Success isn’t found in shortcuts, but in embracing the journey, giving time its due, and valuing authenticity over extravagance.
Join host Kendra Perry as she dives into the three common beliefs that often hold coaches back from reaching the 6-figure milestone. She shares her personal entrepreneurial journey and illuminates how enduring the process leads to the promise of a brighter future.
From the illusion of ease to the race against time to stripping down to the basics, Kendra discusses thoroughly which mindsets individuals need to hold onto and let go of as they walk the path of entrepreneurship.
Tune in now to break free from self-limiting beliefs and set your course toward that coveted 6-figure goal!
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3 Beliefs Stopping You From Hitting 6-Figures In Your Biz
This episode is going to share some harsh realities. I’m going to slap it down with some brutal and honest truth, so you better get ready. You better be in a good space because I like to give it to you straight. I don’t like to sugarcoat things or to make things sound like rainbows, unicorns, fluffy, warm, and fuzzy. That would be weird because that’s not me. You know that I will tell you how it is. Let’s get into the 3 beliefs stopping you from hitting 6 figures. These might surprise you.
First Belief: Thinking It’s Easy
The first one is thinking it’s easy and it’s not. This is one that I see all the time because I support early-stage health coaches. I get people coming into HCA or following me on Instagram, Facebook, or reaching out to me on YouTube, who are sometimes very new and are frustrated that it’s hard. I’m going to be honest with you. Building a business is going to be way harder than you could ever imagine. Everything you think it’s going to be like, take that times it by 100, and that’s how hard it’s going to be.
A lot of people don’t realize how hard it’s going to be because truthfully, the barrier to entry to get into something like online business is quite low. You could imagine that if you were going to start a retail store or even eCommerce, restaurant, or something like that, you can’t just do that with no money. To start a restaurant, you are going to need hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital, probably the same with retail. With eCommerce, you are going to need inventory and you are going to need to invest in things.
With online business, it feels like we can invest for nothing. The good news is it doesn’t have to cost a lot. That’s beautiful in one way because it means that so many people who maybe don’t have access to capital, or to investors and $100,000 to start a restaurant, get a space, hire employees, get equipment, get inventory, and all that stuff can start a business and potentially make 6 or 7 figures.
You can have a business like mine where I make multiple six figures. I make money while I sleep, or while I’m hiking, and I can buy whatever I want. I have this amazing free lifestyle, that is available to anyone starting a business but it’s hard. It’s way harder than you could ever imagine because you will have to sacrifice. I know there’s this whole area of thinking out there and a lot of people are very anti-hustles culture. What I’m going to say might ruffle a few feathers, but I’m not anti-hustle. You have to earn your right not to hustle. If you start a business thinking that you are not going to have to hustle, you are going to be sadly mistaken. You are going to be shocked when you realize that it’s not working and you are not getting clients.
I don’t believe that you should be hustling forever. That’s unhealthy. I don’t think we should be sacrificing our health. We need to create boundaries, self-care, take care of ourselves, and find happiness and joy outside work. I’m all about that. As you may or may not know if you have been reading this show for a while, I started my business in the depths of a health crisis. I had chronic fatigue and chronic insomnia. I felt the worst I have ever felt in my life. It was so rough and super dark and I thought I’d never get over it. I did not sacrifice my health. I always prioritize my health, but I worked myself off.
There will be some sacrifices that you make. If you have a full-time job, you can’t just sit there and be like, “I don’t have time. I have this full-time job.” You are going to have to get up early and work before you go to your job. You are going to have to stay up late and work after you come home from your job or you are going to have to sacrifice your weekend. There’s just no way to do this without sacrifice. This is hard.
The reason why it’s hard is because you are literally building something from scratch and you are competing with all different types of people online. You are asking people who have never met you, seen you in person, and experienced your energetic field in a real-life and real-world way to open up their wallets and hand you over their credit card numbers. Think about what is happening there. People need to deeply trust you. Trust takes time, especially when you are someone who just showed up on the internet and you are like, “I’m smart. I can help you. Buy my crap.” They are not just going to trust you right away. It does take time, especially when you are new.
You have to learn how to show up every single day in your business, show your face, be on video, speak, and put yourself out there without anything in return because again, it does take time. It’s hard. A lot of times, especially in health, we are speaking to deeply personal and likely embarrassing problems. Maybe you help women with infertility. Maybe you help people with their PMS symptoms, digestive issues, diarrhea, acne, or things that are incredibly sensitive and people don’t always want to talk about in a public forum.
I was interviewing one of my past Health Coach Accelerator students on the show. At this time, her episode would have dropped on August 28th, 2023, and it was with Rachael Webster. It’s episode 186 from 0 to 70K months in only 2 years. Something that she was saying that surprised her is she felt like in the beginning that no one was listening. It was hard to show up every day and give it her all like all these people were listening when she felt like no one was listening. What she found over time was that people would come out of the woodwork and be like, “I have been following you forever.” She would be like, “Who is this person? I have never seen this person before.” This isn’t only in health and wellness, this is in other industries as well because this happens to me.
People will be following you, they will be watching, but they are not going to give any indication that they are there. They may never like a post, comment, or send you a DM but they are watching. The reason why it’s so hard is because you have to show up and give it your all every day and show up with the energy that one million people are watching you even when you don’t hear anything from a single person.
Think about that. That’s hard because we are used to external validation. If you are someone who’s had a boss and you have been in a corporate job or just been an employee of any sort, typically we are used to receiving feedback. We are used to getting a pat on our back or a slap on the wrist when we don’t do things right.
In most jobs, if we have a decent leader, sometimes if we have terrible management, we get no feedback. I have been in that situation, but usually, someone is telling us we do a good job when we do a good job or we are getting a promotion or when we are messing up, someone is telling us that we are messing up. It’s easy to be motivated by this external validation. When you are in a business, there is no one telling you that you did a good job, at the end of the day. Sure, in time you will have clients sharing testimonials, which can help that, but there’s no one giving you consistent feedback.
That can be hard because you have to pat yourself on the back. You have to be self-motivated. If you show up late for work, no one is going to say, “That’s your second time being late. If you show up late again, we are going to have a problem.” No one is going to say that. You can wake up every morning, you can mess around all day, and do nothing. No one is going to say boo to you. That’s hard for a lot of people.
The reason why it’s so hard is we have to do things and we have to take action without feedback or external validation. Sometimes what can motivate us is the carrot. What I mean by that is you post on social media and you get a whole bunch of views and comments, and that gives you the carrot that makes you want to keep going. That can happen with time, but in the beginning, you are going to be posting on social media and you are going to be getting nothing.
It doesn’t mean no one is seeing it or no one is there, but where is the dopamine hit? We are used to that dopamine hit. The reason why business is so hard in the beginning is because you are building something from scratch. People don’t trust you in the beginning. There are so many scammers out there, there are so many people on the internet peddling all kinds of crap things. Ultimately, people are instantly going to assume you are a scam until you prove yourself otherwise.
That can be hard and can result in you putting in all your effort, feeling like you are working yourself off and getting nothing in return. You have to learn how to put yourself out there every day consistently with big energy and get nothing in return. That’s why it’s hard. We like things that stroke our egos, external validation, and getting a pat on the back that says, “Good job. You are doing awesome. Keep going.” No one is going to do that for you. You have to learn how to do it for yourself. You are going to have to struggle. You are going to have to work yourself off, be incredibly self-motivated, and commit every single day.
Second Belief: Thinking It’s Fast
That’s a great segue into the second belief that’s stopping you from hitting six figures thinking that it’s fast. It will be way harder than you ever thought it would be, and it’s going to take you way longer than you ever thought. I don’t know what it is that makes people believe that this is a fast process. I say this all the time, but if you are not willing to give at least three dedicated years to building your business, then you have no business being in business. If you think it’s going to happen before that, you will be sadly mistaken. If someone has ever made you believe that, it’s crap.
Can it happen faster than three years? Yes. Going back to our HCA student, Rachael Webster, who I interviewed at the end of August 2023. She entered HCA in the spring of 2021, it is now the fall of 2023, and she is doing $7,000 a month, which is almost a 6-figure business. Not quite hitting six figures yet, but she’s pretty close. I’m sure she will do it at any point. She’s going to do it in the next year 2024, 100%.
It can take less time. Another student Angela Brown, she got to $250,000 in under 3 years. It can happen faster, but you should prepare for it to take longer. You should even prepare for it to take up to five years. When I say that, “You got to give it at least 3 years.” They are like, “I don’t have 3 years. I need to make money now.” I’m just looking at them and I’m like, “What do you think this is? This is the business. You are building it from scratch.” This takes a lot of time and dedication.
Coming back to what I said before about the building of trust. You are just showing up on the internet. You are saying, “I’m a smart person. Buy my thing.” You have no trust. It’s like in the Criminal Justice System, we say, “Innocent until proven guilty,” while on the internet, it’s, “Guilty until proven innocent.” It’s the opposite. People don’t start by giving you trust, they start by giving you nothing, no trust. That does take time. You need to gain a track record. You need to gain testimonials, social proof, and people referring you. You need to start showing up in multiple places.
At this point, I have been on the internet for years. It’s easy to come across my stuff. If you are looking for business and marketing stuff, and you are a health coach or wellness coach, you might stumble on my YouTube channel, my show, my Instagram, or my Facebook. I’m out there. I’m in so many different places. That trust is built by constantly coming across my stuff over time. It does take a lot of time.
It took me about 3.5 years to hit 6 figures in my business. I’m several years into it and I still haven’t fully hit my goals. It takes time. Those first three years are going to be hell. There is no other way for me to describe it. I’m being straight with you. Expect the first three years to be hard. If it gets easier faster than that, then you can consider that a win. If you are two years and it’s hard, then you are right where you should be. Something that grinds my gears, and I say this with love. I have a hard time when people are saying something like, “I have been out there for 3 or 4 months, I’m doing all the work, I’m posting consistent content, and I don’t have clients.” That’s pretty normal.
When people come into HCA, oftentimes they are building from nothing. What you do in HCA, for example, is build the foundation. Usually, people are ready to enroll clients into the program by the 2nd or 3rd month, and oftentimes they are. To get to that place of consistency where you feel confident in your business and confident that your business is going to continually generate revenue, that is three years and beyond. I’m not saying you are not going to get a client for three years. You should be getting a client within the first six months or so. That consistency is what’s going to take three-plus years.
There’s no way to speed up that process. You can do things like run ads or you can pitch collaborations, but for the majority of business owners, that consistency is going to take a few years for people to get into their flow and start to gain that confidence like, “My business makes money. In year nine, I’m confident that my business is going to make money every month. If I have a bad month, I know I’m probably going to have a good month the next month or the month after. I have that belief and knowing in my business, because I have been doing this for long enough and I have built up a client base, a foundation, and I know what I’m doing.” It does take time. It’s not fast. If you think it’s going to be fast, then you are not going to hit six figures because you are playing the long game. This is a very long game. That is number two.
Third Belief: It Needs To Be Perfect
The 3rd mindset that is stopping you from hitting 6 figures is thinking it needs to be fancy or perfect. I see this so often. A lot of coaches want everything to look professional. They want everything to look perfect. They want to build their entire program, put it into fancy hosting software, make pretty well-designed slides, and have all these things. It’s a silly thing to do before you have proven that something is profitable.
For example, when my students come into HCA, we have them build a program, and with that program, we help them build a curriculum. The curriculum is essentially the modules and the step-by-step that guides clients through a process to get them from problem to solution. Essentially, the curriculum is like having a course, and I believe a course belongs in all programs, whether it’s a group program, a one-on-one, or a hybrid. It’s important because what this does is it prevents you from having to repeat yourself because regardless of what people are struggling with, there are some baseline things that everyone needs to know.
If you are going to come into HCA, regardless of where you are in your business, we are going to need to make sure your niche is profitable and that you have compelling messaging. You are going to need that program or that thing to sell and you are going to have to have a marketing and sales framework. I don’t need to reteach that to every new person coming through the program.
I have recorded that into modules and people consume it at their own pace when they come through the program. It’s the same thing for you, even if you are doing something like a one-on-one or a group coaching program. They come through and need to learn things. That’s why we create a course for every program, whether you are offering it as a one-on-one group or hybrid.
What a lot of people want to do is they want to record everything. They want to put it into all those fancy hosting platforms to make it look professional. The problem is, it takes a lot of time. It never makes sense to put a lot of money and time investment into something before you have proven it’s profitable. Nobody does that.
Let’s say I wanted to create a skincare product. Maybe it’s like this anti-aging serum. I would not go have one million bottles of that made and just hope that it would sell because it’s going to cost me a ton of money to make those millions of bottles. If it doesn’t sell or people don’t like it, they don’t like the smell, it doesn’t get the result, don’t like the texture, they don’t like the label, or whatever it is, I just lost a crap load of money. Luckily, we don’t have to pay for inventory as online coaches, but we don’t want to create this perfect thing before we have proven that it’s profitable.
When people come into HCA, we always start with a beta. Instead of recording all of the modules and making fancy everything, what we focus on is creating the minimum awesome program. It’s similar to a minimum viable product. It’s still awesome and it still has value, but it’s not fancy, but it provides the result. In the end, that’s what matters. Instead of paying for fancy course hosting software like Thinkific or Teachable, we just drop everything into a Google Drive, which is free. People get access to that when they sign up for your program.
At some point, might you put it into a course hosting platform? Sure, but I would not do that until it’s proven profitable, because you can lose a lot of money paying for these platforms. Even worse, you can lose a ton of time and then have it turn out that it’s not profitable. I have told this story before on this show a long time ago, this would have been in 2015, 2016, or maybe 2017. I can’t even remember anymore. I wanted to launch a course and my first course was called Hormone Power. That is the business model that I want. I desperately wanted a course business, and so I spent months creating this course, six months to be exact.
I worked on weekends and evenings. My partner probably almost broke up with me. He was just like, “You are working all the time.” He was super annoyed by me, but I was so determined and I worked myself off. It took me so long to create this course, and then I tried to launch it and I couldn’t make it profitable. I could barely make any sales. People just didn’t buy it. It was so frustrating because I can’t even tell you how many hundreds of hours I put into that course creation. To have it not sell was devastating. I had put it into a fancy course hosting platform. I have recorded everything. I’d made these super fancy worksheets. It was just this crazy labor of a thing and then it wasn’t profitable. You don’t want to do that.
Every time we launch something new or we have a program, we want to start with bare bones and we only invest back into it once we have proven that it’s profitable. That’s what I work with my HCA students to do, whether they are doing one-on-one, a group program, or a hybrid, which is a combination of one-on-one and group, we start with bare bones, we launch a test version, and we test it. We make sure people want it, it can get people results, and we can live up to the promise that we offered. Not only does this help you prove something is profitable before you invest a lot of time or money into it, but it also keeps you in integrity because then you are not out there selling something that doesn’t get people results.
With my course Hormone Power, I was out there selling it and I’d never gotten anyone through it. I didn’t know if it was going to get people results and people saw through that. They could sense that there was something off. I learned a lot from that experience. The truth is, you don’t need anything fancy. You can do this very bare bones and keep it simple and basic, and your program can still get unbelievable results for your clients, and you can keep your profit margin high.
A lot of people are like, “I want to invest in Thinkific like you.” I’m like, “Think if it costs me $2,000 a year. It’s expensive. It’s costing me $200 a month.” I don’t recommend that, but my course business makes a lot of money. That is a very reasonable expense for me. That’s not how I would start. Do you want to be spending $200 a month on fancy platforms? We just want to keep it basic. Keep it basic until you have proven something is profitable.
Let’s quickly recap. Those three beliefs are stopping coaches from hitting six figures is number one, thinking it’s easy. Building a business is not easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The payoff is more than worth it. The money plus the freedom plus the fulfillment is more than worth the hardness, the difficultness, or the stress of it because it is hard and it doesn’t stop being hard. Yes, you get into a flow, it gets easier, but it’s full-on. The business never stops. You have to constantly be brainstorming new ways to market your business and be putting yourself out there and attracting clients into your world. It’s hard and it’s way more hard than you can ever imagine.
The number two belief in stopping you from hitting six figures is thinking it’s fast. Give it at least 3 to 5 years. If you are not willing to give it three years, then don’t start a business, don’t even start because it will take that long and most people start before they have even given themselves a chance to succeed. This is a good way to think about it. A lot of us have done post-secondary education. We have gone to university or college, and it takes us 4 years and we suffer through those 4 years. It’s hard but the reason why we do it is because there’s a promise of something better on the other side, which is maybe a higher-paying job or a career.
We don’t sit there and bitch about how long it’s taking. We are like, “No, this is going to take 4 years, and in 4 years I will have this degree and I will be able to do X, Y, or Z.” Think of your business like that. Don’t expect to have a successful consistent business in less than three years. Just don’t. If you don’t think you are going to have it before then, then maybe it won’t be as hard. If you are one of those people in the position where you are like, “I don’t have three years. I need to make money now.” Go get a part-time job, seriously.
This is what I did. I had a part-time job. For the first three years in my business, I worked for FDN as a contractor. It was about twenty hours a week, but it paid the bills. If you only have your business to pay the bills and you are in your first three years, you should get a part-time job. I’m serious. Go get a job at a local health food store, do whatever. Just find a part-time job. They are out there. Get something to pay the bills or get a business loan. Do something because it is going to take long. If you think you can do it faster than that, then, by all means, go for it. You might be sadly disappointed.
The third thing is thinking that it needs to be fancy. It doesn’t need to be fancy. When I hit six figures, I barely had brand colors. I had a crap website. I didn’t have any fancy branding or messaging. I was just out there every day putting myself out there and working myself off. It was very basic what I had, but I was able to build the six figures. Only once you are at six figures, when you are generating a decent amount of cash for your business, think about investing in the fancy platforms. You can keep it very bare bones and keep your profit margin high until you have money to invest more. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love this show, I would so appreciate it if you could give me a review. Go to www.RateThisPodcast.com/Wealthy. Thank you for being here with me. I do appreciate your time, and I will see you next episode same time and same place where I help you become wealthy AF.
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