When creating a business, it can be really easy to fall into trading dollars for hours or working one-on-one with clients in order to deliver a service or transformation to positively impact people’s lives and make some money.
But the issue I’ve found with this, and that I see others fall into as well, is that they start to crave more success, more money, more freedom, just more.
One popular solution that you’ve probably heard about before is to create a one -to -many offer and go from selling your time or a done for you service to selling a transformation, which requires you to learn to package your expertise.
And that is what this entire episode is all about. Exactly. How do you take the expertise that you have and package it in a way that gets others the transformation that they want, and most importantly are willing to pay for.
Show Links:
Show Takeaways:
- Learn what a one-to-many offer is and how that could look for your business
- Discover the two biggest mistakes female entrepreneurs make when it comes to creating a one-to-many offer
- Find out to create an offer that your audience wants and is willing to pay for
Rather skim before you listen? ⬇️
The dream that we have as entrepreneurs chasing freedom is that we get to positively impact people’s lives, make some money, and have the freedom to be our own boss all at the same time. When creating a business, it can be really easy to fall into trading dollars for hours or working one-on-one with clients in order to deliver a service or transformation. The issue I found with this and that I see others fall into as well is that they start to crave more success, more money, more freedom— just more but they are at a ceiling where time vs money battle has reached its max.
One very popular solution is to create a 1:many offer and go from selling your time or a done-for-you service to selling a transformation, which requires you to learn to package your expertise. And that is what this entire episode is about, exactly how do you take the expertise that you have and package it in a way that gets others the transformation that they want and are willing to pay for.
A 1:many offer can look a lot of different ways and some may be more right for you, your business model, your audience, or your industry. To be clear a 1:many offer is simply a container where you are leveraging your time and expertise to serve more than one person at a time. It can look like a group coaching program, a course, a book, a membership, a digital or physical product, etc.
While there are interesting and unique aspects of each type of 1:many offer, there are some similarities about how exactly to take what it is that you do and package it in a way that is scalable. Think about it: you can custom-tailor one-on-one coaching or done-for-you services on a project-by-project or client-by-client basis. But a challenge of 1:many offers is creating a series of information, action steps, queries, etc. in a way that works for lots of people, those who are in your ideal audience.
Before I get into how exactly to do this well, let’s dive into some of the things some entrepreneurs doing that is making their life harder or not fulfilling on their promise to deliver the promise of their offer.
There are two extremes that I see entrepreneurs fall into with this and one is certainly more common for the female entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with and the other I’ve witnessed mainly through my own experience as a consumer of these things.
The first of these two extremes is to shove everything that they know into a course, book, program. This offer is never finished because not only do you have all the bells and whistles, but you always find something else to add. I call this the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach. This is the one I run into the most with the female entrepreneurs that I’ve chatted with and even some I’ve worked with.
The reason this is common is that going from working one-on-one to creating an offer once and then selling it over and over triggers a lot of women to feel guilty that making money can be easy. Or that asking someone to pay for information or something that doesn’t require their individual time and attention feels sales-y and “icky” so they justify the price tag, no matter what it is, by cramming so much into it and hiding it under the guise of value.
The second extreme is one that feels super eww to me, but this ain’t about me, is it? The second extreme is the bait-and-switch upsell approach. In this approach, one gets someone in the door with the promise of solving a problem usually at a super low price. Then they give a little bit of value and then tell that person that to really solve their problem, they need a different program or offer that is a bit more expensive, and the cycle continues.
Now, this is NOT the free value to paid offer funnel I am speaking of. That funnel is one in which you provide a freebie that gives some value but isn’t disguised as being able to solve all of someone’s problems and then you have to pay to actually get it. The difference is that the freebie delivers on the promise of the freebie and the paid offer is the next step.
This is also not a well-designed product suite funnel. It is totally okay to upsell and continue to servicing your audience with new offers and progressively more expensive offers. The problem with the bait-and-switch up-sell is the bait-and-switch part.
The reason that both of these are traps to avoid are that it is focused on the business or service provider — aka YOU!
In the first situation, your guilt is causing you to put so much into the offer that may or may not be necessary that it actually doesn’t help the consumer reach the transformation they are looking for. They might still be able to get there, but it is despite all of the fluff rather than because of it.
In the second situation, you are basically stringing someone along because you don’t believe that your transformation is worth enough up front or that you don’t know how to market and sell it in a straight forward way.
While I am a huge advocate for creating a sustainable business that works for you, only focusing on you, especially when creating a 1:many offer is a recipe for disaster.
So, I’ve shared that focusing solely on yourself when packaging your expertise is a recipe for disaster, so what is the recipe for a smashing success? Well, if you said to also focus on your audience while keeping yourself in mind, you win this round.
When you think about focusing on your audience, you need to understand what they want. You need to step into their shoes and understand their world. What is difficult for them, what is holding them back, how best they want to learn or experience a transformation.
How do you actually do that? Well, you know that I am all about tangible action steps, so I am going to share how to do that right now, step-by-step.
How do I decide what to teach on or what to create an offer on? well, what does your idea client want? What do they need help with? If you are working 1:1 with clients, what is something that keeps coming up that you can create a repeatable process around?
The easiest way to understand your audience, your consumer is to directly interact with them and ask them questions. This can look like official market research, or just good DM conversations TBH.
When speaking to them, you want to identify their pressing problems, the things that are keeping them up at night. Once you understand the problems, you can choose one, yes, just one, and solve that one. It doesn’t have to be all of them. Solving one problem can have positive effects on other areas or eliminate other issues as well, but you want to identify the ONE problem that you will help them solve.
A fun trick to this is to identify an ideal audience member and ask them what they are having issues with right now. Every single course and digital product that I have created have come because a singular person told me that they had that problem and each thing was a solution I created for them. That made creating the solution so much easier for me because rather than thinking about how to get “everyone” to a transformation, it is a “how can I help Joanna, or Elaine, or Jennifer, or Amanda, or Claire, or Ashley solve this problem?”
So, once you identify the problem, then you want to define it, define the problem at a level where you are the expert on the problem, because only when you understand the problem can you understand how to solve it for your people. Get granular, how does it show up in that ideal client’s life every day, why does this problem matter, what would solving this problem mean to them, not just on a big picture level but at a day-to-day level too. What would their life look like if this problem was solved? What does your ideal client or customer actually want?
Only then can you start thinking about the solution. And not in a features kind of way. It’s about a journey, an experience. Think about the journey that someone needs to take from where they are now with the problem to the solution. Think about the small milestones someone needs to hit on that journey. If someone is starting at A and their ultimate destination, the problem-solved part of that journey is F, what are steps B, C, D, & E.
So this will probably be easier if I give you an example. Let’s take my World-Class Wake Up digital guide. The problem is not being able to stick to a morning routine to feel the way they want to feel each day. The promise or problem-solved part would be having a morning routine that they love that they can stick to no matter what. The journey to get from problem to promise can be broken down into 3 milestones. Milestone 1 is know what they really want/self-awareness. Milestone 2 is creating the routine. Milestone 3 is creating a plan to pivot. So each of one those things is necessary for someone to reach the full transformation.
I always like to end each episode with an action step that you can take right now to help you move forward and begin to implement immediately. Here is your action step for this episode: Make a list of all the possible problems that you could solve for your idea client. Then go through and narrow it down to the top 2-3 that you could create a 1:many offer on based on your unique strengths, repeatable processes, and where you want to show up for your clients and customers.
