K in sales, and I’ve done this while moving five times with my toddler and husband, nine months of pregnancy that left me sick most of the time, giving birth, postpartum anxiety, and with an ADHD brain that doesn’t do well with typical business strategies. I want to teach you my method of growing business, and I’m doing this at an event I’m calling Simple Scaling Week.
It’s going to be four days long, and I’m going to be sharing four scaling lessons with you every single day. We’re going to touch on innovating your own business offers so that you can sell your coaching offers and really make them into a brand. We’re going to talk about balancing your business using really simple, simple ways of creating systems behind the scenes in your business. You’ll also talk about elevating your marketing so that you can build trust with your audience faster and just stand out in a very unique way that only you can do. And lastly, we’ll talk about calm launching your group offerings and really learning how to remain calm and confident when launching a program and putting on this huge marketing campaign, how to keep your mindset calm and confident.
This event is sponsored by Show Up & Lead Mastermind, which applications for this program open September 24th during this event. Click here to join the waitlist to be the first to get details on how to join this event. All right, y’all, let’s get back to the episode. I can’t wait to see you there.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Show Up Real Podcast. I’m so excited that you are here. Let’s get straight into today’s topic. Okay, so today I’m talking about how to make money fast when business is slow. There are many times in my business where I needed cash, and I needed cash quicker than normal. I needed cash kind of fast, whether business was just slow, and maybe I launched something and it didn’t go as well, or I attempted to fully book my one-on-one coaching and I didn’t succeed. Regardless of the why or the how, I definitely have had times where I needed cash fast.
So today I’m sharing kind of my mindset and strategy around making money fast when your business needs it. And also, I’m sharing a little bit about my own stories and times that I’ve needed to take action, and the types of things that I’ve done and thought about. I kind of want to do a whole separate episode on all the ways you could make money fast, but I’ll leave that for another day. If you are interested in that, let me know on Instagram. DM me and let me know, like, yes, please make that episode, and maybe I’ll make it sooner than later.
Okay, so let’s just get straight into it. I want to start with a disclaimer, and the disclaimer is, and I think this is an important disclaimer because I think people forget this a lot of the time, very much in the coaching industry specifically because we are coaches, and if you are a coach, you want to listen to your coach, and you bought into them. So it could become this cycle of, “I should go get coaching on this,” which I believe in coaching, I love coaching, it’s changed my life. But let me give you a disclaimer really quickly. You are the owner of your business, and you are always allowed to do whatever you want and whatever you need to make money in your business.
I just want to be clear about that because I’m going to be giving you some strategy on some things I recommend, but I want to be very clear here: nobody’s in charge of your business except you, and you always get to make those decisions. Sometimes those decisions feel like risks. Sometimes they don’t. And I just wanted to start with that. Okay, so that’s the disclaimer. Now let’s get into it.
So let’s get clear about something else. If you need to make money, I always want you to have the belief that there are so many ways to do that. There are tons of ways, probably an unlimited number of ways to make money. And I think if you are a business owner and you’ve had sales before, specifically if you’ve had tens of thousands of dollars in sales before, then you have to look at the realness of what you’ve created in your business and be real with yourself that you know how to make money. You know how to make money. You could fight with your brain all day, but if you have made money in your business, right, you know how to make money. Period. End of point. It’s just a truth. It’s just a fact. It is data. Okay, so I want to be clear about that. I’m not going to fight with you about that if the data is clear. Okay, you know how to make money.
Every single business owner does. Nobody forced you to start a business. Nobody forced you to make offers. Nobody forced you to market your business. You did that. Okay, so you know how to make money. I want to start with that first. All right, so that’s the case. Now, when you are a business owner and the funds are low and you need to make money quickly to start covering whatever expenses, I want to give you a strategy that’s a mix of mindset and strategy. Okay? We’re going to start with mindset because I think when you are in this “I need to make money” energy, it definitely is more on the scarce side. There’s some type of worry, underlying worry, anxiety, that’s brewing when you see your funds getting lower and lower, and you know you need the money to pay for whatever the case is, whether it’s your payroll, your team’s payroll, whether you need the money—I know in the beginning of my business, I was paying for my son’s childcare with my business. So for me, the way I thought about it back then is like, if I don’t make money, I don’t have childcare, and then I can’t work, and then we’re just screwed, and then it’s this whole big thing. So regardless of what the money is for, I know that if you need the money, you need the money.
So let’s get into the strategy, and I’m going to start with mindset. The way I like to think just generally, as I’ve been able to grow my business, I’ve really learned that I need to adopt this unbothered mindset. And it’s really what I keep going back to for my mastermind, Show Up & Lead Mastermind. The mindset that you have to have as you scale your business is really this mindset that is unbothered, that you’re just so ready and willing to pivot, to move, to make a decision, to like—this extreme flexibility in your mindset is so valuable, especially when you need to make money.
Why unbothered? Because typically what I see, typically my goal, I should say, when it comes to business is just to be detached from my business and my business’s problems. One of the reasons we worry a lot about money—I mean, there’s a long list, let me be clear—one of the reasons we worry about money within the business is that, number one, most people are very attached to the money in their business, and it’s not a healthy attachment. It could be this attachment that like, “I need my business funds to look this way,” or “I need to make money so that X, Y, Z.” Now, everybody has different expenses, everybody has to pay for different things out of their business, but for the most part, what I see is when you are in this mindset of “I need to make money fast,” there’s a deep attachment to the money. There’s a deep attachment to clients, getting clients, and the attachment itself is unhealthy because it’s going to be hard for you to really think strategically and in a smart, intentional way when you’re just trying to solve problems quickly.
So here’s the process. Let’s get into the actual real process I recommend from a mindset point of view to start to handle when you want to make money quicker. Step one is the first step that I walk my clients through inside Show Up & Lead Mastermind when they need to make money is first getting quick to be compassionate with yourself. I have a process called quick to compassion, and the point of quick to compassion, this framework, is you don’t have a lot of time to go back and forth in your decision-making if you need money. You don’t have a lot of time, typically. And what I’ve found is that when you want to make decisions in your business, you need to make decisions in your business to bring in revenue, one of the first places you have to start with is by processing your emotions and just getting very real with yourself about what’s going on in your body and what’s going on in your mind. That level of awareness is 100 percent required if you don’t want to just overwork and grind incredibly hard to make a buck or two.
So the first thing you have to do is learn how to process your emotions. And I shouldn’t say “learn how to”—you have to process your emotions. Step one is you have to settle the fuck down. Like, I’m just going to say it that way and be real with you because this is what I have to remind myself of over and over and over again. Like, I have to settle down if I want to make these decisions in my business. And what I’ve found is really helpful for me is using
a framework called quick to compassion, where I just go through a five-step process that really helps me come back to myself. It helps me settle down and get clear about what’s happening in my body, what’s happening in my mind, and it just really helps me process all of the messiness of the emotions.
Sometimes I’ll also even just take a walk or go outside or take a shower and do something that’s not in front of my computer so that I can clear my mind, but this part is really important because if you are trying to do any decision-making from a place of worry, overwhelm, frustration, anger, resentment, like all of these very valid and real emotions—I’m not trying to devalidate them—but we want to process them. And when I say process them, I’m talking about going in and feeling those emotions.
So step one is really just settling down. Get quick to compassion and really feel those feelings and let them be there. I was talking to one of my clients about this and just saying how it’s so important to be neutral with your emotions, and sometimes we’re just not. And this is the reason why it’s so important to process your emotions in a way that will help you remain calm and keep you grounded and help you settle down because typically, if you want to make money quickly in your business, you can’t be in this hustle, hustle, hustle mindset. It just doesn’t work long term. So I want to make sure you do that first.
All right, number two is after you’ve settled down, after you’ve been quick to compassion and you’ve processed your emotions, and just given yourself some grace, number two is let’s get strategic, and let’s also get creative. So this is where I want you to open up a Google doc or a notebook and just let yourself be strategic and creative about ways that you could make money in your business quickly. I want you to brain dump all of the ways you could bring money in. Every single way, whether it seems logical or not, whether it makes sense or not, or whether you’ve done it before or not. I don’t care what the case is. I want you to brain dump every single possible way. And if you don’t want to go that route, another way to do this is really just go back to the data.
If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve had money come in, and you’ve likely had a lot of people in your audience who have wanted to work with you or have reached out to you. So if I were in this place where I needed to make money quickly, I would go to my Stripe account or I would go to my PayPal account, and I would start to do some research about what’s worked in the past. Like, what was it about that strategy that worked? What was it about that offer that worked? And really analyze what happened, and then from that analysis, I would create a little plan. Like, what makes the most sense?
So maybe if you’re a coach, you open up an offer for a one-on-one call or a few one-on-one calls. If you’re a consultant, maybe you make some reach outs to some old clients and let them know you’re available for some projects. If you have a lot of products, maybe you start to look at your data and start to promote some of your older products again. There are a ton of ways to make money, but you need to look at the data. But what I think is more important than looking at the data is getting creative with that data.
Let yourself just imagine all the possibilities that are available to you. I think it’s just such a fun way to approach business. And then lastly, number three, is after you’ve gotten creative and you’re starting to think of all the ways you could make money, I want you to pick something. And that’s step three, pick something. Now, let me tell you a little bit about picking. When you are in a place where you’re like, “Cat, I need to make money, I need to make money quickly,” you have to be decisive. I have this saying in Show Up & Lead Mastermind, “Money loves decisions. Money loves a decision. And money also loves someone who is willing to make a decision over and over and over again.” So make a decision on how you want to bring money into your business, and do it.
Now, let me give you an example from my business. This was back in 2021. It was my second year of business, and I was doing my taxes. I knew I was going to owe some money, and I didn’t know how much, but I knew I was going to owe some money. So the CPA came back to me, and he said, “Okay, you owe 16K, Cat.” So I was like, “Okay.” And at that time, I didn’t have that much in the bank. I had some money, but I didn’t have that much in the bank, and I had just made some decisions that weren’t the best decisions for my business at the time. They were still smart decisions, but they didn’t necessarily bring me a lot of revenue in the first half of the year. So my CPA is like, “Okay, you need 16K by tax day,” which was April 15th or something like that.
So I had two options. I could either just not pay it or I could take out a loan or a line of credit or something like that. Or what I decided to do was go out and make that money. I just decided that, and I remember this time very vividly. I remember thinking to myself, “I need 16K, let’s go make 16K.” And at that time, I had a podcast, I had a small audience on Instagram, and I had a lot of people that wanted to work with me, and I had a lot of clients who were just starting their businesses, and they were having a lot of questions. So I decided to put out an offer, and the offer was a $2,000 offer for people who wanted to join me for some coaching.
At that time, my coaching was $7,500, so it was a lower ticket offer, but I knew a lot of people who would be interested in that. And I decided to put out the offer. Now, here’s the deal, I put the offer out there and I ended up having to sell a few spots for that price. So I ended up making about $12,000 from the offer. I still didn’t have the 16K, but I was getting closer and closer, and I just remember thinking, “I’m going to figure this out.” And I ended up making that 16K by tax day, and I ended up paying it in full.
Now, the reason I wanted to tell you this story is because I think a lot of times when you need to make money, you get so into your head about all the ways it’s not possible. And the reality is, as a business owner, you’re going to have many, many opportunities in your business to make decisions, to bring money in, and you really need to practice that flexibility in your mindset to just make the decision, right? So that’s really what I want to share today.
When you need to make money quickly, you have to settle down, be quick to compassion, number two is to be strategic and creative, and number three is to make a decision and follow through. That’s it. It’s not that deep. It’s not that hard. It’s not rocket science. It’s literally just about trusting yourself and knowing that if you need to make money, you’re going to make money. And that’s just how it is.
So I hope this was helpful. I will talk to you next time.
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