Ep #80: The Secrets to Success with 8-Figure Life Coach Corinne Crabtree

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast, episode number 80.

Welcome to The Life Coach Business Podcast, a show for coaches who are ready to up-level their business and take their impact, leadership, and results to a whole new level. If you’re ready to start taking powerful action and become the leader your business needs in order to grow and thrive, this show is for you. I’m your host, Amanda Karlstad, certified life and business coach, and entrepreneurial leadership expert. Now, let’s get down to business.

Hello and welcome, everyone. Welcome to the show. I hope you’re doing well. I am doing amazing. I am so excited to bring you today’s episode. I have a very special guest that I am bringing to you today, someone that I know many of you are familiar with. I have Corinne Crabtree on the show today and I am so thrilled to bring you this conversation.

So, for those of you who may not be familiar with Corinne, let me give you a bit of background. Corinne is a master certified life coach whose mission is to help every woman lose weight and live the exact life they want. Corinne lost 100 pounds almost 15 years ago, and ever since, she’s dedicated her life to teaching women how they can do the same.

She’s host of the wildly successful podcast Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne, which has been downloaded over 28 million times in 160 countries. She’s had over 500,000 women take her free course that teaches four basics on how to easily transform weight loss and their lives forever.

Corinne serves almost 10,000 women from all over the world every single day in her private online program called No BS Weight Loss. And that’s now grown to an eight-figure business. And here, she helps women learn how to love themselves while never quitting on themselves again.

She’s also known in the industry for giving her straight no-BS advice when it comes to losing weight while eating foods you love and never having to worry that the weight is going to come back. She’s an industry leader who is making massive waves in the weight loss coaching space and she’s an inspiration to thousands of women across the globe.

I know that I am always inspired by Corinne and the trailblazing work that she’s doing. And I think you will be too. I’m so honored and excited to bring you this conversation today. I know you’re going to love it. You’re not only going to hear some behind-the-scenes of Corinne’s eight-figure business, but you’re also going to hear, in true Corinne style, her straight talk when it comes to being the CEO of your business.

I know you’re going to love all of the wisdom that Corinne shares in this episode. So, with that, let’s go ahead and dive into the show.

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Amanda: Alright, everyone. I have a very special guest for you all today. I am so, so thrilled to welcome Corinne Crabtree to the show today. And if you don’t know Corinne, let me just start by saying she’s a very big deal. And she’s a master certified life and weight coach. She’s the founder and CEO of No BS Weight Loss, which is an eight-figure coaching business that helps thousands of women across the globe through her membership and live events. She’s a podcast host of the top-rated podcast Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne. She’s a motivational speaker, a mom, and I see her as a trailblazer in the coaching industry and such an inspiration to so many. So, with that, Corinne, welcome to the show.

Corinne: Well thank you. I almost started crying. I was like, that’s so sweet the way you said all that. So, thank you for having me.

Amanda: You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for being here. So, for those of you who may not know Corinne, I know a lot of my listeners will know Corinne that are especially within the Life Coach School community. But those of you that may not be within the community that might be new to Corinne, I think it might be good to just start out with talking about your journey into coaching and really your journey over the last several years.

And for those of you who might not be aware, Corinne does have an eight-figure coaching business. That is right; an eight-figure. She is amazing. And so, we’re going to be diving into all of that today. So, with that all, I’ll let you dive in and talk a little bit about your journey.

Corinne: Well, my journey really began with my weight loss. I graduated from high school, eloped with a douchebag, basically. Didn’t go to college. Blew my college ride. I had a full scholarship to go for nursing, and within the first semester, I quit because he played Sega more than he would work. So, somebody had to bring home the bacon. So, it was me.

So, I was doing all the jobs and then – but I had always struggled with my weight. I was bullied through high school. I had been overweight since I was nine years old. I never knew my life without a weight problem.

And so, I divorced him pretty quick, thank god. And then just worked a lot. I worked for a company, worked my way up. But I learned valuable training skills and I loved my time when I was working. I learned so many things about what was going to make me a good entrepreneur, which was just how to show up.

I worked for a company where it was like a hard-ass company to work for. I traveled all the time, like six days a week. And when I would be home on the seventh day, I would have to prep for the other six days that I was going to be traveling. So, I had to go to the office on that day to do the things.

But I was young. I didn’t have kids back then, so it’s all alright. So, I met my husband and had my son, I was the biggest I’d ever been. I was well over 250 pounds. He was a year old, and I couldn’t keep up with him. I couldn’t keep up with my husband if we would go for a walk at the mall. I was eating like trash. And I was spending my days on the couch watching my kid and basically watching my life go by.

And this one day, I just had a meltdown and just knew I was going to have to change. And I knew that I also, because I’d suffered so much through dieting my entire life, that I was not going to be able to do it like I’d always done it. I was not going to join a program and I wasn’t going to count calories. I just knew me, and I knew that I needed to make small changes. So, I did that, lost the weight. And when I did, I, for the first time in my life, had changed how I thought about myself.

It was the first time I’d ever lost weight where I was actually genuinely proud of me. And I was, like, my conversations about myself were about things I could do. And it was just such a different thing that I knew that I had figured out something that most women can’t, and I wanted to help as many women do that as I possibly could.

And so, I got out a laptop from that job that I had left. It was so busted they didn’t want it back. They were like, “This is your parting gift,” you know. Because I left them. I knew I was getting married and just I was ready to start my life with Chris. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. And so, anyway, I got that old laptop out after a couple of years of being gone. And I got on Weight Watcher message boards. Because we didn’t have Facebook and stuff back then. If you wanted to talk to other people losing weight, you had to go to Weight Watchers and get in their forums to figure that out.

So, every day, I was answering questions. And after a while, I had started a blog because I was answering questions all the time and repeating myself. and I thought, “I can help more people if I have a blog. I can just send them the link. It will already be written. And then I can help more.”

And I messaged all of them and just said, “Hey, if you want to work with me on email, PayPal me 20 bucks and me and you will chat all the time.” And people started signing up. They loved me. And I had my first clients that way.

Now, I, you know, do not advise anybody to charge $20. That’s not exactly an ace marketing plan, back in the day. But it was helpful for me to get started. It was the first time that I believed I had something of value to offer someone and we were going to work together.

And so, in that group that I was working with, there was about 20 or 30 clients, I started noticing that if I wanted to be able to help more people, I’d have to start putting them together. So, I naturally grew into a membership eventually. It was like, I started off with one-on-one, I had a time constraint problem, moved to group, had a time constraint problem there and thought, “We should just have a membership so that I can create content that everybody can just use.” And that’s kind of how I got started.

Amanda: Amazing.

Corinne: So, I never got any kind of formal training. And then, in 2015, that’s when I went to the Life Coach School. Because I was helping people mentally all the time. I had tried giving them some, you know, “Here’s meal plans that I’ve been eating, and it’s worked for me,” and I would give out workouts and stuff that I was doing to just try to help them. But 90% of what I did to these women was talk to them all day and help them think differently.

But I didn’t know what I was really doing until I went to coach training. And then once I did that, I knew that I was now going to have a system and I was going to figure out how to really teach this at a scale. And that’s when I decided I was going to really grow this business and make it into something that I could really start helping as many women as I always wanted to.

Amanda: What I love so much about your story, Corinne, is that it comes from such a deep place of service. Like, every time I hear you talk about your story and your life and just growing up – and I know we didn’t get into that here, but I’ve heard you talk about that in different shows and different interviews that you’ve had. Just the passion that you have for wanting to help your tribe, help the women. It just blows me away, what a deep place of service that comes from.

And I just think, for me, I talk all of the time about the importance of vision, the importance of coming from that place of service as the coach, whatever that looks like, whoever you’re working with, whoever your tribe is, it’s knowing what that compelling why is and making sure that you’re connected to that every day. I think that’s one of the most important keys to success actually in building a highly successful practice. Would you agree with that?

Corinne: Oh, 100%. One of the things that I talk to my team all the time about is whenever we’re making decisions, I’m like, “Please make sure you’re reading it from our women’s eyes. What is her mindset right now? Read it from her perspective. This decision we’re fixing to make, is this making her life easier or not?”

We run every decision through the filter of our customer first. Because I tell my team all the time, I don’t want something in my business or a business decision to be something that stops one woman today from being able to lose her weight. I know how fragile weight loss is. It is one of those things that we – gosh, it’s one of the hardest things in the world to overcome, and you don’t need extra roadblocks, especially if it’s even a button on the menu of our website. I aguish. I look at those things and I’m like, “Is this going to make sense for her to click? Is she going to know exactly what to do?”

Because in those moments when you’re desperate and you’re wanting help, you cannot have – I don’t know if you can cuss on your podcast…

Amanda: Go ahead.

Corinne: Bull crap happening that slows your customer down. And I don’t think it’s just in weight loss. I think it’s something we all have to think about. For me, my passion for my customer I know is why I’m so successful. Because I say no to a lot of bullshit. Because I know it won’t help my customer.

I just don’t think about me that much when it comes to all of it. And I think that’s what’s important for business owners, is that if you’re the most important thing you’re thinking about, like, “I’m scared, I’m doubting, I don’t know,” like all of that is like, get over your crap, you know.

Amanda: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. It’s so, so good. So, talk to us a little bit about, like, so 2015, you went through training. You decided, “Okay, I’m going to really create the system, take this system, and go out and help as many women as possible.” So, what did the next few years actually look like for you, to where we are today in 2021? Which by the way, congratulations on your most successful launch. You just wrapped that up. We were talking before we started recording. It was over 3000 new members into the program, which is phenomenal, like bow-down, like you’re just so baller. So, so amazing.

But what did these early – we know the real early days, but after you decided, “Okay, I’m going to build this business, I’m going to get serious about this, I’m going to take this process and I’m really going to expand this,” what did it actually take to do that?

I will tell you, at first, it took learning a lot of things that I needed to learn. I knew that I needed a course for my membership. So, I went through – I think everybody has gone through Amy Porterfield’s either digital course academy, or mine was Courses that Convert back in the day. I went through it. But I didn’t just become a course hoe, like a lot of people are just like shelf-developing all day long, where they’re like, “I buy a lot of stuff, but I don’t do it.”

I made a list of things that I knew that we were going to need, like what is the next thing the customer is going to need? And I was like, we can do this. If everybody’s learning the same thing, this will make everything easier. So, I went and I got a course on it and I did every single thing the course told me to do. I’m a big believer in, if you buy it, finish it. Then you can buy something else. But you can’t buy something else until you finish one thing.

So, I did that first. I knew that I was going to have to learn marketing. My stuff was like word of mouth and I thought, there’s got to be a way to do this. And it was about when Facebook ads were starting to be a thing. So, I went and learned how to do some Facebook ads. I got my husband involved. He’s a tech person. He had an executive job at the time. But I knew enough how to get people onto my email list, but I didn’t really know much about what I was doing.

So, I studied that and then I got him involved and had him study it. But it was a lot of, like, just looking at what’s the next thing the business needs? And every time I would do that, I would knock that out and then I’d be like, “What is the next thing?” Because the worst mistake I think that we make as business owners is we think about all the things our business needs in the beginning. It’s like, at the end of the day, it’s going to get done one at a time, no matter whether you think about all of it or not.

So, I always just get really focused on what’s the next best decision for the business? And I don’t get stuck there. I just pick something. And I always assume I’m right.

You know, there’s nothing that says Facebook ads should have been first or second. But, you know, I just picked one. So, I think that was what was helpful for me. But it was a lot of studying and implementing, studying, and implementing over and over and over again, figuring out how to do my website. I did all my website. I studied how to do a three-part video series for a funnel. And I shot it with my phone.

I did just – my first, I would say, the first two to three years as I started really scaling, I didn’t do anything fancy. I always wanted a version one out there. and lo and behold, version one made a lot of cash. I didn’t have to level it up…

Amanda: And you’re still using parts of that…

Corinne: Oh yeah, we finally have redone our websites and stuff, but the copy is pretty much the same, we just had somebody design it to where it was prettier than what I had built. But what I had built made us the first million. So, it wasn’t like I needed…

Amanda: Not bad…

Corinne: No, by the time we got to freshening up the website, it was because I was starting to look at things and wanting to sophisticate things up a little bit. But I didn’t get caught up in the pretty and all that stuff. In the beginning, I got caught up in, “We need to get something out there to see how the public responds to it first.”

Amanda: Amen, get that proof of concept. I talk about it all the time. So, with that, thanks for sharing. What do you think are the most important things for someone – because my audience I have coaches that are just starting out, some that are still in corporate jobs, wanting to transition into coaching full-time. I have others that are fully in on their business. Some of them have had some success. Some of them have even reached that first six figures.

So, if we’re looking at that first six figures, which we know is usually the hardest, because in my opinion you’re dealing – it’s not so much all the tactical stuff. It’s just the brain. It’s everything we’re dealing with from a mindset perspective that is so, so incredibly difficult, can be, right? So, what do you think are the most important things for a coach that wants to grow to that six, seven-figure level?

Corinne: It literally is going to come down to your willingness to make mistakes and how fast you’ll make them. One thing that my husband and I talk about all the time is like, we’re just going to learn real fast. And all that means is we’re going to, like, challenge ourselves to make the most amount of mistakes as possible, get things out there, see what works, see what breaks.

I will say, we have gotten so good at putting things out there just to see what’s going to break. I mean, literally, it’s a mind switch. Because most people are like sitting around with their precious trying to make sure that it’s perfect before they go out. And I’m like, I just want to get something into action, and I want to see what the problems are.

And I do this even a lot like with content and launches and things. It’s like, let’s put it out there and let’s track everything that goes wrong so we’ll know what to fix next time. I think having the mindset of just knowing things aren’t supposed to always be going right. They’re supposed to be breaking and stuff. Your ability to get into that level of action is what separates you from the pack.

Amanda: Agreed. So, something that I see a lot with coaches in general, and I’d like your insight on this, is just to that point, a lot of times we go to launch, maybe we do that first webinar or we put that first funnel out or we get on social media, we’re doing all of the things, right? And we’re not getting the return as quickly as we want. And yeah, I think you probably know where I’m going with that. So, what would you say to someone that’s maybe in that position right now, that is feeling like, “I should be further along, I should be getting results,” that does have that expectation to a degree that things should be…

Corinne: Yeah, I always just tell people, you’re just wasting your time thinking that. I mean, why not just slow yourself down even – I always love it when somebody sits around thinking about how much further they should be along. It’s like, I kind of think you might not be doing anything right now. This is not exactly helping the equation here.

But we do that to ourselves. Now, I think it’s fine when those thoughts come in. So, I think that it is very natural for all of that to happen. What’s unnatural is to believe all of that, number one. That’s the part where I’m like, that’s a no. I just don’t believe I should be further along.

What I want to believe is that I can get ahead. I know how to get where I want to go. I will figure out how to get to where I want to go. That is just a perspective shift and it’s got a different energy behind it.

Because I always think about, like, even businesses like $50 million to $100 million businesses, they’re never thinking about how much further they should be ahead. You know, that’s why they’re where they’re at. They’re always thinking about how they’re going to get there, what they need to start doing. They’re always gaining.

Well, when we’re babies, we’ve got to have the same mindset. We don’t need to be making $50 million to start believing in ourselves. You don’t even need to make 100K to start believing in yourself. But you can sit there in the face – this is the thing. I think when launches don’t go, I’ve had plenty of launches that sucked, that were costly and expensive and, like, you know.

I always, after a launch that doesn’t go well, I will tell you, I usually give myself about a good three to four hours to just wallow. I just, on purpose, be disappointed, let’s just do it. Because I don’t want to fight with my brain. Like, you want to throw a hissy fit, let’s have it. And this is your time span, and this is where you get to do it.

Amanda: We’re going to set a timer.

Corinne: Yeah, and then after that, what I do is I start going through and I look at, where were the successes? What did we do right? What did we learn this time that we know we want to be doing again? And I start off with thinking about that stuff. And then I go back through and say, “Okay, so where can we find data that helps us figure out what to actually change?”

And I will say that that is, when you asked about what’s helpful for people is so many coaches, and even on my own team we do this all the time, when we have a problem, I always ask them, “Alright, where’s the data that proves this is a problem? Show me exactly what’s happening.” If you tell me lots if people are saying, I want to know how many people are saying, out of all of our membership.

I always do that and then say, give me a solution, but I want to know what your solution is. What is it fixing? But also, what is it going to break too? Because every solution comes with its own little host of problems. And when you do that, it helps you to not be a, like, a reactor in your business, where you’re not just like, “They said this so now we’ll start doing this.” And then you create another host of problems.

And I did that, when you talked about the hard part of the first three years, it was breaking that habit. That was definitely me.

Amanda: Yeah, and I see this a lot too because it’s like you’re in such scarcity a lot of times. Like, it’s just you’re battling all of that old programming and you don’t yet have all of the evidence, right? One of my favorite quotes is “Absence of evidence isn’t absence of evidence,” which I love that. I love that idea. Even when we don’t see the evidence, we still have to remember, like you said, “Yeah, I’m maybe not at $15 million yet, but I know I have what I need to figure it out.” That doesn’t mean that that’s not going to happen.

I can’t expect to have that $15 million first before I start believing. And I see that happen a lot. So what I love that you’re talking about, because I coach my clients on this all of the time and really teach them to track their results, track the numbers, whether it is a funnel that we’re working on, whether it’s consults we’re doing, whatever that looks like in their business, and the importance of knowing your numbers. Can you talk about, like, developing and cultivating that, especially like where you’re sitting today with an eight-figure business, how important that is?

Corinne: It’s so important. And I will be really honest. This is the first year that – we’re very serious about our numbers now because we want to make sure that our decisions are based on, like, what is the next best thing to be working on, and I want proof. Early in the day, I had to go mainly by Corinne’s gut. I didn’t have a lot of numbers to prove what would be the next best thing. So, I went with my gut.

But you do want to start getting used to relying more on data than just your gut. Because I have a pretty good mindset, so I’m not sitting around doubting my business and then relying on my gut. That’s the problem when you rely on your gut is if you don’t have a strong mental mindset, you’re relying on a very leaky gut.

So, I encourage everyone to always, at any time, figure out how you can find that. I think for us, we track a lot of our funnel stuff. It’s very interesting to me the changes that we make from the moment someone sees an ad, all the way until they become a customer. The little things to change that make a big difference.

So, we run all the – it’s just basically a big spreadsheet that just tracks what’s going on each week. And we look at it and we have – I don’t know the formula. My husband does it. But there’s a formula that essentially says, you know, if you change this thing, it’s performing at this percentage, if you changed it by 1%, here’s how much an impact it would make.

It’s funny because some things are very small but make the bigger impact over something that looks like it would make a bigger impact and it doesn’t actually make that big of a difference. So, we do a lot of that. We do on the internal side, we just come up with our key things to track for our members. We’re always tracking our retention.

Every single week, we have a team meeting, and we go over how many people are, you know – I always say, if they’re here, they’re happy. So, how many happy customers do we have right now? What is that number?

And we also, we like to track how many of them are logging in. We track a lot of their behaviors now. Like, I don’t track their weight. People are always like, “Do you have a weight tracker?” It’s like, no, I track their behaviors because their behaviors are what will influence their weight.

And so, I look for, in my business, what behaviors of my customers can I start tracking that helps me be smarter about how to serve them? So, I do think numbers are important and it’s – don’t make decisions unless you have data. A really good rule is, you know, try your hardest to get it.

And a lot of times, if you have a decision and you don’t have data, decide, is this because this is really something I just need to decide, there’s not going to be data that can tell me this? Or is it because I don’t have that tracking mechanism yet and I probably should get it?

Amanda: Exactly. Good. That is so good. So, you talked a little bit about – or I’d like to talk a little bit about progress, process, and passion. This was something that you had talked about in our Life Coach School mastermind in 2019. I don’t know if you remember delivering that. I can’t believe it’s been a couple of years now, right? But you talked a lot about that and being able to tie passion into everything that you’re doing. I love that concept because I think those three key areas, making progress, the momentum that you’re building, having a process, being able to know your numbers, know what we’re actually doing here, but also infusing all of that and connecting with that passion, what are your thoughts on that?

Corinne: What I do, so, like how I put it into practice each day for my business is when I wake up in the morning, I only give myself three things that I have to get done today. And they are always the three things that I can directly tie to this is what’s best for the business. Like, we get these three things done, we are moving the needle on our goals.

I’m almost always working on something that involves retention every single day. Because I just know that if we keep our customers, they’re likely to lose weight. It’s when we go off into the nether lands is when you have problems. So, I want them with me. I don’t want them off doing any more BS diets.

So, when I do those, every single day I ask myself, how do I want to think and feel about my work today? I think about – I read my mission statement every day. It’s in the front of my business planner. I made my own custom one so that I would have, like, all the questions I know that are most important to me. I write about my clients a lot.

So, I always stay, like, for me, the purpose makes everything easier to implement. So, when I’m tying my purpose to the progress part, like these are the things we’re going to get done and here’s why it’s so important, even when we do our weekly goals and stuff, the questions that I answer are, you know, what yearly goal does this support? Like the things I’m going to work on. And why is this so important to the No BS women?

I’m constantly tying it back and when I do that, I have no problems most days showing up for my work. It’s like, I’m not going to say I don’t wake up sometimes like ugh, just like everybody else. But I can bring myself over the hump because I’m so deeply connected to the things that get on my calendar are always meaningful, they matter, I have thought through that, so it’s a lot easier to not just chuck them to the side.

And then the processes part is simply you can’t grow without processes. Anything that you’re doing over and over again, please y’all, document your stuff. One day you’re going to want to have somebody else doing it or one day, you’re going to be sick and somebody else needs to get it done. And ain’t nobody going to know how because you ain’t wrote down the process yet.

I tell my team all the time like, if I say you’re going to vacation for a week, then it better not be a shit show around here when you’re gone. You need to be able to go on vacation and us not need you. And I don’t want you checking in. Processes allow you to take your time off like a boss.

Amanda: Yes, 100%. And that’s something that I’m actually working on myself is documenting all of the internal processes with my assistant and getting that all just nice and tidy for that reason. So you really want to build – I was telling a client about this the other day is I was thinking about when I look at some of the most successful coaching businesses in the industry, I mean, you’re at the top. Huge.

When you really start to dissect their business, your business, you see there’s a machine. There’s a machine within your business. And when I look at the most successful coaches in the industry you can see that very clearly, that you don’t really get to an eight-figure level without having some level of that in your business. Would you agree with that?

Corinne: For sure. It’s crazy to me because I mean, I was the only employee for so long and I slowly started adding people. But we have like, 20 people. And I will tell you, the vast majority of them – I mean, I know them all personally, but I can’t tell you what they do day to day because we have so many good processes.

I have hired people who are now better than me at all these things. And I love that they are – they just get things done. Processes just allow you to drop the worry. I never think about our – we have a marketing team who there’s three awesome women, one’s a coach. Everybody who’s on my team except for one person has all been an obese woman and lost weight.

I’ve just always been able to hire from within. And our head of marketing, she’s lost over 100 pounds, she’s quit smoking since she’s joined, so our people are very tied to the purpose of our business. And they have gotten so many processes I couldn’t tell you what they do all day long.

All I know is my social is full, and it looks beautiful. But that’s what you want in the business. When you’re in the early stages especially, you want to think about your future self. So you start thinking about what am I doing and how can I systematize this? How can I make this not only easier for me but easier to hand off to the next person?

And that is going to give you – the moment you catch fire, the more processes and stuff you have, you’ll be able to capitalize in those moments rather than stall out because you don’t have enough help, and nobody knows how to do anything but you.

Amanda: Okay, that’s so good. So when do you think – this is going to vary I know from person to person and business to business, but when do you think from a revenue standpoint, when is it time to start getting this stuff in place? When is it time to start hiring people?

Corinne: Well, if I could go back because I didn’t hire anybody – I took way too long honestly, I took way too long. I wish that during my first – when I got to right to about 100K, I wish right before that I would have hired someone to just – like a virtual assistant. Someone to come in and schedule posts, clean out my email, do the things that I was probably spending a good hour to two hours a day administratively doing because I thought I was the only one who could.

And I didn’t need a full-time employee or anything, but I really could have used someone that would have liked to have just spent an hour or two doing some of the busy work that was on my calendar all the time. Even just like, cleaning up – I’ve always wrote all my courses. But just being able to have someone put it into a Keynote, rather than me painstakingly doing it myself.

There was just so many things that I look back on, I’m like, I could have for sure gotten rid of that way earlier than I did. Now, some stuff I’m glad I kept. I kept my website for a long time, and it really helped me figure out when it was time to have a team start doing it.

I knew functionality really well. I knew I was not good at getting it done but I knew the things it could do. And I really understood how to talk to those people, so I think it’s – look for the easiest things to let go of and start putting those things into place so that you can focus on some of the more intricate stuff because it will make you smarter when you start working with vendors or contractors later on who’s actually going to do the work at a high level, you’ll be able to talk to them.

Amanda: Yeah, agreed. I think having that knowledge is so valuable. I talk about this all of the time because we resist a lot of times not wanting to put that funnel together, not wanting to write that sales page, not wanting to learn how to run Facebook ads.

I have a lot of clients that say who can I just pay to do this? But I always stop them if it’s the first time that we’re doing this because I want them to learn. I want them to understand the mechanics. I want them to understand it for that reason so when they go and hire someone, they know what they’re looking for, number one, and they know when that person is doing it, they can also jump in and say okay yeah, this is working, I know how to read this data that I am seeing and know whether or not that person is really maximizing everything they can be.

So I always talk about the importance of yeah, it might feel like we could go quicker if we outsource that, but I think there’s so much value in the beginning to learn how to navigate those things, some of those technology pieces that we don’t want to do.

But when you’re sitting at an eight-figure space, it’s easy. You can just quickly – and right now you have people of course, you have a great team. But being able to jump in and see things and know, hey, we got to pay attention, or we got to jump in, huge. That could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. When you’re playing at that level.

Corinne: Yeah, for sure. It’s nice because when I go into team meetings, when I go into our smaller team meetings and stuff, they can tell me what is going on and my brain was doing their job at one point, and a lot of times I can see connections from my big view of things that are happening and also understanding their roles.

It can come up with ideas and solutions so fast because I have all that knowledge. I never regret any graphics I ever went to Canva and designed myself, there were some janky ones in the beginning. But all the things that I did, it also just taught me that I can figure a lot of things out.

And that’s probably the skill that I learned the most on the 100K journey was I really learned that I could solve and figure out so many different things that I never knew how to do and so that meant that at this level, when – sometimes when we have problems now, they’re big problems.

If we have – if something goes down, it could cost us 100K in a day. I mean, if you don’t really believe you can figure things out, then when those mistakes are happening, when Facebook wants to shut – we had a launch last year. Facebook ads shut us down during right before our launch.

We weren’t even able to advertize and we had to figure out, alright, if we’re not going to be able to use Facebook ads, what are we going to do? In those moments, when you’re just like, this is the only launch I’ve got planned this quarter and this is how I pay my employees, you can either go down a crappy road or you can trust you can pivot.

So I think that’s what learning that stuff and it feels like a slog only because you’re thinking like a slog, rather than I’m going to figure this out, and when I do, I’ll be better for it. And I will know if I need to hire someone.

Amanda: So good. That’s so interesting. I didn’t know that that had happened last year.

Corinne: We had two different launch that that happened. It happened the year before that too. We got – I forget why we got shut down. I had a picture of me that I think exposed too much shoulders. I sure wasn’t naked, but I was breaking the nudity rules. I was sitting there going we didn’t put no nude pics of me to try to get people to join. And they shut us down for like, four weeks right in the middle of our height of our list building for our big launch. That happened one year.

Amanda: I hope you’re all listening to this right now. Think about just the expansiveness. Four weeks and the level that you’re playing at.

Corinne: Yes. We are very much lining the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg. I should be his prized possession at this point.

Amanda: So I’m just curious, what in that moment, what does an eight-figure business owner – what do you do?

Corinne: Well, when I first heard it, of course I’m dropping in the F bomb and I’m pissed and I’m all the things. And then it’s like I always say, I have the normal human experience, but I don’t stay in the first reaction. I’m really good about noticing when this is not beneficial. Have your moment but we’ve got to figure it out. To me that’s the only option.

So in those situations, it’s a lot of, alright, so if this is not going to work and we’re not just going to sit around and belly ache, what are we going to do? And I will tell you, this is God’s honest truth and sometimes even when coaches say this crap I’m just like, ugh, what do you mean this is the best thing for me?

You just don’t want to hear that when you’re in the middle of it. The last thing you want to hear is this is all happening for me. Sit on my middle finger. This is not happening for me. But I cannot tell you every single major hurdle that we’ve ever faced, we have always come out on the other side better and stronger with some kind of new system or some kind of new way that we would have never done it had it not been for that.

COVID was such a good year for us in terms of we had always had live events, we always have two a year. And we have about 350 members come, it’s a three-day girls gone wild, mommies gone wild weekend. We’re not exactly girls anymore.

But it’s like, a lot of crying and a lot of drinking and a lot of partying. We’re doing one of the three at all times. And so when COVID hit, I had an event in April and of course everything shut down in March. And I had a decision to make. I was going to have to re-find every sold spot, which is very expensive, and I’d already paid for a lot of the things.

So this was going to be one of my personal decisions to make. And I just knew that the right thing to do was to go ahead and refund. But I also knew we couldn’t not have events. And when it started looking like we’re like, this is not going away any time soon, my husband and I decided we’re going to figure out virtual.

We had always thought that there’s no way you could replicate the in-person. It’s never going to be as special. And I said, well, what if we were going to make virtual better than an in-person? What would we be doing?

And now our virtual events bring in 2800 plus members every single – we had three of them last year. We’re getting ready to have another one in May. They are the most life changing. We never – not only do they make more money than our in-person, because in-person makes no money.

We literally do that because I love a party and I love being in front of people. It might as well be Corinne’s diva crown moments. So that’s it. But our virtual events, we don’t even make much money off of them, but we change so many more lives.

We do full on stage, there’s eight to 10 cameras in the room, we take over – it looks like Oprah came to town and decided to set up the O studio. We do it at a high level because I wanted every woman sitting in her living room to feel like I was right there with her teaching her. And that would have never happened without the problem of COVID. And they’re here to stay now.

We’re going to do hybrids. We’ve decided that we built them around the idea of every event will be virtual plus have the in-person experience, but everybody will feel just as special no matter where they’re at. So I think it’s that always remembering that when you have the problems and stuff, the first couple times it’s never fun but when you believe in yourself and you challenge yourself to figure it out and make it better, you prove to yourself there’s not really anything that can stop me.

Amanda: Yes. Don’t you think this is just – it’s literally about not giving up. That’s it. Done.

Corinne: It’s the same in weight loss. I tell people all the time, you know who loses weight? The person who doesn’t quit. I mean, the only thing that stands between someone who is now a success story and the person who doesn’t is both of them are going to make the same mistakes. It’s just one of them quits over them and one of them doesn’t. That is the only difference and it’s the same in business.

The reason why I scaled the way I have is because every little problem that came my way, I didn’t go sit on the couch and cry about it. I stayed at my computer and figured it out. That’s really the only difference.

Amanda: Agreed. So what are your thoughts on the coaching industry kind of in general? There’s a lot of people, it’s becoming a massive industry. It’s becoming more mainstream. You see so many great things, amazing things, exciting things happening. For someone coming into this industry, what’s your best advice?

Corinne: It’s really just believe in who you’re going to serve. Believe in them and think about them way more than you think about yourself. Just every time – I think that’s the big thing. Don’t get caught up in thinking there’s three other coaches doing the same thing I’m doing.

The last time I checked, there are billions of people on this planet. I never think there’s too many weight loss coaches. I mean, I’m going up against Oprah. So if you’re a confidence coach, who are you going up against? I got Oprah to deal with. But I don’t think about that stuff.

I never think about the market being saturated or there being too many. I mean, when we think about what is someone who’s running a big business thinking about all day long? They’re not thinking about how small the pool is now. I don’t ever think that.

I’m always thinking about where are my people? How do I talk to them? Who can I help today? What posts – I’m on my Instagram, what post is my customers most needing today? Because I follow people who – a lot of my clients, I follow them, I follow hashtags, what my clients are posting, and I see them in my feed all the time.

And when I see them in my feed, I know what’s going through their head. And so I’m thinking about all of that stuff. That’s what a successful person, that’s what a coach is really thinking about. They’re not sitting around thinking about there’s not enough people or the market.

The biggest thing that pisses me off is when people say like, “Well, these coaches are giving us a bad name.” It’s like, no, you’re not out there differentiating us from them. There’s the difference. Go out there and show the world what a coach really is.

Amanda: That’s powerful. That is powerful. That’s a powerful distinction right there because it is so easy, I think to get caught up because there’s so much noise. There’s so much noise, right? So I think staying in your lane, being able to, like you said, just hone in on your work.

One of the things that – one of the first exercises I take all of my clients through is we talk about we develop what is the movement that you want to create here. You have created a movement. You’ve created a movement, a tribe of thousands, women across the world.

Corinne: Yeah. It’s so crazy to me when we sent out an email yesterday that we only wanted to send to our international clients because we have our event coming up and our swag box, we send it out six weeks early just to make sure they get it because shipping international is hard.

And we have like, 600 people. It astounds – I remember when I had my first international client. I always called her my exotic client because she lived in Serbia. You just make me feel so international. We have 600 of them and it just is amazing how in this day and age, you can reach people literally anywhere on this planet.

Amanda: Yes, it’s such a privilege to be able to do this work and to have the technology and reach the people that we can reach. So, so good. What parting words do you have to say to coaches building businesses, trying to get to where you’re at, trying to maybe break that first six figures, the seven figures, eventually eight? Where do you want to leave it today?

Corinne: Just that it is possible. I mean, there’s nothing from my background that would, if you read it, would say oh yeah, I think she’s going to break barriers for women and become very successful in coaching. I was a depressive hot mess high school college dropout. I grew up broke and poor.

There’s nothing in my background that says I should be able to do what I do today. So if I can do it, I’m a real big believer in when you are feeling doubt, always think about if it’s possible for someone else, it’s possible for me too. So I always think just don’t give up on yourself, know it’s possible.

Amanda: So good. So good. Corinne, thank you so, so much for your interview today. Oh my gosh, you have such great wisdom. I’m so, so proud to be able to have you on this show and honored. So thank you so, so much for your time today.

Corinne: Thank you. I loved it.

Amanda: Okay, awesome. Thanks so much.

Hey, if you’re ready for a real breakthrough in your business and want to grow and scale your business to at least six figures or more in annual revenue, I invite you to apply for my exclusive program The Mastermind at amandakarlstadcoaching.com/the-mastermind. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Life Coach Business Podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build, grow and scale your business and accelerate your results, visit amandakarlstadcoaching.com.