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The last time you heard from Hilary Krueger on the Goal Digger Podcast, she was working with her husband to create a powerful online course that helped parents reduce the chaos and increase the joy of parenting. Their course was a big success, but Hilary had so much more to teach outside of that topic.
Now, Hilary is a coach, not a fancy coach she says, but a coach who helps people show up as their authentic selves to sell out their offers and programs. I’ve known Hilary for years but got close with her work after she walked through a course that I was also taking, and it’s been a real treat seeing how her business and life has transitioned in the last few years.
This episode is two-fold! In the beginning it’s Hilary’s time to teach us all the secrets to just getting started, and then she turns the tables on me as we talk scaling and next steps in her coaching business.
Hilary’s Entrepreneurial Endeavors
When we last heard from Hilary, she was working alongside her husband on a business they created to support his interests, passions, and superpowers. Hilary was the back-end support for the course and programs they launched together. She was the one telling him what to post, when to post it, and how to show up online so they could reach their sales goals.
They were successful, but her husband ultimately decided he wasn’t the online guy. She told me, “Backstory is that we sold our house. We took a bet on ourselves. We didn’t even have a business yet. And we literally grew it from zero to six figures in 10 months and he, all of the sudden, doesn’t want to do it anymore.”
Hilary loved the whole experience and she wanted to keep helping and serving others through courses and programs. Hilary decided she would do it on her own, with a new focus, built on her own, interests, passions, and superpowers. Now, Hilary is a “master at messaging and queen of simplifying” and that’s how she helps her students.
“I really help people work through their roadblocks in their business, to get started in formulating how to do it without over-complicating it and really simplifying it,” she explained.
Help with Sales Funnels
Hilary told me that while her offers sell organically, without paid ads or a ton of promo, she’s not sure where to take that next. She asked how to set up and market her courses and other offers into a funnel to begin scaling what’s already working.
For me, I didn’t get good at sales funnel strategy until I was pregnant with Coco. Before that, I didn’t have a reason to automate to that degree. It came down to the question: How are we going to ensure that the way we’re serving and showing up actually makes an impact, but also can help make income? A funnel was the answer.
My first step was ranking the offers I had at the time in order of importance as it related to the income, impact, and how they aligned with what I valued the most in my life at that point. Then, I built out a six month funnel of the key programs based on each next step a student could take after experiencing success with the step before it.
A lot of times, people build that value ladder based on lowest price offer to highest price offer, but that doesn’t always make sense because if you think about someone’s journey, they might need more one-on-one support to implement something they learned in the beginning or in a program that you teach. I broke my six-month funnel into three sections.
Hit play to hear how my six-month funnel is set up, right down to how many emails I send in different phases.
Things You Should Automate
Hilary also asked about the things I chose to automate so that I could be present with Coco when she was born and during the newborn phase. I love talking about automation, and I have so many ideas for things you can automate in your business.
First, if you’re having success with organic traffic and organic sales, it might be the right next step to look at traffic that comes from paid ads. Running ads to free content and freebies is one of my favorite tactics, because they convert at a much lower price and it gets that person into your funnel so you can begin to serve them before you ever ask for their purchase.
When you can have a few ads running where your email list is growing — even just like a three part funnel setup that you knew led to some sort of offer, even just running ads to a freebie and dropping people into that sequence is a great way to start automating and generating true passive income.
From 6 to 7 Figures
Hilary asked about the game changing decisions and additions to my business that took me from 6 to 7 figures. For me, it was definitely figuring out a flow in terms of launching my programs.
We launch one offer per quarter, and it allows us to really focus on first making sure our programs are up to date. It allows us the time to reverse engineer what was working before and how we can put a new spin or a new tweak on that. By the end of every single year, all of my programs have been updated and launched, which also means that the evergreen campaigns have been updated and launched.
It gives us this really beautiful flow and structure that doesn’t feel confusing. It doesn’t feel urgent. It makes filling in your content calendar actually really easy. We know what our process is going to look like around updating the course, updating the emails, updating the ad, copy, updating the graphics.
This quarterly launch flow allowed us to get our students the best results and allowed us to approach launches from a more project management standpoint versus that frantic energy around launching. It just changed everything.
More from this Episode
I love these coaching episodes because it’s so fun to hear about the exact phase of the entrepreneurial journey each student is at — it may be exactly where you find yourself standing today, too. We talk about how to discern which opportunities are right for you, and how to be really honest with yourself about it. I reveal the course I almost launched but didn’t (thank goodness) and how I determined it wasn’t a good move, and so much more.
To learn more about Hilary Krueger, follow her on Instagram @hilarykrueger and at hilarykrueger.com.
