From Memberships to High-Ticket: Unlocking Revenue in Your Current Business Model
What's this episode of the lionhearted ceo podcast about?
Ready to scale but can't imagine fitting in any more work or clients right now?
In this episode, we're diving into three common business models and how you can boost your revenue without creating anything new.
Here's what we're sipping on today:
The membership model: How to make it work (even if you're not a "membership person"!)
Multiple course offers: Navigating the menu without overwhelming your clients
High-ticket mastery: Balancing your premium offer with scalable options
Often, the key to growth is right there in your existing offers â it's just about getting a bit creative with how you package and present them!
Ready to roar louder in your business? Hit that subscribe button, leave a review (pretty please with a cherry on top!), and I'll see you in the next episode!
Hi! Iâm your host Sophie Griffiths, a Meta ads expert and business growth strategist.
The LionHearted CEO podcast is designed for impatiently ambitious women who are ready to scale and often juggling motherhood alongside their thriving online businesses in coaching, course creation, or service-based business.
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Read the transcript:
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
[00:00:00] Hello and a big welcome to Lionhearted CEO, the podcast for unapologetically, impatiently ambitious women who know they want to stop being the bottleneck in their business and become the Lionhearted CEO they know they are meant to be. I'm Sophie Griffiths, a tea enthusiast, marketing and Metis ad specialist and firm believer.
The chocolate should never be kept in the fridge. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday for bold, imperfect, fun approach to marketing and scaling your business without burning out every few months. We'll dive into practical strategies and have inspirational conversations that will support you to create a thriving, sustainable business that brings you joy as well as financial freedom.
Okay, let's jump in.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode.
So last week I hosted my Lionhearted CEO Mastermind Day, and it was, even if I do say so myself, a really, really incredible day. One of the things I love so much is [00:01:00] the women in the room were so incredible. There were some real similarities, some real threads between everyone.
Things like we've all pivoted quite a lot. We all like to start shiny new things a lot. We all are at a point in our business where we're ready to kind of scale and get bigger and be more visible and really kind of own our businesses. And really take control of our business and where it's going.
But one thing that was fascinating to me, anyway, is that we all had such different businesses. It wasn't, like, a cookie cutter thing of Oh I do this and I have that. This low cost offer, this group program, and this high ticket offer. And you go around the room and everyone says the same thing.
It was absolutely fascinating how different everybody's businesses were, business structures were the way they preferred to work as well. And really for me anyway, that is really what a mastermind is about.
It's about bringing incredible women together who are really open, willing to share, willing to cheer each other on, support each [00:02:00] other and share what they know, and what they've learned, and there were some incredible, little tips, and like, ah ha moments that had everybody scribbling down.
But also, accepting that, The way I do something or the way they do something Actually doesn't have to be the way someone else has to do it and we can take inspiration from each other But there isn't one way to grow an incredible business so I thought in this episode I would go through some of the main ways of scaling, the different models that I and my clients use and people in that room last week.
I want to give you some inspiration because sometimes I think we can get really blocked about, well this is how I run my business, this is what I can do, without taking on any more clients or increasing my prices, I have no extra capacity, I can't increase my revenue,
So I'd love for you to listen to this episode with an open mind. Just having a think about if anything here sparks anything or makes you think about how you maybe could do things slightly differently or introduce something potentially in the future.
The main kind of models I'm going to cover today are memberships, because [00:03:00] this is a really, really interesting one.
Having just one core, high ticket offer and then having more of, an ascension model, So going from like low ticket to mid ticket, high ticket. So you have more people can go through this like sequence of ways to work with you.
so I'm gonna start with memberships. Because this is a fascinating one. Now, what I should probably say is that I started working for myself nearly eight years ago now, and I would say in that time I have probably tried all of these different models.
It's taken me a really, really long time to understand that dynamic between growing a business, taking other people's advice, using strategies, and also understanding my own strengths, preferences, energy and how I want to run my own business. So I have tried. A lot of different things, not just in this business, but in previous businesses as well.
I have had memberships, I've created directories for women's health and wellness experts. I have done accelerator programs, I've done high ticket offers, I've done group offers, I've [00:04:00] done evergreen group offers, I've done launch group offers, I've done passive courses.
I've done affiliates. I've done licensing a product. I mean, there is a lot that I've done. There's probably not that many that I haven't done. . And I've reflected a lot over the years on why some work for me and why some don't. And I have to really keep that front of mind because there's one thing to know what. you want to do. But when you know that maybe a model is really what your clients want or your customers want, you have to really balance that out.
So we're going to start with memberships because an example for me is exactly this. So I struggle with memberships. really struggle with memberships. And the reason why I struggle with memberships is because I like things to have an end date. My energy, my focus, I'm a very much a starter, not very good at finishing, finisher.
Which means that even when I have systems and team in place to make sure that something is consistently delivered, I find it challenging to repeat myself, to go over the same thing all the time, To kind of [00:05:00] maintain that initial energy. I love the launch. I love the initial bit.
I don't like it when it doesn't have an end date on it. For me, for that reason, group programs are better. Working with clients training wise. But what is fascinating to me anyway, is that also at play here, is the fact that I over deliver.
And I have found this with an evergreen group program actually, as well as a membership that I used to run, is that I really struggled to work out where the boundaries were how I could deliver often what people were looking for, in a way that didn't feel really high touch and really exhausting to me.
I ended up running my sort of evergreen group program as if it was almost one to one support. And that really isn't sustainable because you're not sort of charging the right price. And it's the same thing with a membership, you feel like you have to deliver a lot if you want to keep people engaged and interested and coming back all the time.
That for me is that combination of those two things. I like it when something has an end date and I'm not so good when it's a lower ticket offer. Now one area where I don't find this a challenge is [00:06:00] my long term consultancy clients and my high ticket more long term offers like my Mastermind and other kind of group programs that I've had.
So it's really interesting for me that dynamic, in the room last week, there were a few people who had memberships, like long term, I've been running it for like over three years, one of them what I find frustrating and difficult about membership is what they absolutely love.
They love the long term relationship building, they love seeing people's journey over the years, they love having like the same people's faces on the calls every week, they love being able to like really impact someone's business over time and I think what's incredible is that that strategy has worked so well for them.
Now what we were talking about yesterday was When you have a membership, A, it's really audience hungry. It's really something that you need to have a think about, do I have the audience to be able to start a membership and then grow it generally speaking memberships are lower ticket and therefore if you want to have a membership either It needs to [00:07:00] be a really big focus of your business and you have to really Go for the numbers it has to be one of maybe a few offers that yes brings in income but isn't your main source of income all the time And you have to have strategies and marketing in place so that you are consistently bringing new people in because naturally there will be a churn, people will leave so you need to make sure you're replacing them and obviously getting more people if you want to grow it as well.
That's probably more of the marketing downside of having a membership. Now some of the things we were talking about is, okay, if I've got a membership, I don't necessarily want to add another offer to my world, but how can I scale and grow my income without adding like any additional time or having to find a lot more people?
Obviously with membership, the more people you add, the more you earn. However, we were looking at, how can we take this one membership that is set up, that's working really nicely does really well, and Is there any ways that we can generate some additional revenue without having to do much differently?
Now, for one of them, there is a course in [00:08:00] the membership. We talked a lot about, right, can we take that course out? How do you make sure that that's not confusing? Is it that the course then goes into the membership? Do people have to have done the course?
Is the membership still the main thing and we sell the course? The course separately. So I think that's really interesting. If you've got a defined course within the membership And you sort of know that there's an opportunity there to sell that to people who actually just don't like memberships, a bit like me, I have a similar feeling about memberships being part of memberships as I do to running them myself, I struggle with them because I struggle to kind of engage over longer periods of time without like a defined end date, so is there an opportunity to sell that course to people that don't really want the membership,
is that a course where you do it maybe live a few times a year? Or launch the course a few times a year? Or have the opportunity to buy the course in your email welcome sequence if someone hasn't bought the membership? There's lots of ways you can do it. but that was one way that I thought was really interesting.
The content's there, the, the content we know it's really good. We know it works. And actually it's more about the support model around it in terms of the of the membership in the [00:09:00] community that maybe means people aren't accessing the course rather than the content itself. So I thought that was really interesting.
I also have clients who run memberships and one way they've increased their revenue is by adding on additional tiers.
Now this isn't like revolutionary, but I think what's really interesting is that one of my clients actually her higher tier is her main offering. And then there is a lower level tier that people can sort of downgrade to. Now normally, we've kind of sell the cheapest option and then get people to upgrade.
But what I think was really fascinating about the strategy she's used is that actually when she looked at her tiers, she realized that The people coming in that were getting the most from the membership were people who had a bit more experience, were a little bit more advanced in her niche.
She realized there were some people who were maybe beginning, who were just finding the whole thing a little bit overwhelming. There was actually too much content for them, a lot of the content was too advanced. But they loved the community, and they loved being able to ask questions, and they loved being able to be part of it.
Instead of keeping the rate as it was, and then [00:10:00] introducing a higher rate for those who advanced, she actually filled the gap for the beginners. She actually introduced a lower rate. She stripped out a lot of the content that she knew they weren't using,
it would be too advanced for them and she had a lower rate that she brought in and that's done incredibly well. So when she markets it organically and does launches, she always leads with a higher price rate because she knows most of our audience are more advanced.
However, what we realized with the ads is that when we were bringing people in, the lead magnet is actually aimed more towards beginners. What we realized was that the funnel there for the beginners was much more about that lower rate of the membership. So now we have an entire funnel where we bring people in on this lead magnet, they have the opportunity to buy a little upsell, like a little taster course, and then we offer them the lower rate in the membership.
It's relatively new, but it's working really well. We turned on her lead ad campaign a couple of days ago when she's getting leads at 50 PA lead, which is incredible. So I can't wait to see how that maps out. But [00:11:00] another, as an example of where your membership can actually be dual focus.
In your organic content you can be talking to those people who are further on and then have a very specific funnel for those people who come in through ads, knowing that they're beginners, it also allows you to be a lot more specific about what you offer them, how you speak to them in the emails it's really, really great to have that distinction.
So those are kind of a few examples, if you have a membership, How you could potentially get more people in it or get more revenue without actually you having to do any more work. It's using the structure, the content, everything you've already got there.
So the next model I wanted to talk about was having lots of small courses for people to choose from. What was fascinating when we went round and everyone kind of noted down their different offers was the difference.
Some people have like one offer, other people were like, oh, okay, I've got 12. Now, often they're not being sold all the time. so often there's like a core high ticket thing. And maybe there's a couple of smaller things that sell.
And then there's a lot of the lower ticket stuff. Now, it doesn't have to be like nine pounds, 11 pounds, we could be talking like, [00:12:00] 97 or 197 or even some of them are like 497, but they're things that maybe they're available and
people can buy them anytime, and there doesn't need to be a huge amount of input in terms of the selling process. Now I find this model really fascinating, because for some people it works incredibly well. Giving their potential clients a lot of choice works really well.
It's almost like a menu to choose from. The other side of that is that it can be quite confusing, too many options is not always a good thing, and actually, if you don't have the volume of people coming through and into your world, what you can do is have a lot of courses there that have hardly anybody buying them at all.
And it's incredibly hard to sell a lot of different things organically, because inevitably you're usually trying to sell one main higher ticket thing. If you've got like eight different offers that you're trying to sell all the time, it's very, very hard to get people on board, help them understand what it is and whether it's for them.
So there's a few different strategies we were talking about here. The [00:13:00] first one is can you bundle them up? Is there an opportunity, so you have maybe say three different courses that all cover very specific things but actually have an overarching goal or transformation
so it might be, let's say you want to Get sales from Instagram, and one of the courses is on stories that sell, one of the courses is on, DM conversion and the other one is on something like hooks that sell on your grid.
Actually, all three of those courses are really, really relevant to people who want to sell on Instagram. So you could bundle that up, and then obviously it makes it much easier to sell that one thing that's actually three different courses than it is to sell all three of those things individually.
The other thing would be to look at really clearer pathways. What we did at the mastermind day was we started with the the goal offer. Where do we want people to buy? We started there and then we kind of worked our way backwards through then what do we want people to see before they get to the sales page and then Back to then like the lead magnet, what does that need to be about to bring the right people in to help them see the right organic content.
Then [00:14:00] once they get to the goal offer, the offer you want to sell, they're kind of ready and primed to buy. When you have a lot of offers it can be hard to work out, right well if I want to get them to this offer but actually I've got like eight things I could sell them before they get to that offer of a slightly lower value you're putting a lot of confusion, other options in their way before they get to that goal offer.
Generally what I'd be saying is you have one goal offer and potentially some very low ticket things before it. I'm talking like nine pounds or 27 pounds, that sort of level. And then you have your sort of mid ticket, like for me, I've got my audience builder course, which is 197.
Now I haven't actually got any offers before that at the moment, but I am building a a 27 pound offer. That will go in just before that. But if you've got loads of courses it can be a bit confusing. So then what we talked about was we could have multiple goal offers, like different funnels working.
Of these , 11 courses that you've got, which may be three? are our key ones, which ones can work maybe the step before and which ones actually [00:15:00] we just have to put to the side. Sometimes we create courses and we think they fill a gap and they probably undoubtedly do.
However, sometimes you just have to prioritise getting a few things working first and then being able to bring those courses back in or sell them to people who you know need them or more organically just because you've created a course doesn't mean it has to feature in a funnel or has to be available for people to buy or you have to promote it.
It's about getting super, super clear on what it is that you want to sell and then working backwards, like, okay, well, how does that flow through into my organic content and what lead magnet would I need to then sell that? Now, it could be that your three kind of goal offers have similar organic content And the lead magnet would be similar.
So it could be that you just test out the three different funnels. If I bought someone in on this lead magnet how many sales do I get? If I bring someone in on this lead magnet, how many sales do I get? So you can kind of test that over time. And really what came through yesterday was, That this isn't a quick fix.
This isn't going to be [00:16:00] me saying like, Oh yeah, okay. That's your offer. Take those all out. This is your content. This is your lead magnet. Off you go. Here's the ads. This is a case of testing, refining and really kind of working out what it is that your clients want and what's the easiest to sell.
So if you have got a lot of different offers rumbling around and you're like, I don't really know where to start with actually selling them the opportunity here for you is to actually sell those courses you've already created that just aren't getting the sales at the moment because you don't have the people coming through your funnel.
My challenge to you would be to pick one of those courses that's around the like 200 mark. If you've got any that are like 9 or 27, you could absolutely put that in the funnel as well. Like you could kind of sell that in your emails or in the lead magnet.
But just pick one and start working out, who is the person that is going to buy this one course, and get super specific, Think about what kind of content you'd want to create so that if they saw it, they would then want to buy that course.
Think about what kind of lead magnet you'd need for the right person to come [00:17:00] in, see, and kind of be primed by that specific offer. Just really think about one, just try and zone out everything else, because the more you have, the harder it is to zone it all out, because you're like, oh, but I could do that.
Oh, I could offer that in the welcome sequence. Oh, they could come through and I could offer them this course and then this course. If they didn't do that course, I could offer them this. Just try and think about if I just was focused solely on selling this one 200 course, what would I do?
And how would I do it? And that is what's going to get you to the consistent sales. That's what's going to increase your revenue with the course you've already created. Rather than trying to sell a lot of different things and potentially confusing people. That would be my advice to you. If you've got a lot of different stuff going on, just sell one thing and start generating revenue there.
And then you can add on additional funnels. Not additional courses to the current funnel, additional funnels within the business. And then the third one I wanted to talk about was people who have like one high ticket offer. There's a few people in the room who like, I just work with clients [00:18:00] one to one.
But I know I am leaving money on the table because there are so many people in my world, I've got an email list of nearly 10, 000 people and I know that so many of them would buy something from me if I had something that wasn't just my high ticket.
Either they're just not ready for high ticket or they don't want the specific offer. I know I'm leaving so much money on the table, but I can't work out how to continue bringing leads in for my high ticket offer and sell a lower ticket offer or something in between.
So that people have something either on their way towards High Ticket or just instead of High Ticket. And this one is a really interesting one because
There are some people who just have one high ticket offer. And the benefits to this are, all roads lead to that offer. You're marketing to one single person all the time. You only have one thing to talk about. Literally, you can just talk about it over and over again, you don't have to worry about fitting in hundreds of different offers
but, as I've just kind of mentioned, the downside is, there's probably a lot of people in your audience that would buy something [00:19:00] from you if you had another offer And it's like how can you marry those two up by not diverting your attention and confusing people and taking them off on a different track rather than towards your high ticket whilst also giving them opportunities to buy from you with things that will help them along the way because there will be some people in your audience who will never buy your high ticket offer but you could really help.
What we talked about here was Either pulling out small elements of your high ticket offer that could be sold for people who are earlier on in their journey that could maybe almost prep them and prime them towards the high ticket offer. Whether that's like a module or a lesson or resources that you have, how could you take something that you've already got.
You might have created other courses, you might have some things that you could use. And absolutely, you could use those as well.
And then the question comes to like, okay, so now I've got what it is that I'm going to sell, I feel comfortable with that. How do I sell it? Because a lot of the people I work with, they're running this high ticket one to one, and they're running ads. And they're bringing people [00:20:00] in and those people are end up buying high ticket.
They are more than covering that ad cost with the people who are coming in high ticket. So they're nervous about turning those ads off. Because they obviously still want those people, but they're not sure how to then incorporate the lower ticket offers to sell to the people that are also coming in.
There's a few different ways you can do this. The first thing is you can sell that in the emails. At the moment, they're coming in and you've got the emails and everything is pointing towards the high ticket offer. You can sell more in the emails either before you get to the high ticket offer, or once you've kind of primed the high ticket offer, if they haven't taken any action,
you can sell them the lower ticket offer from there. The other way of doing it is having two funnels. Having a lead magnet that leads directly and really specifically to a lower ticket offer versus having a lead magnet that leads really directly and specifically to higher ticket. And often this can be differentiated between where someone is in their journey, maybe how experienced they are how much money they're looking to earn.
There's a lot of different ways that you can differentiate whether someone is [00:21:00] not. And it really depends on what you do. But again, you've got your high ticket, you've got the content there, you've got the resources.
You don't have to do anything differently or add anything or create anything. All you need to do is pull it out and potentially create a lead magnet that goes directly to those things and get really specific and clear. So again, you're not adding a whole new offer and zoom calls and everything To your world and to like the amount of time that you're working.
Because ultimately, this is the kind of offer that you should be able to set up with ads and it should sell through the ads and email and organic content channels. So you're not having to kind of get involved too much with the actual selling of it.
So in summary, I think the three models I talked about today, so the memberships, having lots and lots of small offers, and then having the one high ticket offer.
I think the main theme that runs between those is that There's always opportunities to add additional revenue to a model that you already have. So if you've got a model and it's working really well for you, and you're thinking like, yeah, I've got my membership, it's working really well, but it's not generating enough revenue I'm going to have to add a [00:22:00] course, or I'm going to have to add one to one, or I'm going to have to add a whole nother modality, way of working with you.
Actually, just take a moment and think like, do I have to, Or can I generate additional revenue with something that I already have? And it's a little bit like, when we talk about selling to your current clients rather than constantly trying to find new clients.
It's a little bit like that. There's no need to create new stuff all the time for the sake of it, especially if it's revenue driven, when actually you've got probably lots of things that you could just add to. An example in my business is the audience builder course.
That's sold through a funnel with ads. But also I have affiliates selling it as well and I also license it out to coaches who can use it as like an ads module. If they have a wider group program and they know their clients are going to want to grow their audience using ads, but they don't want particularly teach them that or answer their questions, they can pay to use my audience builder course as part of their group program.
That's three ways that I'm generating revenue with the audience builder course in terms of how it's [00:23:00] sold. I also have the opportunity to have group calls. I have fortnightly group coaching calls so people can upgrade to that and you can also work with me intensively over 30 days as well if you want more hands on support.
There are six different ways that that audience builder course is being used there the core course stays there in the central and then none of the other elements really have a huge impact on my day to day once it's all set up and running.
That's a way of thinking about like I've got this one course, how can I make the most of it? I don't necessarily have to add a lot of additional courses or new ways of working with me to generate more revenue. I hope that's been useful and given you a little bit of food for thought, even if you don't have any of those business models I've talked about today, with the model that you're using, how are there little ways that you could
use what you already have to add either additional revenue or ways of people buying from you. Thanks so much and I will see you later in the week.
Thank you so much for listening today. Before you go, if this episode struck record with you, I'd be over the moon. If you could take a moment to rate, subscribe, and leave a [00:24:00] review, your words not only brighten up my day, but they are also the magic that helps others discover this lion hearted community.
Again, thank you so much and I will see you next week.
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