The 7 Pillars To Master To Break 7-Figures, Build A Business That Runs, And Fulfill Your Creative Potential Without Burning Out.

When I made my first six-figures as a 23-year-old making YouTube videos about my workouts, getting paid to talk about different products, and coach people into becoming more fit, I knew there was something to this whole online business thing. I did this without even knowing how to run a real business, only armed with the skills of helping people through a fitness transformation and being able to find a LOT of people to do that with through the Internet.

In 2015, my coaching services helped me create $50k.

In 2016, my coaching and brand partnerships brought in 225k.

In 2017, my business coaching programs (and the beginnings of this “real business”) generated 750k.

In 2018 and 2019, my business will have generated 2.5 million dollars in total.

The underlying motivator behind all of this growth was simple: I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, fulfill my creative potential, and keep watching what would unfold as I leaned in.

Each of these iterations has taught me a new lesson about life, business, and leadership–and that’s exactly what I’m sharing with you in this article.

You’re likely reading this if you have a successful (close to or at) 6-figure business, and you want to know how to take the leap into scaling what you’re doing.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear picture of what pieces of the 7-Figure puzzle are waiting for you to master.

Let’s dive in.

 

PILLAR 1: Audience Growth + Visibility

From 2014-2017, I spent most of my energy focusing on audience growth and community building. Not to say this is necessarily “step 1” for everyone, as it takes quite a lot of work and effort before actually getting paid–but “jab, jab, jabbing,” for two years before coming out with a strong business offer did serve my business for years thereafter.

I’ve seen it done time and time again with clients: you CAN build a 6-figure business with a small, niche following with ease.

However: audience building strategies and energy is actually quite different from the regular, maintenance and sales content that entrepreneurs double down on in the early stages of getting their businesses up and running. Let me explain.

Audience Growth Vs. Lead Generation

The difference between audience growth and lead generation is one is about building loyalty, the other is about generating money.

When building an audience, you’re generating attention, fostering community, and building brand loyalty with those people.

When you’re generating leads, you’re ideally creating sales, which leads to revenue for your business.

Without the “audience” and community piece, all you have is a list of people who feel like numbers and potential sales.

Ideally–as a brand–your goal is to build an audience large enough to serve your businesses lead generation needs so you can fill up your offers with targeted customers.

However: many entrepreneurs miss out on the opportunity to build a true audience because of how wrapped up in the sales and marketing aspect we are.

Audience growth means creating highly valuable content for free, consistently, and building relationships. I call this “big growth energy.”

A Personal Brand Will Outlast Whatever Phase Your Industry (And Business) Is In

Your business is incredible, and it’s serving so many people. However: you are far more than your business. Of all the successful entrepreneurs I know: there aren’t very many of them that are still selling their first-ever offers. The only constant is change, so building a personal brand will be that underlying constant that sits underneath the changing wave of your offers and business.

It comes with you wherever you go, regardless of what’s going on in the industry. My personal brand has outlasted 3 different industry switches, and many different social media platforms.

When “use my discount code” stopped working, so many people lost money. By building a business, I was able to replace my $30k/month of brand commission with a business of my own. MY BRAND sustained my income.

Networking + Collaborating

Without this piece: you’ll need to rely solely on your own audience-building techniques on social media. This is wonderful, BUT–even THESE don’t work without people who are excited to engage with and share your content to their audiences. To do that requires actually building a symbiotic relationship with others.

Networking and collaborating essentially means stepping outside of your own personal bubble of your account and being IN the community of people in your industry.

Think about it this way.

Community events, rituals, dinners, etc. are what actually bring people together for a common cause.

You can choose to be the person who shows up to these events and simply accepts the invitation, talks to your friends you already know, or…

You can be the HOST of the events, learning everyone’s name who comes, connecting with other community leaders and hosting shared-experiences, and being remembered for creating the experience in it of itself.

People remember the host and the experience far more than they do the random guest.

I believe this is an integral and often forgotten-about piece of building a 7-figure brand–and understandably so, since it requires you to activate that Big Growth Energy and become a leader in your industry.

PILLAR 2: Offer-Development

In 2017, I launched my first group coaching program– a 90-Day Business Accelerator for people who want to learn how to run a coaching business using Instagram. That program went on to launch 9 times and lived on for 3 entire years in the structure it did. It helped 250+ coaches generate over 2 million dollars combined over time. That coaching program helped our company make 1.5+ million dollars over the course of its lifetime, as well.

The beauty of this product was that we spent a lot of our time, energy, focus making sure it was an absolutely stellar program that delivered results and provided an incredible customer experience.

We had our learning lessons in the early times, but we eventually developed a system that was fairly predictable in terms of how we can keep repeating the same results for our efforts, while also producing results for all of our clients.

When it comes to building out a product suite of offers that make your company a lot of money, know that there are a million ways to make a million dollars.

You could have:

• One course that you scale
• One high ticket program you launch 1x/year
• Funnels that take your customer from your social media platform onto your email list and into your courses
• Multiple programs and offers at various levels
• One of the most challenging things many entrepreneurs struggle within the scaling stages is choosing what makes the most sense for them at this stage.

Some things to consider include:

• What is the one, main offer that can serve the top 20% of your audience that can generate you 80% of your revenue?
• What content do you have in you that’s screaming to come out?
• Are you interested in doing something because it seems easy, or because it will make a lot of money?

The reality is: there isn’t one offer that’s easier than another–but there are offers, products, and services that can make the most sense when you combine your Unique Archetype (quiz on this coming soon!) along with where you’re at in your business journey.

Choosing when to add in a course versus continue and double down on your current offers is a decision that requires strategy and personal awareness.

When you introduce a new offer–it needs to make sense with your brand, cater to the ideal customer, solve a problem in your market or industry, and make sense for your business goals.

In terms of pricing, naming, length, and all of the ways in which you can set up an offer: I have an hour-long Masterclass that teaches exactly that you can grab shortly that’ll teach you all of the ins-and-outs.

 

PILLAR 3: Hiring Fantastic Mentors

“What got you to one level will not propel you to another,” is one of the truest statements about taking a 6-figure business and turning it into a 7-Figure Business.

Building a 6-Figure business requires you to target the right people, create an offer that serves and delivers, price it properly, and sign enough clients to said offers to hit that mark.

You can do that with very little online marketing, if need be. If your work is really good, you can get referrals from clients and tap into other markets and communities to offer your services. Otherwise, you can use social media to attract the correct people for you. If you haven’t yet scaled your business to 6-Figures, I recommend starting by learning my 5-Step Process: Content To Clients here.

Once you make it to that level, it can seem like making more will be easy, right?

Wrong.

If your 1:1 roster is filled up and you have absolutely no time left to figure out your next move, your entire business model is going to require some finagling. At this point is where you realize and notice that scaling requires a new strategy–and learning someone who has done exactly what you have is going to be the fastest way to make that happen.

Here’s what my client Lauren had to say about pivoting from 6-Figure to Multiple-6 Figures:

“There comes a point in your entrepreneurial journey where if you want to scale your business, you can’t just continue doing the things that you have been doing up until that point. I came to this realization at the end of 2018 and made the decision to join FCM with Amanda and her team. I had already built a 6 figure business on my own as a Virtual Diabetic Health Coach but needed specific help with systems and operations, hiring a team, and building out my offers. Before joining I was turning clients away because I didn’t have space ( actually and emotionally), I wasn’t clear on what other offerings besides 1:1 coaching would like look, and I was constantly stressed because I knew where I wanted to go but didn’t have the steps to get there. Investing in this mastermind was hands down the best decision I’ve made in my career. Not only did I triple my revenue this year, but I did it in a way that is aligned with my overall vision for my company. I feel like a real CEO vs an entrepreneur.” – Lauren Bongiorno, Flourish & Conquer Mastermind Member 2019.

Lauren came to me turning away clients because she had zero room in her calendar for them. She had all of these business ideas lying dormant inside of her, but she needed the team, the mentorship, the systems, and support to restructure her business model for scalability.

And if you’re a woman entrepreneur making 8-10k+/month consistently and are looking to scale your business and want to hire me as your mentor for 2020, you can apply here: www.amandabucci.com/mastermind

If you’re a coach or service provider, it’s likely that you’ve spent most of your time mastering your craft and working with clients–NOT studying business, marketing, team building, finances, and everything else.

And that’s okay, by the way. This doesn’t make you a bad coach or entrepreneur. It’s simply a set of skills you have yet to learn or develop.

When you hire a mentor, you’re essentially “cutting the line” and paying to receive systems, templates, processes, and experience in doing what you want to do.

In a previous article, I wrote about the mentors I’ve hired and why hiring them was a financial decision that provided me a very, very large return on my investment. You can read about that here.

At the end of the day, hiring mentors (in my experience) is always about finding the fastest way to the most efficient solution, from people who have been there and done that.

With the way the Internet is set up, there are only a few people out there who have done everything you want to be doing, in the specific way you want to be doing it. The incredible thing is that we have ample opportunity to choose the correct person for us based on energy, community of like-minded people, past experience, and results.

 

PILLAR 4: Launching, Marketing, and Sales–Oh My.

When I switched to teaching people about social media and coaching in 2017, there was one MAJOR piece that I really doubled down on learning from my own mentors: sales, marketing, and launching.

When I joined Lewis Howes’ Mastermind that January, I met so many people with smaller online audiences, but much larger businesses and thriving companies. This was, in large part, due to their mastery and finesse in the digital marketing space.

Learning how to properly conduct an enrollment conversation, set up the tech/back-end, and develop email marketing campaigns was one of the biggest light-bulb “a-ha” moments for me as an influencer.

Since 2017, my email list has built up to 50,000 subscribers, and we generate about half of our business from that alone.

The biggest realization from this point in time was that there’s a LOT more to building a 7-figure business than simply getting more people to pay for your stuff.

Some of the key pieces of these parts of running a successful online business included:

Launching

Launching is the process of putting a product out into the market with as much optimization as humanly possible.

This means giving yourself the absolute best shot at having the most financially successful launch of your product as possible.

You may be reading this using mostly Instagram as your platform to launch your offers, but a “fully optimized” launch requires email marketing (and all of it’s nuanced, detailed strategies), pre-launching to warm up your audience, sales pages (structure, copy-writing, the whole sha-bang), and any other graphics needed for other social platforms.

 

Marketing

Marketing is the process of generating the leads (this could be through facebook ads, a free-opt-in, a free challenge, a webinar, etc.), and ensuring you support your customer in seeing the value of purchasing your offer by sharing specific types of content before and during the launch.

Not only that, but it can also include:

• Increasing the average-order-price by adding upsells, down-sells, and cross-sells.
• Increasing customer lifetime value by offering more products to the same customer
• Choosing prices strategically
• Increasing number of products in your suite
• Increasing places in which leads can find your offers
• Taking customers from cold, to warm, to hot leads.
• Increasing the number of qualified potential customers

Along the same lines, this section also included learning customer retention, customer journey mapping, ideal client mapping, and delivery of your product to ensure the best RESULTS and EXPERIENCE possible for your customer. This is the “secret sauce” many marketers miss.

Marketing is an extremely nuanced section of business that many people find to be slimy, gross, and manipulative.

But there is absolutely a way to be an epic marketer, get many people to purchase your offers, and be completely in-integrity and heart-centered.

 

Sales

Sales is essentially marketing, but it’s the part of the journey where the customer “closes.” Typically, when we discuss sales, we’re mostly discussing the enrollment conversation that might be required for mid-high ticket offers.

The sales process, I’ve learned, is based on being able to walk someone through their fears that are in the way of them actually creating what they want.

Being able to handle objections is simply being able to pick up on triggers that relate to this persons’ money mindset, fear of failure, fear of success, self-sabotaging patterns, and more.

Learning sales is truly so beautiful, when you think about it. It’s truly almost like becoming someone’s therapist for a 30 minute-1 hour-long period. The sale is at the END of the therapy session (ideally, if it’s the right fit), but this session is truly there to break down the barriers the person has between them and getting what they want.

At the other end of the sale is a win-win. You get to serve the client, and the client gets to receive the results after investing in themselves.

My business has primarily run from being able to build trust with my audience, create programs that solve their problems and deliver results, and walking them over the bridge of their fears into the land of freedom and success.

 

PILLAR 5: Systems + Operations–The Masculine That Gives Rise to the Feminine.

This is the most unsexy, yet most important answer yet: building your business machine so it can work while you’re not around.

For example: how my company generated 30k the last week of August 2018 while I was away at Burning Man with complete ease, and nothing broke.

The thing is, running a large business without systems is like building a house on quicksand.

Things will start breaking, falling about, getting messy–and the absolute last thing you want to be doing is putting out fires or spending all of your time doing the same thing over and over again from scratch.

A system is essentially a step-by-step process for getting any task in your business done. We have systems for every single time we launch that include how many emails we’ll send, what assets we need designed, what we need copy for, what materials we need to create, and more.

It’s the structure in which you can truly have freedom. When we build in schedules, deadlines, timelines, systems, and processes–we know EXACTLY what to do, when we need to do it by, and this means we’re not leaking energy worrying about how everything’s going to work.

The flow needs the hustle, and the hustle needs the flow.

The feminine needs the masculine JUST like the creative needs the systems.

Having these allows you to get more done, in less time–and you can be MORE of yourself and your expression because it’ll actually have a place to go, and a system to deliver it out into the world with ease.

With this: you can continue to generate more revenue for your business without necessarily working harder.

Ever hear of that cute phrase work smarter, not harder?

This is that.

The thing is: you’re the founder, the creator, the coach, and the entrepreneur: and this probably feels like the absolute last thing you feel like spending your time doing.

That’s where step 6 comes in.

 

PILLAR 6: Leadership + Team Building.

Now, you don’t have to (and shouldn’t be) doing everything in your business.

A business at 7-figures is different from one at 6-figures because it actually operates like an actual business, not just a coach signing up clients.

Which is fully okay, by the way. There is nothing shameful about not scaling and simply coaching.

But for the purposes of this article: back to scaling.

For awareness, the current HATS you wear as the solopreneur in your include:

Founder / CEO (the one with the energy and vision for the entire brand and business)
Marketer / Content Creator / Copywriter (generating leads for your offers and converting those leads into customers)
Coach (the one actually coaching your clients who you market and sell to)
But as a 7-Figure Entrepreneur, there is a much higher demand for:

Operations Person (organizing and managing any and all administrative work)
Financial Manager (keeping your books in check, collecting payments, sending invoices –more than one offer means many more monies to keep track of)
Sales Person (during launches, enrollment calls may take up all of your time and energy)
Tech Guru (hello, email marketing, linking up tech platforms, making sure resources and emails get triggered at the right time to the right people with the most ease, efficiency, and customer satisfaction)
Customer Service Person — when people have questions about logging in to their account for the course they bought from you, or the one who’s concerned the program may not be for them and needs some support, or the one who wants a refund for whatever reason.
The Person Who Remembers Everyone’s Birthdays–when you have a team, it’s far less about just getting people into your programs, and FAR more about learning how to support a group of humans in working together efficiently. This means people need to be treated like humans, and connect on a personal AND professional level to support the company.
Because all of these roles may require you to crush them before you can hire them all out, the person who will be a secret weapon on your team is the…

(dun dun dun)

Business Mentor.

The one who knows what it’s like to wear every. single. hat. and crush it. The one who knows how to be resourceful, make it all happen, developed the skills of 10 different roles (hello graphic designer, copywriter, tech guru, content creator, customer support, coach, writer, interviewer, video editor, photographer, operations management, sales…can we think of anything else?) who knows what you’re about to go through during the scaling process.

This is what I mean when I say BIG growth energy.

With a vision so big, only another entrepreneur who has gone through the same exact process can GET you on this level.

If you’re in need of someone who can be there by your side during this powerhouse journey, my Mastermind is open for 2020 Enrollment.

Click here to read more and apply.

PILLAR 7: The Personal Inner Work.
The way your current unconscious and conscious mind are currently set up is the reason you are currently where you are (with the challenges you’re facing) in your business.

I can tell you this from experience. These different levels have different energy fields, and require a person with a specific operating system to be able to step into it, do what needs to be done, and be who needs to be..been?

When you’re on the rise building your empire, you learn (very) quickly that there isn’t a whole lot of room to be leaking your energy all over the place with:

Disempowering thoughts, beliefs, and patterns
Draining environments, people, and relationships
Self-Sabotage with your health, well-being, and self-care
Emotional roller-coasters that leave you feeling extremely high/low, draining you of your energy and inner power.
One of the most powerful lessons I learned playing in this field was how important (and necessary) it was to truly step into my power, and take ownership of every little element in my life that was creating discord.

When shit hits the fan and your launch doesn’t go as planned…

When you need to fire a team member for dropping the ball..

When you’re running a business that’s actually running you…

When you’re relationships are seemingly taking a backseat to your business and other areas of your life are suffering for the sake of crushing your next launch…

It’s time to become emotionally resilient and powerful.

We have no choice but to become a super-human being with the capacity to take on a lot all at once, without burning out.

Because if WE aren’t working, usually (unless our machines are fully automated and optimized) our businesses fall apart.

This ability to birth, create, and hold the energy of a larger organization is at the crux of a successful 7-figure business. It’s non-negotiable.

Whatever size your business grows into; it’s always a journey of learning, becoming, and stepping into your power.