Why I'm Radically Changing My Business Model for 2025 (And Maybe You Should Too)

[00:03] online business has radically shifted over this past year or so especially with all of these new AI tools that suddenly flooded the market and enabled people to flood the market with free content if you are an infopreneur if

[00:19] you're an educator even if you're a coach or consultant you might be worried that now there will be so much competition with content online that people won't have a reason to buy your educational products so in that last

[00:34] video I shared five different tactics that course creators and coaches can use to adjust their product and their marketing strategies so that they can stay relevant so that they can keep their businesses growing and most

[00:48] importantly so that they can stay profitable and even grow their businesses well in today's video what I want to do is share with you exactly how I Am shifting my business strategy for this coming year Shifting the products

[01:04] that I'm selling and how I'm selling them so that we can keep the business growing keep the profits up and stay competitive and relevant so I hope that this gives you some like real life application for how you might use some

[01:17] and it might be interesting to see behind the scenes in mine as well so there are three main shifts that I am going to be making to my business strategy this year and the first one is a shift sh away from signature product

[01:32] a shift sh away from signature product offers to some more variety more fresh new offers now to explain what I mean by this I got to give you a little bit of backstory so when I got started with my online business what is now about 7

[01:44] years ago for the first few years I was just figuring out what I wanted to sell how I wanted to help people and what people wanted so I was creating and launching new offers every couple of months now after a couple of years of

[01:58] this as you can imagine on had a lot of different offers and it was kind of chaotic but there was a method to the madness I was trying to find just a few really good offers I wasn't trying to create a ton of different offers so

[02:11] after those first couple of years I started working on pairing down the list of different products that I was selling again trying to figure out what the best combination and the smallest number of products that I could sell would be and

[02:23] was the fact that a lot of my peers and mentors and competitors in this online business indust like to focus on selling just one or two or maybe three different signature offers and there is a lot of value and

[02:38] Truth to the idea that selling less offers is easier and that you don't need to sell a lot of different offers to scale your business to six or seven figures or even past that point however here's been my experience with selling

[02:52] less offers I found that in years when my business had more frequent launches and promotions we made more money and the years when we had fewer promotions we made less money and it's been very consistent that way but once I had

[03:07] paired my list of products down to just four different products in order to sell very frequently at all I had to launch those same products several times each year some of them are set up on automated Evergreen funnels which is

[03:21] great and it creates passive income and it works beautifully for online courses but it doesn't work very well for higher ticket group coaching type of programs which are some of the programs that do generate some of the most Revenue in my

[03:35] business and some of the products that I enjoy running the very most so I found myself having to launch these products three times a year each to be able to do a promotion every month which is the frequency that I found makes my business

[03:48] the most money and that honestly just wasn't that fun for me it felt stale and dry to have to repeat the same words so many times throughout the year didn't

[04:00] feel fresh or fun or new or exciting and I didn't feel like I was serving my customers as well as I could if I had been more interested and engaged with what was happening so this past year what we tried was we just cut down the

[04:14] launched each of those four signature products one time each that was way easier from the promotion side but it didn't make as much money as when we had done a promotion every month of the year so the first big shift that I'm making

[04:27] in my business for 2025 is is to bring back releasing new fresh offers on the regular now I'm going to give credit where credit is due here I initially got this idea from Reading Alex Herm Mai's book $100 million offers if you haven't

[04:43] already read that book it is a great one a great primer for learning how to sell offers online or off just how to create really compelling offers hormi and I definitely part ways when it comes to some values and work ethics and things

[04:58] like that but when it comes to marketing and sales strategy he is spoton anyway in his book $100 million offers he talks about how in his past experience with the gyms and fitness industry they would have this problem where they were

[05:13] selling the same thing over and over again basically lose fat gain muscle but if they just kept marketing that exact same thing over and over again the market would become desensitized to it and would ignore the offer and would

[05:26] slowly stop buying so what they would do to counter this was to launch new fresh to counter this was to launch new fresh offers very regularly and the offers were just repackaging the same thing in different ways to make it appeal to

[05:40] different people and for different reasons so for example they might do like a six we muscle building program or an 8we summer shred and so these two different things might appeal to different Target markets and they can

[05:53] different promotion for each and so it gets people to pay attention and when I read this it sounded so appealing to me because I am someone who really likes spontaneity and new things and

[06:06] Innovation and so the idea of launching new fresh programs on a regular basis sounds really fun to me so I'm really looking forward to leaning into that strategy this year now I want to clarify here that we are definitely not saying

[06:20] goodbye to our signature programs we have built those programs over the past several years we've had hundreds of students go through each of them there is so much proof that those processes work and they've taken on lives of their

[06:34] sell today being Creator Fast Track startup Society validate and 100K Mastermind they're almost each their own business they're certainly their own program and they've got loyal fans and

[06:48] take them in the future and we love running those programs but it's definitely going to be best for my team myself and our customers if we can come at each cohort who goes through the program with fresh energy and lots of it

[07:04] might come as a surprise to some of you because I know you probably know that I'm a big proponent of using automated funnels to sell pre-recorded online courses to generate passive income in your business and so I want to start out

[07:19] by saying that I am not saying goodbye to that strategy that still is a huge Revenue contributor in my business and it's passive income so there is funnels off or to shut down those programs I know people still want to buy

[07:35] them but the shift that I'm going to be making is to focus on and prioritize making is to focus on and prioritize live interactive programs over canned online courses and the reason for this is with all this free information this

[07:50] these days people are way less interested in paying money for information but they're still very interested in paying for the help that they need and support and interaction

[08:03] and they are valuing that more than ever so just as a little example of this when we have launched our live programs over the past few years I've noticed this sticking point that a lot of people have for my perspective the main value of the

[08:17] program is the curriculum because even when it is a live interactive program I always create a very comprehensive curriculum to go with it so everyone is working through the same thing and can learn at their own pace and on their own

[08:32] time and they have that material to reference and all of that right like I want there to be Source material for them to learn from and so to me that's the main value and then the coaching is important as well the fact that they can

[08:46] answered and the part that I've been considering to be the least important is the weekly group coaching sessions which is something that we have included with a lot of our programs but what I've noticed is that those and specifically

[09:00] the schedule of those is a sticking point for a lot of customers whenever we're promoting a new program people are always asking us when are the live calendar and we'll say okay they're Tuesdays at 9:00 and sometimes people

[09:13] will say oh great that works for me and other times they say h that's not going to work for me I guess I can't sign up and to me that's always been surprising because I'm like well you still can get the one-on-one coaching component so you

[09:26] whenever you need and you still can sessions if you want to find out what happened there but I realized that people actually love those live classes and so we've decided to not only focus

[09:40] on mostly doing live interactive programs but lead with the schedule of the group sessions as one of the main features now just to be clear here I don't mean that that is the main thing that we'll lead with people choose to

[09:55] buy products because of the outcome the product will get them the results the will positively affect their lives but after they decide that they want to buy the product their left brain steps in and says whoa slow down here is this

[10:09] really a good decision and the left brain wants the facts and so this is why it is important to mention how many videos your course includes or when those live sessions happen or how many reviews you've gotten or different

[10:24] facts of how good is this product and what do you really get and in the past when it came to those features I focused mostly on the curriculum how really teach you what you need to know Etc but what I've realized is that at

[10:39] this point people are so overwhelmed with so much information that they aren't valuing that very highly and so they're really just wondering is this class at a time that I will be able to fit into my schedule and that makes me

[10:52] classes sure first of all they think about like is this a class I need to but after that they're really looking at the schedule and just trying to figure out what classes can work together in their schedule and that's at the end of

[11:06] the day what causes them to choose to sign over this class over that class so going into 2025 a shift we're going to make is not only to focus on doing mostly live interactive programs but to lead with the specific day in time so

[11:19] for example we might run a cohort of 100K Mastermind that is at Tuesdays at 9:00 and then we can run another cohort of 100K Mastermind or a different of 100K Mastermind or a different program that's at Wednesdays at 300 p.m.

[11:32] information we can hand it over to their left brain to use as a piece of evidence to justify the purchase to the right brain that already wants to sign up okay so now let's talk about the third big change that I'm making in my business

[11:46] this year which is a shift away from educational product now a little bit of backstory on this one when I got started with my online business I was actually doing marketing services for clients not selling educational products I was was

[11:59] building their websites and running their ads online which was fun but it didn't seem like the work that I could really do the best my history is in education I was a music teacher for over 12 years and that was work that I loved

[12:15] I ran a big Music School here in the wamit valley it was a lot of fun but what I didn't like was that I didn't get to set my hours at all I had to work when the kids are available for the lessons and So eventually I sold that

[12:28] business business but what I did love about it was I loved the teaching teaching is something that comes really naturally to me I love thinking about how to explain things to people in ways that will be really easy for them to

[12:41] understand and Implement and so when it came to my online marketing business running into where sometimes I was frustrated because I couldn't get results for my clients because of fundamental problems in their business

[12:55] marketing messages or with their websites and I was running ads for them or maybe they were quite frankly selling a product that there just wasn't demand for and it was frustrating to me because I really wanted to get them good results

[13:08] but they didn't really understand what the problem was since they didn't have their hands on marketing the business and so they didn't see where these issues were coming up and so I wanted to teach them how to Market their

[13:22] businesses for themselves so they could have their hands on it they could see those problem so I made that shift about 7 years ago to the educational side of the online business world and I've never looked back until this year and what

[13:37] happened this year that gave me a bit of a pause and caused me to re-evaluate my business strategy is the onset of all of these AI tools now there's so much content and information out there that it just doesn't make that much sense for

[13:52] people to pay for information anymore now don't get me wrong there's a very real and good case to be made for buying an online course still to this day because you're buying a complete system steps 1 through 10 to get you from where

[14:05] you are now to where you want to go and if it's a well- done course or coaching program that can help you so much more than free videos or podcasts or certainly aiid articles but the thing is that a lot of people at this point are

[14:19] feeling overwhelmed by how much content and information there is and they feel get started but then they're kind of lost and overwhelmed from there and so what they really want and need is some help along the way they need some of the

[14:34] guidance and someone actually coming alongside them and so I am really leaning into the side of online business where we are selling done for you where we are selling done for you resources and tools to help people do

[14:49] people follow the steps and make it easier for them now with my educational products I have always tried to include as many done for you resources as I can example if I'm teaching someone how to build an automated sales funnel and they

[15:05] need to write some emails then I have written for example template emails that they can use to fill in the blanks to write their own emails I've created outlines for them to use so I just wanted to do as much of the work for

[15:19] them as possible to save them that time and effort so the shift that I'm making this coming year is to instead of just selling those done for you resources as bonuses we are setting up a digital product shop where people can directly

[15:33] buy those resources they can buy the email templates they can buy the sales page templates they can buy the slide decks they can buy the Privacy policies and the disclaimers for their websites all of the different assets the content

[15:47] that you need to run an online business and Market an online business we're creating templates and swipe copy and resources for people to use so that they instantly or at least have a big

[16:00] shortcut it's going to save them a ton of time and energy and I'm so excited about giving people a big boost up now from a business strategy standpoint the reason we're making the shift is because this is the sort of product that people

[16:14] are more interested in buying these days there's also a lot less competition with digital products in a lot of Industries than there is with online courses now they're at a lower price point so there's not as much potential profit to

[16:28] be made with each individual purchase but if you run your promotions right you can potentially get people to buy a whole bunch of different products at the same time increase that average order value and acquire a customer in the

[16:42] process because the thing is that generally less trust is needed to buy a tangible asset than to buy an educational product okay that was kind of wordy and nerdy sounding but in short somebody will be more ready and willing

[16:58] to buy something where they can easily see the value of it rather than a product that has more of a potential theoretical type value like an online something in the future but you don't know for sure if you're really going to

[17:13] get that outcome so by selling these done for you resources these digital products we're hoping that we can more easily acquire more customers and it's always easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to someone

[17:26] who's never bought from you before because once someone has bought from you and they have a lot more trust for you as I mentioned earlier I'm not saying goodbye to those pre-recorded courses anytime soon because they're so

[17:39] generate passive income so if you want to see behind the scenes in my business and exactly how I am continuing to successfully sell online courses with automated funnels then head to Gillian perkins.com

[17:54] breakdown to get access to that free training where I'll walk you step step by step through one of my most profitable funnels all right now next up definitely want to watch that video from last month where I break down exactly

[18:09] how online business has changed over this past year and five different tactics you can use to make sure that your business keeps growing and stays your business keeps growing and stays profitable