High Ticket Courses - PRINT
High Ticket Courses - PRINT
Ticket
Courses
The Fastest Way for Coaches, Consultants, and Service Providers to
Make Six or Seven Figures with a New Hybrid Education Model
J OE L ER W A Y
HIGH TICKET COURSES
The Fastest Way for Coaches, Consultants, and Service Providers to Make Six or Seven
Figures with a New Hybrid Education Model
Copyright © 2021 by Joel Erway. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior
written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
For permissions requests, bulk order purchases, and to inquire about prospective
speaking engagements, podcast appearances, and mastermind talks, email maryjo@
thewebinaragency.com.
ISBN: 978-1-7373107-0-9
Earnings Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to accurately represent our products
and their potential to help our customers, their businesses, and/or their clients.
There is zero guarantee that you, or anyone following this material, will earn any money
using the ideas in our materials, books, programs, or mentorship. Examples in these
materials are not to be interpreted as a promise or guarantee of earnings. Earning
potential is entirely dependent on the person using our product, ideas, and techniques.
We do not position any products or services as a “get rich scheme.”
Any claims made of actual earnings or examples of actual results can be verified upon
request. Your level of success in attaining the results claimed in our materials depends
on the time you devote to the ideas and techniques mentioned, your finances,
knowledge, and various skills. Since these factors differ by individual, we cannot and do
not guarantee your success or revenue generation, nor are we responsible for any of your
actions related or not related to these materials.
Any and all forward-looking statements here or on any of our sales material are
intended to express our opinion of earnings potential. Many factors will be important
in determining your actual results and no guarantees are made that you will achieve
results similar to ours or anybody else’s. No guarantees are made that you will achieve
any results from our ideas and techniques in these materials.
Contents
Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Advance Praise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
CHAPTER 9: B
uild a Profitable Business Before
Building a Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
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Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
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That’s when I started studying Joel Erway’s work and joined his
High Ticket Courses program.
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With Joel’s guidance, we’re now in the process of creating our first
high ticket program, which is going to allow us to increase our
profitability while also keeping our business as simple as possible.
If business growth and marketing are what you’re looking for, then
I don’t think you could invest in anything more valuable than
reading and understanding the ideas and principles that Joel pres-
ents in this book. I can’t say enough about Joel, his book, and his
methodology. It’s really some of the most outstanding work I’ve
seen in over 30 years of being on the front lines of marketing.
This book is likely going to become one of the most powerful
marketing and sales books for 7-figure business owners in the next
12 to 24 months.
—Russell Lundstrom, Creator, Marketing Plan Formula
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I wish I had had this book years ago when I first started in this
online world. The information Joel shares with you in this book
is gold. It will shed so much light on how to be profitable in
the online world—a lot faster than you would otherwise. I had
spent at least two years trying to get clients … Within one week
of implementing Joel’s program, I had at least 20 highly-qualified
leads that had actually applied to speak with me on the phone.
He explains why you would want to start with a high ticket
course versus a tiny offer. Then he goes into great detail on how
you would attract your ideal client, straight from how to acquire
them, how to get them to apply, and then how to enroll them. It
takes you through the whole customer journey process and how to
structure your high ticket course. I can’t believe he went into such
great detail. Pick it up. Read it. I highly recommend it. It’ll make
a huge difference.
—Dr. Emily Stopper, Founder & CEO, The Happy Dentist
My heart was racing as I read this book. This book lays out
the entire framework for how to create an incredibly success-
ful business. If you’re a coach, a consultant, a salesperson, a
marketer, or a course creator, this book is your Bible. We’ve
been taught that we need to indoctrinate and engage our audi-
ence first and provide all this incredible value and content for
them before they start to know, like, and trust us. Joel has
proven that you don’t have to do that at all. Read this book,
and you will save yourself months and years of banging your
head against the wall. People who want your high ticket service
are looking for you. And Joel teaches you how to deliver your
messaging, how to frame it, and how to sell it without selling.
He lays it all out for you from A to Z. He gives you the scripts,
tells you exactly what to do, and he gives you the entire frame-
work to do it.
—Dean Edelson, Owner, 1 Big Idea Marketing
because not only does he have a heart for helping you and giv-
ing you real strategies to grow your business, but it’s all in this
book.
—Karwanna Dyson, Government Contracts Strategist,
She’s Got Goals, LLC
Before reading Joel’s book, I was having all these thoughts and
ideas around what I could do and what I couldn’t do and what I
didn’t know. They were holding me back from taking action. After
reading Joel’s book, though, I realized it was really easy. I was able
to implement things right away.
It’s not only very step-by-step and very practical but also very
inspiring. I walked away saying to myself, I can do this. And I
did. I now have kick-ass positioning and an amazing offer. I have
a webinar, and I’m doing Facebook ads. These are things that I
never thought I would be able to do. And the best part? I enjoyed
Advance Praise xiii
the process because Joel makes the process enjoyable. Get Joel’s
book. Then take action.
—Cristina DiGiacomo, Founder, MorAlchemy
“Joel is FIRE … I’ve spent over four days with Joel in person. He
gets it.”
—Scott Oldford, Founder, ScottOldford.com
trial and error, and you are never 100 percent sure whether it will
work out or not.
My AHA moment came when Joel described the Descension
Model. Since I started applying what Joel talks about in this book,
I have now been able to help my clients reach six-figures in
only two months.
Joel also talks about building your business for scale and not
for burnout. That totally resonated with me. With this particular
model and approach, there’s a lot more excitement to do the work,
it’s a lot more fun, and most importantly, it’s simple.
—Sanjay Yadav, Creator, Attract Your Audience
Before working with Joel, all of my past clients were organic and
referrals … Joel wrote an absolutely stellar ad for us which quickly
began to resonate with cold traffic. And it immediately resulted
in at least one sales call per day for my high ticket coaching offer.
—Brett Stewart, Founder, Inner Edge
One of the best parts of this program was the INSTANT ROI.
Before I received any training, I was able to implement just one
piece of advice that gave me an instant $11K. That was before I
had my mini-webinar up! Just goes to show that Joel is a market-
ing genius, and everyone should be doing this.
—Neal Samudre
This book is spot-on. Prior to learning from Joel, I made the mis-
take of actually creating a full-blown course before I tested it,
wasting months and months of my time and discovering I had the
wrong audience. By joining one of Joel’s programs, I learned that
the offer needs to be tested, and then you build the course as
you go. Doing so allowed us to test the offer first and then scale
afterward.
The other thing that I learned from Joel was to have a very
streamlined course. I learned to streamline my messaging to make
sure that it is digestible, and I learned about being hands-on with
my students. With Joel’s knowledge and expertise, I was able to
get from point A to point B a lot faster. Joel is a great mentor for
the high ticket space, and I highly recommend not only Joel but
also his book.
Don’t hesitate. Grab the book. Read it. Do what it says.
—Ian Bentley, CEO & Founder, PivotandScale.com
When I saw Joel, it’s like he held out this long branch and said,
“Grab on, I’m going to pull you out right now,” and just pulled
me to freedom.
—Darren Chabluk, Founder, DrDone
xvi High Ticket Courses
It was 2016, and we had just moved into our dream home, which
was three times more expensive than our previous home. My wife
gave birth to our first child, Dominic. She was no longer working,
so I was the sole provider (with another mouth to feed), and our
living expenses had tripled.
I had just spent the past year and a half hiring mentors, joining
masterminds, and paying tens of thousands of dollars to solve this
problem, but I felt like I was no closer to the solution. I was com-
pletely frustrated with myself. It seemed as though everything that
I had been trying wasn’t working. I was following all the gurus, all
the typical advice, but there I was at 11 p.m., unable to sleep. Again.
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As I was lying in bed that night, fear consumed me. Fear that I
wasn’t going to be able to make it—that I wasn’t cut out for this.
Fear that I was going to have to go back and get a day job.
I worried about what my wife was going to think about me. I wor-
ried about what others would say. I worried that I’d have to put
my tail between my legs and go back to living a more traditional
life—a life that I knew but didn’t want. I had lived the life of an
entrepreneur for two years, and I had come too far to go back.
At the beginning of the book, there’s a chart that talks about the
cost to acquire a customer related to the type of content you put
out (we’ll go into detail in Chapter 8). Essentially, what it was
saying is: If your content is more offer-driven, then the cost to
acquire a customer is going to be the lowest. If your content is
more brand-driven, it will cost you more to acquire that customer.
Now, this was only within the first few pages of the book, but as
soon as I read that, it was like the parting of the Red Sea. I’ve read
so many great books, but this was the moment that changed my
path and turned the ship in the right direction in what might be
described as a quantum leap.
1
Robert W. Bly, How to Create Irresistible Offers: The Easiest Way on Earth to
Make Your Marketing Generate More Leads, Orders, and Sales (Delray Beach, FL:
American Writers & Artists, 2009), p. 3.
The Origin of High Ticket Courses 3
Everything that I had been doing up until that point was what
all the typical marketers tell you to do. You put out content, put
out content, put out content, educate, educate, educate, and then
eventually somebody is going to want to buy. But this chart in
Bob Bly’s book said the exact opposite. It said that if you want
people to buy, you need to make more offers.
This was the birth of the High Ticket Courses (HTC) model.
Alex had been struggling to get his business off the ground. He
came to me with some big ideas but zero revenue from his coach-
ing program. His primary source of income came from flying
all over the country, helping gym owners launch and grow their
memberships.
Alex was able to take those appointments and start closing deals
for $5K to $10K each.
At this point, though, all I really had was an idea and a couple of
case studies. I didn’t have any course content or training materials
put together. All I had were my results and my confidence that I
could get those results for other people.
I knew that this was the start of something really big. Very quickly,
I grew a waiting list of clients.
Most experts aren’t taught how to actually design their offers and
business model. As a result, they’re left feeling lost and confused.
Many will end up giving away the farm and cannibalizing their
offers. On the flip side, many will end up selling their expertise on
a dollars-per-hour basis, stuck in the one-to-one coaching model
with no clear path for scale. This is easily avoidable if you under-
stand the right way to structure your offers and position yourself
in the marketplace.
It all comes down to having the right business model for your
High Ticket Offer.
The wrong way severely limits your potential for growth, whereas
the right way will give you complete and total freedom in ways
you never thought possible.
Meet Bob
Bob is a consultant who helps companies increase their revenue
through different proprietary methods and operational efficiencies.
8 High Ticket Courses
Bob has a laundry list of clients that he’s worked with over the last
20+ years in business. He is well-respected in his industry and is
well-positioned as an authority.
But Bob has one big problem: He spends way too much time mar-
keting his business to get clients, and he’s burned out.
Meet Ben
Ben is a passionate, intelligent, and very motivated individual with
a skill set he wishes to teach others. He decides to start this as a
side hustle that will hopefully turn into a viable business one day.
He sees all sorts of “courses” for sale ranging from $5, $100, and
$1,000+.
Being a newbie with no prior marketing experience, he starts
searching and following influencers to see what they are doing.
Eventually, he decides that because he has no established follow-
ing, he must first build an audience so he can build trust and a
relationship with them.
He decides to create lots of free and low-cost content to attract
and build that audience with the hopes that someday they will
trust him enough to buy more expensive courses from him.
Ben struggles to get any traction with this model.
His audience that he curated from his free content rarely pur-
chases anything from him. After months of struggling, he’s barely
made a couple hundred dollars—not even enough to cover his
software expenses.
Even worse, he feels that producing more content for his freebie-
seeking audience is becoming an obligation. And one that has
turned his passion into dread ...
Read on.
You could get one sale and make $5,000 just by getting your offer
in front of 50 qualified people.
Now, doesn’t that sound achievable?
Keep in mind that experts who choose the HTC model aren’t
looking for completely passive revenue. They choose to work—
when they want, with whomever they want, on any project they
want.
Why?
I’ve spent six years trying to crack the code so that I could live
a semi-retired life while building a multiple-7-figure business.
The road to get here was not easy, but I am living proof that it is
possible.
You’ve worked hard to get where you are, and you deserve a reli-
able method you can count on. Most importantly, you need a
business model that can help you get to that next level.
You’ve already found your specialty, now you want to get to that
$30K to $50K per month without having to sift through leads for
The Origin of High Ticket Courses 15
your ideal customer. The way to achieve this is not pumping out
massive amounts of content, selling a low-ticket offer, or creating
freebie lead magnets.
I have developed a new business model that has worked time and
time again for helping High Ticket Course Experts launch and
scale their courses while designing a lifestyle around what is most
important to them. In fact, it’s so powerful that it’s helped some of
my clients scale to the tune of $20K, $50K, and $400K per month
and beyond—without the need for the “Ascension Model.”
I didn’t just wake up one day and have it all figured out. I’ve spent
time, money, and sleepless nights trying to figure out the “golden
solution” to making webinars that would convert.
I finally asked myself, “What if the way I’ve been learning isn’t the
end-all-be-all way to succeed?”
hustling. And I want to take you along for the ride, so you don’t
waste your time and money like I did. You can spend more time
living the life you want by designing a model that works for you.
And you deserve that.
I’ve built a 4x4 (4 hours a day, 4 days per week) work week so I
can dedicate more time to my family. Each morning I go for a
90-minute ruck (a military-inspired exercise that involves walking
with a weighted vest or backpack) around town, and Fridays are
reserved for making pancakes with my kids. I’m able to do all of
this while running a 7-figure business. And there’s no reason you
can’t do the same.
I’ll show you a way to spend less time building everything you
think you need to attract clients. They’re already out there, want-
ing exactly what you’re offering. The only problem is that you’re
targeting the wrong group.
Don’t just cast a wide net and hope something sticks. In this book,
we’ll go over how to stop playing the numbers game and how to
start validating your offer. We will focus on activating an optimal
customer acquisition process that will consistently work for you—
rather than against you.
When you can significantly cut down the time you spend finding
your ideal prospects, you essentially give yourself the gift of time.
And what you do with that time is completely up to you. Want
to spend more time with your family? Work on a passion project?
Get out in nature more? You’re the boss. You can choose what to
do with your time currency.
The Origin of High Ticket Courses 17
All you have to do is follow the guide and watch it work its magic.
Semi-Retirement Personified
Years ago, I was shopping for a new truck. My sales associate and I
were on the lot where he was showing me a wide variety of trucks
and explaining all the features and benefits. We were looking at
black trucks and crew cabs and double cabs, and diesel trucks
versus gasoline trucks.
My sales rep said, “Oh, Mike? No, he’s not in today. He’s kind of
semi-retired. He just comes and goes as he pleases and deals with
a select few customers, on his own terms, on his own schedule.”
But for crying out loud, I’m still young, so I have a ton of energy.
And there’s so much I want to pursue. I have things I want to accom-
plish … people I want to help … milestones I want to achieve.
18 High Ticket Courses
By the end of this book, you’re going to understand the real oppor-
tunity in harnessing what you already know and packaging it in a
way that pays you good money, predictably, day after day.
The HTC model provides you with a simplistic plan and approach
to design, launch, leverage, and scale your expert-based business
with two to three versions of your core offer.
The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final
stages of completion. It wasn’t all that complicated and basically
consisted of:
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And...
Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our
website for 10 years.
This was the confirmation I needed, after reading Bob Bly’s How
to Create Irresistible Offers, to completely flip my business model
on its head. Upside down.
Nothing so simple had ever made such a big impact in my life than
learning how Elon Musk launched his multibillion-dollar automo-
bile brand. Because if the idea was good enough—and worked—for
Elon Musk, it should be good enough—and work—for me.
Sure, Elon Musk had venture capitalists with tons of capital, but
he still went this route because he knew he needed to eventually
fund his own solar power startup.
Model: create a sales webinar, run Facebook ads, and sell lots of
$300–$2K DIY low-ticket courses.
Are there marketers out there who are successful with this model?
Yes. I’ve worked with many of them.
But the reality is that this is a pipe dream for more than 99% of
course creators. Here’s why: Building a sales webinar funnel is like
the holy grail of marketing. You need to get a lot of things right
to make it click. And frankly, most people don’t have the where-
withal to stick it through because it costs a lot of time and money
with no guarantee it will work.
Management was not my skill set, nor did I desire to learn it. I
was perfectly happy with our little team of five or six employ-
ees and contractors. So, I decided to scale through a low ticket
course.
Even worse, my attention had gone away from the agency, so cli-
ent acquisition was lower than normal. That meant I needed to
hustle to get more clients, or else we’d run out of cash. That’s a
recipe for burnout.
The High Ticket Courses model helps you to leverage your time
and resources to grow beyond selling just one version of your
Discover the High Ticket Courses (HTC) Model 27
program, service, or course. The model has two main parts: The
Tiers and The Trajectory.
I’m going to give you an overview of the HTC model and then
take you through it step by step in later chapters. If you don’t
understand it all at first, that’s ok. It will make more sense later
on as we go.
As you look at this model, you might think this looks a little
“backward.” That’s because you’re probably more familiar with
the Ascension Model, which is what many people in the digital
marketing community promote.
Does the Ascension Model work? Yes, but only for brands and
companies who can afford to build big lists and be out-of-pocket
Discover the High Ticket Courses (HTC) Model 29
What will you experience in your business after you apply this
methodology?
2. Clarity. You will know how to build a bond with your cus-
tomer so that you can continue serving them and develop
that relationship for repeat business.
3. focus. You will know how to make the biggest impact
with minimum viable effort.
In this phase, it’s all about validation. This is when you will experi-
ence fast growth as you test new offers and ideas. It’s critical that
you have your lead flow coming in and that you are reaching an
audience that constantly wants what you’re offering.
Your goal here is to get five paid customers or clients. Your pri-
mary focus is to develop the most profitable offer and generate as
many enrollment calls as possible. The key activities here are to
develop your core messaging and offers that generate a response
from an audience who’s never heard of you.
You’ll notice that in this phase, it’s really all about sales. You’ll
want to test your advertising targets and mediums, your enroll-
ment calls, your lead qualification strategy, your offer structure,
and your feedback. And, you’ll want to develop your Minimum
Viable Funnel layout.
What brings you from the Launch Phase to the next phase—the
Growth Phase—is that your offer has been validated. Usually, this
means you get past five paid customers, and you’re ROI positive.
If you get five customers but you’re not ROI positive, then you
can’t move past this phase.
Your primary focus is making sure that you can fulfill your offers.
When you have this dialed in, you develop a downsell offer to
increase your closing rate, enroll more of your clients, and expand
your revenue opportunities. You’ll work on lead-nurturing activi-
ties and start list building with lead magnets, low ticket offers,
email marketing, and groups.
Your goal here is at least three months of no less than $50K per
month. And your primary focus here is really to free your time: Get
yourself out of fulfillment and selling as much as possible.
Once you know what goes into each phase, you can say, “Here’s
what it’s going to look like when I reach the next tier. Here’s what
I need to focus on as I start to design this model for myself.”
34 High Ticket Courses
1. Avatar
2. Offer
3. Journey
4. Pricing
5. Delivery/Fulfillment
Once you’ve mastered these five elements, then it’s time to think
about marketing and scaling. While it’s obvious that you need to
sell before you scale, many believe you need to market before you
sell. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
You need to gather case studies of clients who are using your sys-
tem and your methodology to get results. You might be thinking:
Well, that doesn’t make much sense. Then, how do I get those testimo-
nials? How do I get those case studies?
get results and achieve success with your system and methodology.
Then, when you’re ready to scale to a more hands-off, productized
version of your HTC, you can share those results to attract new
clients. This is why the High Ticket Courses Model starts at Tier
3, the highest level of service.
Once you help them get results, you can then start to create your
content based on the hurdles they faced. Despite their struggles
and needs, you got them results. You can now start to lead with
both your success and your customer’s success.
The reason testimonials, case studies, and client stories are so pow-
erful is that they allow your prospects to see what is possible for
them.
I ’ve seen far too many people leave money on the table by trying
to bang a square peg in a round hole. They’re often trying to
sell their customers on something they aren’t necessarily ready for.
I can’t tell you how many people want our done-for-you service
(Tier 3), but they’re just not financially or mentally in a place
where they’re ready to take advantage of our agency. Even if they
can cut a check, they still have to be in the right place at the right
time, in the right frame of mind, and on the right avenue for their
business.
Creating the right messaging for your ideal avatar is all about
being able to serve more customers by offering them the ability to
take the journey that best serves them.
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high-converting sales presentations for our customers and for our cli-
ents. We’ve helped at least seven businesses hit the 2-Comma Club
Award. I should be able to teach this to people.
The reason why it didn’t work with paid traffic was because of
one critical point: Just because I can teach something to someone,
doesn’t mean they will want to learn how to do it themselves—at
least not at a price point that would make it profitable for me.
(This also revealed another critical discovery that you’ll discover
in just a moment.)
I was trying to sell a completely DIY program for $997 with paid
ads. For reference, my Tier 3 agency services were $25K. What all
of my data was telling me—that I was blind to for months—was
that I was marketing to the wrong avatar. My avatar wasn’t willing
to pay $1,000 to learn how to do a webinar on their own. They
knew a webinar was a lot of work, and they didn’t want to do it
themselves. They needed help … and lots of it.
Create Messaging for Your Ideal Avatar 39
The key lesson is this: You may have the perfect offer but the wrong
audience. Be flexible with whom you can serve. Most people who
teach avatar design mislead their customers, whether intentionally
or unintentionally. And to be quite honest, it’s catastrophic.
You could have the perfect offer targeting the wrong avatar and go
completely broke because of it. That’s exactly what happened to
me when I started marketing my webinar course.
This is all about asking yourself: How many conversions does it take
to make a sale? The gold square at the bottom with the dollar sign
is your ultimate conversion hole—the sale. This is when some-
body says, “Yes, Mr. or Ms. Expert, I believe in your promise, and
I’m willing to pay you for your expertise.” The closer someone is
to the conversion hole, the more they are typically worth, and the
easier they are to convert.
Imagine that you’ve got a High Ticket Program that teaches peo-
ple how to make money through options trading. The best odds
for your success would be to target the person who is closest to the
conversion hole.
Your only focus with this avatar is: Why is your unique methodol-
ogy the right methodology for them?
The further out you go, the more conversion conversations you
need to have.
On the widest spectrum (Zone 4), your prospect wants to build a side
hustle to make money, and they’ve not yet expressed interest in stock
market investing. So now you have to start by saying, “Listen, you
Create Messaging for Your Ideal Avatar 43
need to really pay attention to the stock market if you want to make
money. And here’s why.” Then, “You have to really pay attention to
options trading.” Then, “Here’s why you should pay attention to my
methodology of options trading.” That’s a pretty far reach.
Now, this is going to be the largest audience, but these are not
necessarily people who are going to take action right now because
they don’t have any urgency. The timing is off if your offer isn’t
even on their radar.
As you get closer to the hole, your messaging becomes more and
more relevant, and your conversation gets dialed in. But it’s all
about making sure you’re talking to the right avatar.
You guessed it. The one who has tried and failed.
44 High Ticket Courses
Then I’ll ask, “What is your offer?” And they’ll say, “I want to
teach Law of Attraction and NLP.” They don’t realize they have
to educate and warm up their Zone 4 prospects. Otherwise, it’s
like walking up to people who are only curious about PD, LOA,
or NLP and saying, “I’m going to show you how to live your best
life ever!”
By doing this, you’re missing the boat. You really have to change
your “who” and go after the people who have already gone to the
Create Messaging for Your Ideal Avatar 45
seminars, who have already read the books, who already know the
language and terminology. For example, look for people who have
already tried NLP or the law of attraction—people who want to
take it to the next level. This is where you want to start. Begin by
explaining to them why they failed before and why your method-
ology is the right fit for them.
Get this wrong and one of two things will happen as you start
driving paid traffic into your funnel:
The easiest way to spot this is if your advertising costs are through
the roof.
The biggest mistake that I see when people are creating their ava-
tar is that they choose someone who is in Zone 3 or Zone 4, not
realizing that those people take the longest to convert and are the
least likely to convert right away.
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People in Zones 3 and 4 are too far away; they have to be convinced
of too many things. And this is going to show up in your opt-in
conversion rate. It’s going to show up in your lead quality. It’s going
to show up in people not applying to work with you because you’re
speaking to somebody who’s too far away from urgency.
Right now you’ve got 3-4% of your market (the top of the pyramid)
considering buying either your offer or a competitor’s offer. And
there’s another 6-7% (the next level down) who are open to it. Mean-
ing, if they’re presented with the right offer and the right opportunity,
they will take action. The remaining 90% of your market (compris-
ing the largest part of the pyramid) are not your target. Either they
aren’t considering your offer, or they are not interested at all.
2
Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with
Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies (New York, NY: Portfolio, 2007), p. 64.
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So the number one mistake to avoid when you look at this buyers
pyramid is trying to capture the entire market. You don’t want to
try to capture all five segments with one message, which is what
most people do. This is exactly what I did when I was struggling
to grow my webinar agency.
This usually ends with the message targeting the bottom portion of
the pyramid—those who are least likely to respond because they know
that they’re not interested. They’re not even connected to a prob-
lem you solve or an opportunity you offer. Or if they are connected,
they’ve already told themselves that they are not going to entertain
any offers, which makes them completely unlikely to respond.
When all of your messaging targets your ideal avatar, your con-
version rates will not only increase but you’ll also reduce the
time spent acquiring new clients. And you might even hit a few
“holes-in-one.”
C hapt e r 3
I think his Big Promise was “Get at least one letter grade higher
than what you were getting.” I was concerned he would run into
problems, so I wanted him to explain more.
I asked, “Have you launched your Power Offer? Have you started
generating any leads for this?”
I said, “What’s the issue?” though I already knew what the issue
was before he told me. I wanted him to tell me.
First, he was pursuing broke college students who may have from
$30K to $60K in loans. They didn’t have money to spend on
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training and probably also lacked the desire to invest any more
in themselves. Even though his promise was the tangible result of
getting better grades, his prospects either weren’t willing to put in
the work or weren’t able to pay for his services. So, after talking to
a student who liked his course, he would often hear, “If I’m going
to do this, then my parents have to pay for it.”
This further delayed any conversions because there were now two
decision makers. He wasn’t having any success. I dug deeper: “All
right, man. Tell me a little bit more about your situation. Obvi-
ously, the market you’re going after is one you’re passionate about.
But, it hasn’t been viable for you as a business model. So tell me,
what’s your secret sauce?”
One of the ideas I had for him (which I wanted him to discover
for himself ) was to find an alternative market with greater poten-
tial. I asked, “If anybody can benefit from it, then what if you
were able to take this same method and apply it to somebody who
was willing and able to pay for it?”
“Well, I don’t really know who is willing and able to pay for a
study method,” he said.
“Ask yourself: Who else would find value in your direct, tangible
result of better grades by learning how to study better?”
Create Your Power Offer 51
Then the question was, “Do you feel they’d benefit from applying
your study methodology to their licensing exams?”
I want to help you create what I call the “Power Offer.” My inten-
tion for you is to take action with this, right now. My clients who
launched their Power Offers to their network immediately won
business from them. I promise you—it has worked dozens upon
dozens of times.
I want to walk you through this quickly. This one tactic is what
opened the floodgates for me when I was really struggling to get
leads, set appointments, and talk to people who wanted to buy my
High Ticket program. Once I launched this Power Offer, our cost
per application dropped by 90%!
any offer. And, you’ll know how to communicate clearly and pre-
cisely to get people excited about what you’re offering. If they’re
not getting excited, you just keep revising your Power Offer until
people do start responding—just like Rob’s audience did.
This is why I recommend you start with sales first and then mar-
keting. We don’t want you getting tripped up with all the gobble-
dygook of lead magnets and all the complexity of both technology
and strategy.
This works for private messages, for people in your network who
might be interested in what you have to offer, for social media
channels, for your email list, and for your customer list. It doesn’t
matter. It works. It also works anywhere you have a live audience
(on a stage, online in a Zoom conference, etc.). And the frame-
work is very simple.
Call out the Avatar: Attention course creators, coaches, and experts.
I want to challenge you. Create your own Power Offer, and start
posting it in your various communication channels or in private
messages to stir up interest and desire for whatever you offer.
If you want step-by-step help to create your own Power Offer, I’ve
put together a workshop specifically to show you how to do it. Go
to PowerOfferWorkshop.com.
Brad’s Story
Brad had a successful coaching program that helped people learn
options trading, but he struggled to get a consistent flow of new
leads coming in month after month.
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Once he got this dialed in, he was booking calls at $30 each and
converted those leads at nearly a 50% conversion rate on a $3,000
coaching offer.
Because of his ongoing success, Brad’s wife was able to fully retire,
which means they get to spend more time together as a family,
raising their two young, very active boys.
There’s a balance here. This is the dance. You need to really focus
on what you can deliver and what you can promise. So many
people miss this. Ultimately, you need to craft the perfect offer
for YOU.
C hapt e r 4
The goal here is meant to drive high ticket sales. If you’re doing a
strict return on ad spend, your cost-per-sale is going to be the low-
est with this funnel, because you’re targeting people who actively
have a problem and are searching for a solution.
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offer and showing them the roadmap of what it looks like to work
with you.
Use this funnel during Phases 1 and 2. This will get you to
$30K–$50K per month on average (sometimes a lot more,
depending on the market), so it’s going to be sufficient for most
experts.
Ask yourself:
You will use the MVF to identify the three key criteria to qualify
them:
They have a problem they are ready to solve, they believe in your
process and methodology as a solution, and they are willing and
able to pay for help.
to the rest of the buyers pyramid. Craft an offer that targets the
top 10% of the market: Those who are open to buying now if
they’re presented with an offer that makes sense to them. Give
them a compelling offer and a clear solution.
MTDO allows you to test with paid traffic, which is the holy grail.
If you don’t have a list, this is huge. Ultimately, you want to move
into paid traffic because this is where you’re able to grow quickly
and maintain a lifestyle where you’re not on a constant marketing
hamster wheel.
This also targets premium buyers who value their time over their
money, allowing you to charge a premium price point. Your cost
per acquisition is also going to be the lowest.
1. Power offer
4. Phone Call
They will schedule a phone call where you have a quick
enrollment conversation. I’m not going to call this a
“strategy session” because they’ve already been presold
throughout this entire process. By the time they get to
this conversation, they know they’re going to be pitched
an offer, figure out if this is the right fit for them, and
move forward.
5. Enrollment
Only enroll them if you can confidently say, “Working
together is a grand slam, and here’s why …” At that point,
you simply show them the roadmap and collect payment
if they are a good fit. Your benchmark during this entire
process is a bare minimum of 4X return on ad spend.
Ask yourself:
If you read this copy from my Power Offer ad again, you will see
that all of these questions are answered, either directly or indi-
rectly. We were building skeleton webinars with the core elements
of what they wanted.
This is important.
song and dance. These people want the bottom line. They value
their time more than their money. They simply want to know
exactly what it is you’ve got to offer. They’ll figure out for them-
selves if your methodology is right for them.
Once I realized this, I flipped the whole script on its head. I led
with the offer. Then, I gave them the basic, minimum, need-to-
know information, and the game changed entirely.
The people you attract through ads don’t have to register for a date
and time to sign up for this webinar. It’s just a prerecorded video
that has the fluff cut out of it.
Ask yourself:
But, in order to schedule a time to speak with you, they must give
you more information about themselves to prove they are serious
candidates.
The goal here is to screen your leads, find out who is the best fit for
your program, and automate your qualification process.
If someone is not a good fit for you, you’ll have a good indication
before you get on the phone with them. And this will continue to
evolve as you develop your ideal customer.
Too many questions will scare off your leads. Shoot for no more
than five questions. As you start collecting responses and having
enrollment calls, you can determine whether or not you need to
revise your questions or add more.
Once you know who isn’t a good fit for you, you can use
the flip side of this person to help you identify the perfect
customer.
Create your exclusion list. Be the boss, take control, and get clear
on who you’re not willing to work with.
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And it will help you direct the phone call and enrollment
conversation.
BONUS TIP: If you want to further qualify your leads before you
get on the phone with them, you can choose to follow up with
them via text or email before your scheduled call with what I call
the 3-Question Pre-Close.
Then, I will ask these three questions before I get on a call with
the lead.
If you choose to use this strategy, your closing rate will skyrocket
because the lead will be framed as strong as possible for a sale.
It reduces any tension that might have been present on the enroll-
ment call if these questions hadn’t been answered.
Assuming they say “yes” to the final question, they’re 95% of the
way sold on your offer program. Your scheduled enrollment call
will be a breeze.
This is not a strategy session, and you don’t have to follow a sales
script. You just need to listen, affirm, and enroll.
I t’s your job to map out the whole trip people will take through
your world of expertise so they can see the hurdles, the oppor-
tunities, and the gains.
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program, they said, “Okay, great. Thanks for the webinar. I’ll see
you later!” There was no next step for them.
Not only was it broken, but it was also taking us longer to teach
them than to build out the webinar ourselves. Rather than spend-
ing six, eight, or ten weeks coaching, we could have focused on
doing it for them, which would have saved a lot of time and gen-
erated far better results.
The moral of the story here is to build a journey around your offer.
Never get pigeonholed as selling just a tool, because tools are like
bandaids. You want somebody coming into your world under-
standing that there’s more to the story than your offer.
Then we have Onboarding where they reach the first three mile-
stones: identify their money market; identify their idea, minimum
viable offer, and model; and develop their one- to two-sentence
Power Offer.
Now they’ve hit the Launch milestone, and they move into the
next three: generate their first leads, generate their first applications
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and phone calls, and close their first sale. Boom! Sales Closed.
Finally: Optimize, rinse, and repeat until they’re comfortable.
By the end of this journey, they’ve got the foundations built for
a $10K- to $30K-per-month High Ticket Course and Coaching
business. In a nutshell, we want them to hit certain milestones
within a 4-week period:
Here’s what our Milestone Plan looks like from a visual standpoint:
This roadmap shows them what they need to do every step along
the way to get the result. The Big Promise that you’re leading with
Outline Your Customer Journey 77
That alone comes with its own set of challenges that I help them
solve, either in our agency or in our mentorship program.
Once they complete that goal, I know from experience they are
going to run into a number of different problems, such as:
The key point is to make sure you are designing a journey that
continues past your initial promise, so your customers and clients
will want to keep paying you for your advice and support.
This is how you can develop that customer journey, and explain it
to your customers and audience so they know and trust that you
can deliver the goods. This is all about trust and keeping them on
the right path. Nobody wants to follow a blind leader.
Outline Your Customer Journey 79
You can tell them all of the instructions verbally, but they’re not
going to trust themselves to remember it. They might second-
guess themselves. But if you give them a map and clear, step-by-
step instructions that they can’t screw up, you’ve built that trust
factor with them.
If you want your customers and clients to sell your program for
you through glowing testimonials, map out their journey for
them. Work through these questions. Your answers will become
the foundation for a program that gets your clients the best pos-
sible results.
We had just raised the price, and it was exciting to see a surge of
cash in our bank account. I was managing the team, and I thought
we were ready to handle this type of business, but I didn’t do a
good job of qualifying my clients. There were definitely some cli-
ents that I shouldn’t have accepted into our agency, and there were
some clients we just couldn’t get results for.
I stopped interacting online. I couldn’t get out of bed all day for
weeks on end. I felt like I had let my team down, like I had let
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It took about 45 days for me to get out of that depression and start
rebuilding everything. The moral of the story is that, in terms of
over-promising and under-delivering, you have to make sure that
you do not put unnecessary stress on yourself.
Just because you CAN charge a high price point doesn’t mean you
SHOULD charge as high a price point as possible. Because if you
ever get yourself into a situation where you realize that you can’t
Design Your Perfect Pricing 83
fulfill your promise, you don’t want it to cripple you. And it can
happen at any stage in your business.
The High Ticket Pricing Model melds four things together. And,
if you get this right, you can avoid things like massive chargebacks
and deep depression.
When you combine all four of these things, you will have the
perfect price that you feel comfortable charging, that people are
willing to pay, and that they’re able to pay because they see the
results that you provide. And you don’t have to worry about pos-
sibly shooting yourself in the foot and adding unnecessary stress
because you charged too much.
But I could sense that she wasn’t comfortable doing that. So I said,
“Hold on. You haven’t even fulfilled this offer yet. Don’t raise your
price. Let’s dial down the ad spend and make sure that you can
comfortably fulfill your promises.”
Yes, a high close rate on your sales calls might indicate that you
should raise your price. But it could also indicate that your prom-
ise might be too strong. Before you jump to raising your price,
first make sure you’re getting results for your customers and you
are able to fulfill your promises.
Susan was already getting stressed out that she had so many
customers. She didn’t need to add a higher price to her stress.
When you get clients coming in the door, you have this immedi-
ate surge of euphoria, and then it quickly transforms into stress.
Now you actually have to perform, and you have these voices in
your head: What if I don’t perform? What if I can’t get them results?
Those are things that you absolutely have to deal with.
What should happen when you get close to a 10? When you’re on
the phone with your perfect customer, you should be able to say
with confidence, “Based on everything you’ve told me about your
situation and what you’re looking to achieve, working together is
a home run, and here’s why…”
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There might be some risks, but I’ll tell them up front that the
ends justify the means. The rewards far outweigh the risks. This is
a home run. And if I can’t tell them that, then I’m not perfectly
confident, and I have to dissect that.
Example:
Example:
By the time I was ready to launch the course, I was pretty pas-
sionate about my topic, but I still ran into some struggles. To deal
with this head-on, I hired a marketing coach and paid him $10K
to help me sell this program.
I replied, “Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m passionate about this. I
know I can help these people, so I’m going to continue forward.”
Wrong answer.
“Hey, I’m unemployed and I loved the training, but I really just
don’t have the money for it right now. Thanks for the training. See
you later.” Meanwhile, I was asking myself, What is going on?
In hindsight, I could see that I was going after people who were
unemployed. Naturally, they were looking to ace their job interview,
even though they didn’t have one lined up right at that moment,
and they didn’t have money to spend. While I was focused on my
Design Your Perfect Pricing 89
We ended up doing very well for this client, helping him fill up
his calendar with qualified sales leads and drastically improv-
ing his closing percentage with our prequalification methods. In
just a few short months, his company had generated hundreds
of thousands of dollars in new revenue from what we had built
for him.
However, if you had seen our communication with this client over
the first couple of weeks of starting this project, you’d think he was
hemorrhaging money. Each email seemed like the world was on
fire and that doomsday was upon us. Thankfully, our team knew
Design Your Perfect Pricing 91
how to handle it, and all was well. But this serves as a prime learn-
ing lesson: You attract exactly what you put out.
This new client simply wasn’t happy with the results he was get-
ting—even though he multiplied his initial investment many
times over—because he fell short of the goal he had set for him-
self, which was to make more than $10 million in eight months.
Ask yourself:
clients. Because if you do not put your clients front and center, I
promise you, you will not last. Word is going to get out, and your
program will fail.
From the outside looking in, most people would say he was crush-
ing it. However, after seeing inside his business, it was clear to me
that my client was navigating a sinking ship.
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Now, if he had designed this right, his $997 one-time offer should
have been on autopilot as a DIY program. Instead, he was selling
this offer as lifetime access to a coaching program and promising
group coaching calls seven days a week for life.
I want to make sure you avoid burning out with “offer canni-
balization.” If you have a cannibalized offer that’s doing $150K
per month but you need a team of 15 people to support it,
you hate your business, and you’re forced to continually sell
this course every single day just to keep your business afloat,
you don’t have a business model. You have a sinking ship with
vanity metrics.
Start at Your Top Tier for Delivery and Fulfillment 95
It’s important to start at the top tier and work your way down.
Not only does working one-on-one with a premium offer get you
cash-flow positive, but it also helps you to:
Your Tier 3 can also be a done-for-you service where you’d use this
to validate your offer and demand first.
NOTE: If you don’t have any client testimonials, you can follow
my Sales Script Swipe File to start acquiring new customers. See
Bonus #2 in the Bonus Section at the back of the book.
As you work closely with your clients, you can record the “teach-
ing” sections to eliminate the one-on-one calls and structure
group support calls to be more leveraged. But this is the best start-
ing point. Let’s map this out:
the first piece of content that’s going to get them on their way to
their milestone, place each step in order, and teach this to them in
one-on-one calls.
In between your weekly calls, give them email support, and say,
“If you have questions as you’re executing the plan, shoot me an
email. I’d be happy to discuss.”
You work one-on-one so you can get case studies, even at lower-
level programs. These case studies will help you sell more.
●● Doesn’t scale.
●● Takes the most amount of time.
Visual:
Or, you could have dedicated topic calls that are led by your
coaches. And in between each milestone, the client is doing the
Start at Your Top Tier for Delivery and Fulfillment 99
work. They get the support, they get the community, and they get
access to the experts. But it’s much more leveraged.
Now, you’re not doing one-on-one calls. You’re doing group calls,
and all of the teaching is completely productized. This method
works to lower your fulfillment time in the program while help-
ing more students get better results. It allows a personal touch
between you and the students on a larger scale. And as it grows,
you can add in more coaches to help support your fulfillment side
and add more support calls, if necessary.
You create dedicated support calls for specific action items in the
program. For example, you might have an “ads call,” or you might
have an “offer” and a “funnel” call. This can be run by one person
or by a team.
This is how we have it set up, and it’s extremely leveraged for us,
while at the same time getting incredible results for our students.
Now, you might be thinking: OK, Joel. That program looks great. But I
don’t have a team in place to have that many calls. What now?
As you start to add more clients, you can then bring on the coaches
to host these Q&A calls. But, more coaches are not required to
have a successful High Ticket Course.
This is important:
Your offers and programs are living, breathing, and
always evolving.
Do not think that once you design it, it’s going to stay static and
unchanged. Your students are going to be accepting if the pro-
gram evolves, and you add things or take things away. Understand
that you can change it.
Start at Your Top Tier for Delivery and Fulfillment 101
Most online course creators teach you to build this DIY version
out first. The opposite is true. If you start here, you’re much more
likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. The HTC model has you
starting with your Top Tier offer, getting clarity on that offer, and
then offering a DIY model for anyone who wants your end result
without the price tag of one-on-one consulting or group coach-
ing. If you will wait until you master the top two tiers before you
create this lower tier, you’ll save a lot of time, energy, and money.
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Why do you need to have two to three versions of your core offer?
The answer is to be able to serve more of your customers. Not
everyone is going to be a perfect fit for your top (most personal-
ized and expensive) offer or want to do it all themselves with-
out support (DIY). They still want the core promise, and you can
deliver it at every level.
As you create new offers, make sure you’re providing equal value.
Start with Tier 3, charge a premium price point, and make sure
any new offer you create can be fulfilled and delivered faster than
your comprehensive, done-for-you offerings. That’s how you
reduce the time spent in your business, increase your bottom line,
and deliver results for your customers and clients.
C hapt e r 8
In Phase 2, you hit the Growth stage. Here’s where you start to
build the elements of the foundation and scale from $10K to
$50K per month. Maybe you will bring on a team member or
two to help you free up your time. This phase is about building
the marketing assets to support your growth, so you can go after a
larger audience and start to build this as a business model.
Then you have Phase 3, the Scale phase, where you become the
leader of a growing team and go beyond $50K per month.
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You’ll need to master all 10 Steps of Phase 1 before you can move
on to Phase 2.
Take a look at the graphic below. Notice that your first milestone,
the Prep milestone, includes Money Market, Identify Your Model,
and 1-2 Sentence Power Offer. The next milestone is Build. Here
you have Mini Webinar, Technical Setup, and Go Live. Your third
milestone is Test, which covers Lead Generation, Applications
and Phone Calls, and First Sale. Step 10 is Optimize.
Be sure to hit all three milestones. Check all the boxes in each
step. Then, let that progress push you toward Growing and Scal-
ing (Phases 2 and 3).
The Launch Phase in 10 Steps 105
Remember that passion doesn’t always turn into profits. It’s won-
derful if you are passionate about something, but making sure
that your passion actually connects with something that people
are willing and able to spend money on is the secret to building
a business that you truly love. All too often, I see people with
this burning passion to help people, but they don’t make that
connection.
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Get clear on exactly what you want to do. The biggest mistake that
I see people make who are already having early success is to give
away the farm. They’ve pigeonholed themselves into only selling
that offer, and now it becomes a burden rather than a joy for them
to fulfill.
Be aware that there are certain pitfalls that you want to avoid in
this stage. For example, you don’t want to attract the wrong kind
of clients. You want to target a market that’s willing and able to
work with you. You also don’t want to structure your offer in a
way that demands so much of your time that you hate delivering
on it. Make sure your perfect offer setup not only provides a posi-
tive experience for your ideal clients but also protects your time.
To help you create your Power Offer, see Bonus #2: Create Your
Demand Faucet Power Offer toward the end of this book.
I’ve worked out a deal with them to offer you a free trial to their
software at this link: highticketcourses.com/GHL
Here, you’ve got your Power Offer message. How do you know
if people are actually clicking through and if it’s actually making
The Launch Phase in 10 Steps 109
How do you make sure that your clients are getting service? You
want to make sure you’re providing the best experience for them
while still doing this in a way that allows you to create a very light-
weight and effective offer.
The one specific area where most people fail is when they fall in
love with their offer. They decide not to listen when the market
says, “I do not want this offer,” and they keep trying to slam a
square peg into a round hole.
You need passion in this business because you want to serve your
audience, but you also have to design your passion around what
people want. And if people are not responding to your offer, a lead
magnet will not save you.
All these milestones occur in Phase 1, the Launch Phase. This can
take people from 30 days to over 90 days to accomplish. It all
depends on how fast you’re able to execute, how fast you’re able
to get feedback on your offer, and how willing and able you are to
pivot your offer.
C hapt e r 9
I asked him what his existing assets were, and he told me he had an
email list of 30,000 people. I said, “Oh, that’s awesome!” because
having an audience to work with is usually a good sign. It means
he’s probably making some decent money in his business.
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But here’s the thing: A list is only valuable if it’s an active and
engaged list of buyers—not a list of freebie-seekers.
That’s the big problem with building a list before you ever make an
offer to them. If you train your audience to consume (not buy) your
content by providing all this great free information, they’re going to
see you only as a great resource—like Wikipedia or Google—where
information is free anytime they want. That’s a recipe for disaster.
The book that hit the nail on the head for me is the same book I
mentioned in the introduction: How to Create Irresistible Offers3
by Bob Bly. In this book, Bly takes this concept of going after the
right market at the right time with the right message, and he puts
a dollar value on it.
This is what his chart is saying: As you create content, the struc-
ture of the content and its message will directly correlate with
your cost per sale.
3
Robert W. Bly, How to Create Irresistible Offers: The Easiest Way on Earth to
Make Your Marketing Generate More Leads, Orders, and Sales (Delray Beach, FL:
American Writers & Artists, 2009), p. 3.
Build a Profitable Business Before Building a Brand 117
As you reduce your offer content and increase your brand con-
tent, your cost per sale will go up by two to four times each itera-
tion. By the bottom of the chart, you have primarily brand-driven
(educational) content. Your cost per sale is going to be extremely
high because it’s not offer-based, direct response marketing.
Ask yourself:
Brad had been running his Power Offer and mini webinar to
attract clients for a few months. But after one of our consulting
calls, he knew that he was leaving money on the table with some
of the leads he spoke to but hadn’t yet enrolled. So, he decided to
host an informal, virtual event called “Beers with Brad.”
Why did this work? Simply put, these people were already primed
with an offer the first time they were exposed to Brad. They weren’t
expecting free education. They knew Brad had a program. They
just needed the right time to join.
Build a Profitable Business Before Building a Brand 119
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I worked with the COO for four or five months, and I realized
in the end that I didn’t want a big team. We had invested in Infu-
sionsoft, we had hired other experts to help us build the right sys-
tems, processes, and procedures, and I was building something that
I didn’t want. Ultimately, I realized I didn’t really want a big agency.
In this chapter, we’ll cover what you need for Phases 2 and 3,
which is how to grow and scale everything you built in Phase 1.
These are all the things that will happen as you start to grow and
scale into your leadership role, and they should happen in the
right order.
Scale Your High Ticket Course Business 123
Things will happen that may pull your attention away from the
main focus, but the good news is that you’ve got an offer that
converts.
It’s important to ask yourself what you want from your business.
Not everyone wants the same things. Some are content with five-
figure months while others want to scale to six figures and beyond.
Ask yourself:
These simple questions will start to prepare you for if, when, and
how you’re ready to grow this business.
Getting to a 7-figure run rate is really simple with the right plan. It’s
roughly $85K per month, and that’s it. If you’ve never hit $85K per
month, and it seems like a stretch—that’s totally fine. But I promise
you, when you start hitting those milestones of $10K a month, then
$30K a month, then $60K, $70K, and $85K a month, it’s not so
difficult once you’ve successfully moved through the three phases.
That could be 10 clients at an $8,500 average order value, or that
could be 20 clients at an average order value of $4,250.
Then we have your High Ticket Course model, where you have
two or three tiers of your signature offer. They meld together.
We’re going to walk through the three phases now, so you can see
exactly how to apply the High Ticket Course model to the Trajec-
tory plan.
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Example:
Let’s say you’re just getting started and you are launching a new
offer. You start off in Phase 1 of the Trajectory by only launching
your Tier 3 course, the most premium level. That’s either one-on-
one, done-for-you, or whatever is the most intimate level offering.
In this example, you will start out with a $3,500 offer, and your
goal here will be $10K per month. You will want to reach that
goal as fast as possible. So, at $3,500 you will really only need
three clients to get to that $10K per month mark. If you have a
30% closing ratio of people who you get on the phone, then you
will only need to have 11 conversations to get those three clients.
You will follow an advertising model. You will use ads to save
your time and get your message out there as fast as possible. Your
benchmarks will be a bare minimum return on investment of at
least 4X. In this specific example, a 4X return on investment will
be a cost per sale of about $700.
If the answer is yes, and if you’re getting those clients results, you
will introduce a Tier 2, leveraged offer in addition to your Tier 3.
(Remember, when you start out with Tier 3, you don’t necessarily
Scale Your High Ticket Course Business 127
So you now have two offers. You will bump your Tier 3 offer to
$6,500 and will introduce Tier 2 at the same price where Tier 3
was initially: $3,500. At this point, it will be okay to raise your
price because you know you have a successful offer that you are
confident you can fulfill. So if you average those two together, the
average offer price will be $5,000.
Some people will say, “This is awesome. I’ve never had this much
freedom. I’ve never had this much money in the bank. I’ve never
had this much profit in my business. I just want to maintain this.”
And that is totally fine. Any further growth will cause some people
to hit a time barrier.
I often see people float around between this $30–$50K per month
mark as a one-man band, or maybe with an assistant, to help them
help free up some time.
As you come to this fork in the road, you will have that decision
that you need to make. Do you want to grow this even bigger? Or
do you want to just maintain and enjoy what you’ve built?
If you choose to move into Phase 3, you will start building out
your team. Maybe you will hire an enrollment specialist to make
those sales calls. Instantly, you will be relieved of 20 conversations
a week, and that’s a huge weight lifted off your shoulders. Maybe
you will hire a coach to help with fulfillment. Either way, these
are the things that you need to focus on to start freeing your time.
Let’s look at the math as you become the leader who is building
that small but mighty team in Phase 3.
Scale Your High Ticket Course Business 129
Your goal here will be to hit $85K per month and beyond. You’ll
need to have 13 clients every single month on a front-end rate.
You’ll need to have 44 conversations. Assuming a cost per sale of
$700, that’s going to give you an ROI of 9.75X.
These are not falsely claimed numbers. These are numbers that I
have seen our students hit. What I’m doing here is giving you a
roadmap. And if you have an offer that people want, if you get
leads coming in, and if you close 25–30% of these conversations,
this is what can happen.
You will deal with fluctuating ad costs. That’s the name of the
game. The bare minimum ROI that you should shoot for is 4X
return on ads. That gives you that cushion that you need so you
can say, “This is comfortable. I can add cost fluctuations and sur-
vive the testing period that I need to do.” Many times you’ll earn
higher than a 4X return on ad spend, but this gives you plenty of
margin to work with.
No matter your goal, I’m not here to cast judgment, but I do want to
challenge you a bit. When I first started out, I was struggling to make
consistent $10K–$20K months. If someone told me back then that I
would eventually be running a successful multi 7-figure digital agency
and coaching business, believing them would have been a stretch.
Figure out how much you need to make per month to not only
cover all of your expenses but also give, save, and invest. What will
it take for you to live a truly free and happy life?
Define your goal number and then ask yourself: What is the first
monetary milestone that I need to hit? Set monetary micro milestones
so you can validate that you’re on the right track.
As you read the next section, take some time to define your why.
Then, work through the “Perfect Day” exercise. After that, we’ll
tackle the “Lack Mentality Mindset” in Chapter 11.
They had no idea how long the course was. They had no idea what
time they had to meet. They just had to go on this Long Walk
until it ended.
This was one of the most impactful things that I have ever observed
from both a mentality and a commitment standpoint because, in
the end, four people started The Long Walk, but one dropped out
and only three people finished. Even after making it through the
ten days, that one person couldn’t finish and ended up dropping
out at the end.
All of the training leaders met the final three people at the top of
the hill and said, “Congratulations, you’re done with the training.
What was the one ‘why’ that got you up the hill?”
I could see how extremely powerful this was because their one
“why” is what kept them moving forward when they faced adver-
sity. These people got beaten. They got destroyed over the course
of 10 days. Civilians—not military personnel. But they wanted to
test their mentality and their wherewithal to figure out if they had
what it took to go through Special Operations Forces training.
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If they gave an answer that was surface level, like, “Oh, I want
prove to myself that I can do this,” they would get asked again:
No, tell me why you are here. And the people who couldn’t figure
out a clear “why” all dropped out. For the rest, when the going got
tough, that “why” was what kept them pushing forward.
Take the time now to write down the answers to these questions
and any others you can think of. Your answers are going to help
you start to really define what it is that you want to get out of your
business and out of your life.
From that point on, I’ve never worked a Friday. The business
now takes a backseat to my life, and that’s what happened when I
defined my perfect day. My “why” became clear: I want to put my
family and my lifestyle first—above the business.
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Defining your perfect day is an exercise that will help you find
your ideal life.
C hapt e r 1 1
More specifically, what hit me was to identify the trends but not
follow them.
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Are you able to take a step back and objectively identify the trends?
Is the trend to follow that loud person, that loud mentor, that
loud guru, or that loud whatever-it-is? Is that truly the right path
for you, or are they just making a lot of noise in the marketplace
to attract and mesmerize you?
4
Dennis Green, “Amazon Seizes Half of All Online Black Friday Sales in an
‘Eye-Popping’ Show of Dominance,” Business Insider, Business Insider, Novem-
ber 24, 2017, https://www.insider.com/amazon-takes-half-of-all-online-black
-friday-sales-so-far-2017-11.
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Wow. Now, I had a new goal. A million dollars in a day was pos-
sible, and now so was a billion dollars.
What Amazon did blew my mind with the possibilities for digital
marketing and online businesses.
Challenge Your Limitations 139
But wait. Let me ask you a question: How long do you think I held
on to this limiting belief of a billion dollars in 24 hours? Remem-
ber, it took four years to break the record of a million dollars, but
a billion in 24 hours? How long do you think that record lasted?
Alibaba’s single-day sales hit a new record of $25.3 billion. The previ-
ous record of a billion in 24 hours was surpassed by 25-fold.5
5
Tiffany Hsu, “Alibaba’s Singles Day Sales Hit New Record of $25.3 Billion,”
The New York Times (The New York Times, November 11, 2017), https://www.
nytimes.com/2017/11/10/business/alibaba-singles-day.html.
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When I make what appear to be lofty claims like $85K per month,
I want you to look within and evaluate your thoughts and mind-
sets for limiting beliefs.
How does your brain respond if you ask: What’s a goal I’ve never
dreamed of before? What do I currently believe is impossible?
I’ll say it again: How you think is everything. It’s time to expand
the limits of your mind and understand that what you think is
impossible is likely quite possible. Start expanding your thinking.
Think bigger!
Now, it was a great offer, and we helped him scale very, very
quickly. In fact, to my knowledge, I believe that he is the fastest
person in the ClickFunnels community to grow to $10 million.
We were able to help him go from zero to $10 million in five
months with just a very simple Power Offer and mini webinar
Challenge Your Limitations 141
funnel. I think he did his first million in less than 30 days. Now,
that’s not typical, but it did happen.
Then, there’s Nicholas, who’s in the health and fitness space, work-
ing directly with clients to hit their fitness goals. After following
my advice with Power Offers, he was able to generate 153 calls
for $3.68 each (not typical). As a result, he generated $28,898 in
revenue from just $241.80 in ads.
The pie is what we cut up for us all to share; the more we have,
the less others have, and vice-versa. The myth is that the more we
Challenge Your Limitations 143
take, the more we own, then the more we’re taking away from
somebody else.
you go into business with this mindset, it won’t serve you and will
suppress your growth and income.
Garrett points to the idea of the finite pie, where once you take
a piece of the pie, there’s much less of the total pie left. But that’s
really not the case—especially when sharing your expertise. To be
quite honest, some of the best offers and some of the best pro-
grams that I’ve seen in terms of financial success and impact have
been when we are teaching others exactly how to do what we’re
doing, holding nothing back.
Steven launched his course, and from the very first email opt-in,
he closed a deal for $10K. He has since scaled that to multiple-
five-figures per month, and he’s on his way to building his own
High Ticket Course business. His phenomenal success was a result
of thinking in terms of abundance and not scarcity.
You’re not sharing your pie or even a piece of your pie. You’re
creating more pies. You’re creating more opportunities that come
Challenge Your Limitations 145
from having more influencers and having more people in the space
who are now servicing and developing your market as a whole.
Our joint venture webinar crushed it. It was the best promotion
we’d ever done. I’d estimate we did around $30K in sales from that
promotion. When I told my ads manager about it, he said, “Well,
why don’t we try another angle and teach people how to build
their own webinar agency?” Inspired, we created new ads and new
hooks to promote this message, teaching the exact same thing, but
going after a different market by showing them how to do what I
did to build the agency.
“The rich don’t work for money, they work for assets
which make money FOR them.”
— Robert Kiyosaki
A ssets are, in any other market and lots of other niches, things
that produce revenue and a compounding return on revenue.
As an information marketer who sells your intellectual property,
you have incredible assets that require very little to produce, unlike
real estate where you have to actually purchase land, a house, a
condominium, or a commercial property.
Your most valuable assets come from the intellectual property you
have in your mind. I want you to think about how you develop
your intellectual property.
What are the core assets you need to be successful in your busi-
ness? Think about how you can build your assets in a way that
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won’t take away tons of your time because, remember, your whole
goal is to live a semi-retired lifestyle. You don’t want to be a slave
to your business. You want the business to work for you.
Travis said, “Robert Kiyosaki, from Rich Dad, Poor Dad, collected
$45 million in royalty payments between 2007 and 2010, when
real estate was tanking and investors were literally losing their own
homes. This was not rent from his real estate property, but royal-
ties from his intellectual property.”
You see, you create your intellectual property once, and then you
can rent it, sell it, and license it to collect those royalties for years,
without ever depleting it or having it depreciate.
He’s not selling what he’s doing. He sells to the aspiration of who
his audience will become once they’re able to do a handstand.
Do you think his marketing message is: “I want to show you how
to do a handstand. If I offer to show you how to do a handstand,
would you take me up on that offer?”
him and learn more about how he can help them live their best
lives.
The rich don’t work for money; they collect rent, dividends, and
royalties from their assets. Your intellectual property is an asset.
You don’t have to sell cheap shit to the masses when you can sell
valuable assets to the classes.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait until I’m 63
years old to save up $5 million, so I can pull out 4% a year
(which is what many wealthy people do, even though $200K a
year isn’t bad). I want to semi-retire NOW and enjoy my fam-
ily. That’s why I’ve not only worked to become a High Ticket
Course Expert but I also wrote the book on it so you could
take what I’ve learned, apply it, and become a semi-retired High
Ticket Course Expert, too.
Afterword
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Along with the picture, he asked, “Are you here? Is this you?”
10 years. We hugged, and I asked, “What’s going on? Why are you
guys here!?”
I wondered: What are the odds that we’re all staying at the exact same
hotel in this tiny little beach town, at the same time?
They asked, “What are you doing here? I know this is your com-
pany but had no idea you were hosting events.”
“Holy cow, I didn’t realize your business had grown so big,” said
Chris.
“Well, how long are you down here for?” they asked.
And as soon as I said that, their jaws just dropped. “Six weeks?!”
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“Well, how long are you guys here for CJ’s wedding?” I asked.
Finally, my other frat brother, Josh, said, “Yeah, I’m here for three
or four days.”
Each answer I got was between two to four days. I wasn’t sure
what to say, so I just looked around and said, “Well, that’s great.”
But … I could tell they were all curious to know how we were able
to spend so much time away from home.
Ah, Semi-Retirement
Back in 2010, when I was 23 years old, I was working as a sales
engineer for a commercial HVAC manufacturer. We sold air
distribution equipment to mechanical contractors and building
owners throughout Buffalo, NY.
At first glance, it didn’t make sense. But even though they were my
largest client, I hardly made any profit from their jobs, and they
took the most amount of my time to service.
I was ecstatic if I got more than two weeks of vacation per year.
Sadly, that was the norm. But now, I’m taking six weeks off in a
row and enjoying a fantastic lifestyle as a semi-retired professional.
If you were to ask me 10 years ago … heck, even just 5 years ago,
if I’d be able to spend over a month, every single year, down at the
beach, I’d have said you were crazy. I’d have thought that maaaaay-
be when I’m 55 or 65 years old, I could retire and be a Florida
snowbird because that’s what most people do.
They work their entire lives and save up their money, buy a condo,
and retire down south somewhere. Exactly what my parents did.
They bought a place in Florida after my dad retired. But here I am,
just a 31-year-old guy, who’s able to spend more time down in the
Sunshine State than any of my other family members.
Every spring, my family and I drive down from upstate New York
to St. Augustine Beach to escape the brutally cold winters. That
beach is now, by far, my favorite place on earth. We spend just
over a month there, enjoying the beach and the ocean, and having
fun in the sun.
The beach is where my heart is. I love looking out over the ocean while
hearing waves crash up on the beach. I love playing with my kids in the
sand. I love the heavy rains that come and cool down the humid air.
Everything about the beach resonates with who I am as a person.
I have two very young kids, Dominic and Leah. At the time of this
writing, Dominic is just about to turn four years old, and Leah
is just about to turn one. I’ve been married to my beautiful wife
Maryjo for almost nine years.
Afterword 157
I never could have imagined back then that I’d be living my dream
life by packaging and selling my intellectual property online.
Ready to take action? This is the first step in clarifying your avatar
and message. And to encourage you, I want to bribe you to do
your homework.
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“Because I’m looking for my first clients, and because I’m going
to be personally working with them as I validate and prove my
methods, my one-on-one rates will be going up substantially
higher once the course is published.
“But since this is the first stage of launching the program, I’m giv-
ing a drastically reduced rate for my direct, personal attention and
fees. Plus, I’m guaranteeing success for anyone that I work with
one-on-one.
“So, Mr. Prospect, if you’re interested in the end result, I’m going
to help you myself and personally guarantee that we get that out-
come together because I’m looking to build my portfolio of case
studies and testimonials.
“If you take action now and decide to reach your goals with me …
First, you’re going to have my full, undivided attention on a
BONUS SECTION 161
That is how you get started. By selling something before it’s ever
created. Let them know how this gives them the highest probabil-
ity of success with guaranteed results, or you’ll continue to work
with them until they have success.
Doing this will transform your call with them from a “strategy
session” to a Q&A call, and your sales conversions will drastically
increase.
Validation
You should be able to figure this out once they submit their assess-
ment form. Once you develop the right assessment form and the right
questions, you should have a pretty clear idea —yes or no—if you can
help them. If the answer is no, then you want to make sure that you
let them know right away, so you don’t waste your time on a call.
You want them to say, “Yes, I’ve watched your webinar, and I
understand it.”
Then, you want them to tell you why they like your method ver-
sus what they’ve been doing in the past. Ideally, they’ll use your
branded language. Listen for the terminologies that you’ve created
as they explain to you why they’re choosing you.
Sample Question: “If at the end of this call I feel that there’s a defi-
nite way that I can help you, and if I provide value to your situation,
are you looking to make a yes-or-no decision on this now, or are you
just looking and you want to decide a couple of weeks from now?”
Here are some rules that you should follow for accelerated results
with content marketing done the right way:
Types of Content
There are eight types of content that I focus on that have been the
biggest needle-movers in my business:
These types of content can be cycled through over and over again
in a repetitive fashion. That gets results, causing people to follow
you because they want to learn more about what you do.
BONUS SECTION 167
Ask yourself:
This is what’s going to warm up those people who have raised their
hand, who are interested, but who are not yet ready to buy.
When you’re first starting out, yes, you only focus on one channel,
one platform, one offer, and one minimum viable funnel—because
that’s all you need to get to $30K per month. But maintaining
that stability will require you to branch out.
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So what are the types of channels that really move the needle?
Ads
If you don’t own an audience first, this is where you can start.
This is what I use to amplify what’s working for my content mar-
keting. Ads are the single greatest growth tool and time-saver in
your arsenal, and they’re still relatively cheap for what you get
in return.
You can make a killing off of ads if you have a High Ticket pro-
gram. It’s still relatively cheap for what you get in return because
you’re building your audience, your assets, your offers, and your
revenue.
Email
Do not sleep on this, regardless of what you hear about open rates.
The ability to market and communicate directly to a list that you
own is invaluable. This effort alone will support you for as long as
you are in this market. This is great for internal promotions, which
is also known as free money. You can have a one-to-one relation-
ship with your audience through email. It’s extremely powerful
and excellent for leadership.
BONUS SECTION 169
Groups
When you get people to join a group and that group grows,
it doesn’t matter how big it is. People are going to say, “Wow,
look at that group!” and they’re going to follow you. It’s great
for maintaining engagement and building a bond around a
common idea. It’s not so great at getting everyone to see your
message; regardless, it’s still an excellent social-proof leadership
tool.
Social
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all of the
ever-increasing number of social media platforms all have their
pros and cons. This is dependent on where you and your cus-
tomers spend their time. You can be active on one platform and
repurpose your content for other platforms. There are several
social media scheduling and tracking tools to make cross-post-
ing easier and more effective. Do an online search for “Social
Media Posting and Scheduling Tools” to find the right scheduler
for you.
Podcasts
This is my sleeper pick and easily my absolute favorite. It has
given me the highest ROI plus enjoyment factor. It can be a
great way to create pillar content and use that to be repurposed
into other forms of content. People can listen to podcasts when
they’re traveling anywhere—on the airplane, on walks, and in the
car. Being in their ear is extremely powerful, and it’s extremely
easy to produce.
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As you progress, hire a team member to do this for you. There are
tons of talented content marketers out there who love creating
content and would be excited to do this on your behalf. This will
be one of the best team investments that you can make in your
business.
Ask yourself:
To Maryjo:
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J oel Erway is the founder of The Webinar Agency and the cre-
ator of the High Ticket Courses (HTC) Model. His methods
have generated over $50 million collectively for his clients, his
students, and his own businesses.
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