How to Actually Make $10k in a Month (cash in hand)
There’s a trend in the online business world, especially among business coaches, of bragging about having a $10k month.
And I once learned that a lot of the times, those income claims that are being made are actually not totally true, because it doesn’t necessarily mean cash in hand in that month (which is a rant for a different blog post).
But I don't just want to complain. I'm really big on taking action and making change happen. Not just sitting around and ranting and moaning about stuff that other people are doing. That is not really productive.
I would rather equip you with the tools to actually get there.
I want to empower you to know how to hit $10k months and beyond. Because that’s a goal for a lot of people. It's okay if that is not your goal, but sometimes, even if it’s not forever, you want to prove you can do it.
So let’s talk about how to actually go about having a $10k month in your business, and what I think is the easiest way to get there – what I call the Sustainable Sweet Spot.
3 Different Approaches to Making $10k
Realistically, if we're just looking at the math of it, to have $10,000 a month in revenue coming in – so not projected income, not future income, but actual collected revenue in a month – you could sell one thing that is $10,000 on a single payment invoice, or 100 things that are $100, or 1,000 things that are $10, or 10,000 things that are $1.
Again, none of these are better than the others.
Some are just easier than others to achieve.
SELLING fewer OF THE SUPER HIGH-PRICED OFFER APPROACH
A lot of times people say you should just do the super high priced thing because you have to sell fewer of them.
Okay. You can.
But how many of us are coming up with, say, a VIP day that’s $10,000?
Probably not many. Especially if you haven't been in business a super long time, or if you've been charging lower amounts.
Could we design an offer worthy of a $10,000 price tag? Absolutely. But you don't have to.
SELLING lots OF THE LOWER-PRICED OFFER APPROACH
On the flip side, let’s look at the lower priced things.
If we look at the general industry conversion rate for online coaches/service-providers, it's about 3%.
So you could sell a $100 product, but you have to get 100 people to say yes to that product.
Therefore, you need a much bigger audience to get that many yeses. You need a larger email list. You need more people on your social media channel, wherever you are.
Again, this is doable. I have clients who do this.
But it can be harder because of the volume of people that you need to buy into it.
So while it can feel more comfortable asking somebody for $100 versus $1,000, it's still going to take a lot of effort and a lot of hustle on your part to sell 100 of those things in a month.
THE sweet SPOT: RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE
So instead of the two extremes (which each come with their own challenges), I recommend take the middle path. Selling a few of the middling-priced one-to-one offers – 10 of the $1,000 offers.
I don't know if you've ever heard the saying, “The fastest path to cash is one-to-one work.”
But it really is. It really, truly is.
Our strategy with this is getting clients in this middle range, with an offer and a price that you feel really good about selling, and being very clear who you're selling it to and the problems you're helping them solve.
First, let’s look at your starting point
If our goal is to have a $10k month, first we need to get a clear idea of where we’re starting.
How much do you already have coming in this month?
What’s your capacity look like this month?
How much time do you have to work on your business (versus in it) this month?
Based on the answers, you might take a different approach to reaching your $10k month goal.
If your goal is $10,000 and you're currently expecting $7,500, this could easily be solved by bringing in an additional client or two, or just by raising your rates.
But let's say you're closer to averaging $5,000 a month.
It could be that it’s simply time to raise your rates.
But maybe there’s a higher-level offer to help you close the gap to $10k.
There might also be a lower-level offer that would be an easy yes for people who are already in your audience.
Now, I don't agree with the idea that we need an offer for literally everyone along the way of the customer journey, from beginner to beyond expert.
We don't need that. But sometimes an opportunity comes along to target your audience in a new or different way, and it might be a better match for your capacity than a higher-priced, high touch offer.
A Real-World Example of This
A while back, I worked with a very successful social media manager who wanted to reach $10k months.
She was already above that $5k per month range, but she was totally booked out with done-for-you clients and didn’t have the capacity for any more high-touch offers like that to help her reach her goal.
Then she realized she had a ton of entrepreneurs in her audience who were struggling with their content plan for Instagram, who would totally hire her if they had the budget, nevermind her being booked out.
She really wanted to create an offer to support them (and help her reach her $10k/month goal), but didn’t know what offer type would be the best way to approach it.
She was originally thinking of creating a course, but the idea didn’t really excite her.
We had a coaching session together and figured out that, instead, she could do these things where people get booked in for 90 days at a time. And then every month they meet for 30 minutes. And she helps them plan all their content. The clients are responsible for the images, for posting the content, and engaging on their account. But she would help them know what to post to help them convert their content into more sales so that hopefully they would get to a point where they could outsource.
That alone – with the intro price we agreed to of $250 a month and with the capacity she could handle, which was 10 people a month – would bring her an extra $2,500 a month, exactly what she needed to reach her goal!
And she was like, “I literally know I have 10 people in my audience right now who follow me, who love me, trust me, and who want my help who would jump at this.”
So that's $2,500 extra a month, locked in for three months, right off the bat, for a great middle-priced offer to get her to her income goals.
The Sweet Spot: What’s Yours?
If you’re already doing something mid-range for people, that’s great.
Maybe you want to do a higher-level offer. Maybe the people in your orbit want more from you. They want the next level.
What offer could you create for them that would help to close that gap to $10k without burning you out?
Could it be a $2,000-a-month coaching program? For that, you would only need a few people to take advantage of it and you'd be at the $10k mark.
BUT ON THE flip SIDE, WHAT IF YOU’RE CONSISTENTLY BELOW $5,000 A MONTH?
If you’re revenue is consistently below the $5,000 a month mark, there are probably two things going on
Your prices are far too low
You are not marketing properly
This is where it gets really hard.
It's really hard to try to make things “affordable” to everyone and hit your sales goals if you aren't getting the volume of people coming in at those lower rates.
If you do have a lot of eyeballs on you, if that low-ticket business model is what you've set up, if you're investing in Facebook ads, and you can pull in that volume, great. Go to town. Rock it out.
But if not, you need to start to have packages or offers that are a little bit higher than what you already have. And you need a better marketing plan.
Because again, if you were only doing, say, $200 coaching calls or something, think of how many clients you would need to have. At $200 per call per month with clients on a three-month cycle, you're gonna need so many clients a month at that rate in order to hit $10k.
You are going to be exhausted. Exhausted.
So maybe it's time to reconsider.
Maybe you need a group program that's a little bit more expensive so you can leverage your time better. You could make that $500 a month and then maybe up your coaching rate to even $1,000 a month or $800 a month.
Do something else that is going to make it easier overall for you to stay within your work capacity and get to that goal.
Maybe incrementally increase your prices so you don't have to do the scary thing and triple them overnight or anything like that.
There are sustainable ways to hit that $10k-a-month goal.
I 100% promise you that you can figure it out when you look at your capacity to deliver on your work, whatever that is, and your monetary goal, your offers, and your prices – and take the emotion out of it and do the math.
