What Got You to $20K Months Won't Get You to $50K Months

In this episode of Do The Work, we're talking about one of the biggest transitions entrepreneurs face:

What happens after you've built a successful coaching business... but you're running out of time, capacity, and energy?

The strategies that get you to your first $10K–$20K months often aren't the same strategies that will get you to $50K+ months.

At some point, working harder stops being the answer.

You need systems. You need leverage. And you need to start thinking like a business owner instead of a solo operator. 

In this episode, we break down exactly how we help our clients navigate this transition.

We cover:

• The power of a time audit
• How to identify what to keep, delete, delegate, or automate
• When it's time to hire your first admin support
• How AI is changing the future of online businesses
• Why most coaches hire too early (or hire the wrong things)
• The biggest mistakes people make when scaling their delivery model
• When to move from 1:1 coaching into a hybrid model
• How AI setters may completely change lead generation over the next few years 

We also share behind-the-scenes insights from what we're currently testing inside CCI, including AI-powered appointment setting, automation systems, and how we think business operations will evolve over the next several years. 

If you're currently doing $10K–$20K months and wondering how to grow without working more hours, this episode is for you.

Free Resource

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About Us

Coaches Creating Impact helps health professionals scale to $10K–$20K+ months using proven systems for content, lead generation, and sales.

Connect With Us

Reuben IG: https://www.instagram.com/reubendriedger/
Terri IG: https://www.instagram.com/terridriedger/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

There's a do the work podcast where helpers want to stop winning it and start scaling.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Where your host and Terry use the ideas guide. And together we help you get clients, grow your audience, and actually run a business at work.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Expect real talk, tactical strategy, and the kind of perspective you can only get when you're building two things at once a company and a marriage. Let's go through. Hello, hello, folks. Hello. Welcome to another Wow.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

The work.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Yes, that's the name of the podcast. Amazing. We should really just sing the intro song every single time. Get rid of the intro and just like sing. I think we'd get more people listening.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Yeah. For those who didn't know, Ruben used to be a session guitarist.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

He used to be super cool.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

I like back in the day was super cool. Yeah. Now I'm just That's why I had the Hots for you. He used to Okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Yes.

unknown 0:52

Okay, good.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Okay, good. Oh Panic moment. Panic moment. 11 years into marriage.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

I know, right? Folks, this isn't gonna be a crazy. This isn't gonna be Wow, I can barely talk today. We have a really fun episode where basically we've had more and more of our clients get to that place of where they're doing $10,000 or $20,000 a month. So we've been in the midst of helping a lot of them with understanding like how do you keep on growing your business after you hit that level.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

And uh it's kind of one of those classics that um there's two sayings that my old mentors used to say. Number number one, they would say that what got you here is not gonna get you there, right? So like what got you to 10 to 20k months is not gonna get you to 50k months. The second thing that one of my mentors always said, which some people don't like this, but it's like every new level has its own devil.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

And it's like you there's a new challenge you gotta face. And so to get to a 10k month, or even sometimes a 20k month, it is a lot of just like work hard, post a lot of content, message a lot of people, have a lot of sales calls, just get clients, right? Like it's just like it's just like basically spend money on ads, message these people.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Hustle, hustle, hustle.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

Hustle, hustle, hustle. But uh hustle, hustle, hustle, there's a point where you need to do things differently. Yeah. And so we wanted to talk today about how we coach our clients through that transition and how they've been able to have $40,000 or $50,000 months, or even some of our clients have had $150,000 months with these strategies. So the first thing that we wanted to talk through is when anyone hits this level of okay, things are busy, there's a lot going on, I'm wearing all the hats, I don't know if I can do more of this. We do what we call a time audit.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Terry, can you describe to people what a time audit?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Yeah, so a time audit is essentially writing down exactly what you're doing throughout the day. So it's like, okay, uh 7 a.m. check my emails, 7.15, respond to emails, 7:30, open up my Instagram and start responding to DMs. Like you are writing down everything. And this isn't like marketing admin. You're writing down literally what you are doing. And then I, of course, have an insane template where then you can color code like um how mentally draining different things are, um, how how but also how important they are. One thing that I think is a huge downfall is some entrepreneurs at that level they want to get rid of everything that's mentally draining to them. And that that is not a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

No.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Because there are some things that are a 10 out of 10 importance. Yes. Um, and that potentially need your face or your voice attached to them, and getting rid of them just because they're draining to you may actually be at massive detriment to your business. Um, but yeah, that's what a time audit is.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

That's what a time audit is. And so the way that we like to think through it is that as you write down everything in the time audit, basically there are four different actions you could take with each piece. Either you can keep doing it yourself, that's number one. Number two, you could just get rid of it. There are sometimes things that people write down, and I'm like, oh, just stop doing that.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Same with us. Like when you do a time audit, somehow I'm like, what?

SPEAKER_02 4:09

Why are we doing that? Yeah. Let's just stop doing that, right? So the first thing is you can keep doing it yourself. The second thing is you can just get rid of it altogether. No one needs to do it. No software, no human, no you. It's just gone.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Then the third thing is we can delegate it. So delegate is when we give the task to another human. Yeah. So usually that makes it a lot of different things.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

It could be an employee, a contractor, exactly, et cetera.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

And then the fourth thing is instead of delegate, we could automate it. Is there tech that can just do it for you? Right? Like a classic example would be some people are manually booking all their sales calls.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Ooh, you know what's another good one?

SPEAKER_02 4:47

What's that?

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Oh, sorry, did I interrupt you? No, no, no, I love it. Uh, this last week I was talking to one of our clients and they were like, Yeah, so then I go on YouTube and I post it, then I go on Facebook and I post it, then I go on TikTok and I post it, then I go on Instagram and I post it, then I go on Flips and I post it.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Guys, Metricool.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Metricol. There's things that you can just post it once and it goes to all of them.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

For like 30 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

And that is worth the time it's gonna save you.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

So there is a lot of softwares that can help with things. Um, and so basically, when you look at the time audit, those are the four things that we can do. Now, let's talk through maybe some of the most common scenarios for our clients. What would you say? Like, let's start with delegation, because for most of them, that's kind of one of the first steps of like, okay, I'm wearing all the hats. What can I delegate? So, what have you found working with those clients, Terry, to be the first pieces that they're delegating?

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Definitely admin work. Admin work, first of all, is the cheapest.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Um, and can be quite time-consuming and energy draining for you. So, this could be things like email responses, this could be things like onboarding clients, this can be things like even sorting through your DMs, um, putting things on Metro Cool. Um, some admin people are even really good at editing content. So, stuff like that is what um we usually recommend hiring out first. Um, I do recommend starting with contractors. Please remember contractors are not employees, do not treat them like employees. You need to treat them like contractors. Uh, but this allows you to do it in a much more affordable way, not have the responsibility of having an employee, that kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And uh what we have found is that there's there's a big wave of people kind of going online being like AI or Claude can take over all your admin tasks. What's like like when we have clients who are asking us, like, hey, should I hire a human VA or should I get Claude to do it? What's kind of like the general rule that we're kind of going with there?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, my recommendation is first abs like absolute Claude can do so much more than you think it can. So, yes, utilize Claude and Zap year and all the automations you can to automate the crap out of your business, and then you're still gonna want to hire an admin. Yeah, because you still need someone to operate that Claude. I highly recommend though. Um, like we right now are making the shift of teaching our employees AI. Right. Uh in the future, it's definitely gonna be a requirement to uh work at CCI that you already come in knowing Claude. Um so yeah, whoever you hire, you want them to be extremely efficient in Claude workspace um and different automation software.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

This this I just want your hot take on this. Yeah, how soon do you feel like Claude is gonna take over like 80 to 90 percent of like admin work and like people won't need VAs as much?

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Here's the thing like I think the wave is gonna be VAs who know how to set up Claude.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

But are you gonna still need them for 40 hours a week or are you gonna need them for only like 10 hours a week?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Okay, like I think businesses are gonna become much more affordable to interesting, yeah. But I I don't see like when people are like the business, the million dollar business of one, I just don't see it. I there are elements of business that will simply always need a human touch, human response. Um, and like at the end of the day, any anybody who has set up Claude projects knows how time consuming that in and of itself is. And if one part of it breaks and then you're spending your entire day rebuilding it, like yeah, like there's just I do not see a world where you are going to get to a million-dollar business with just you yourself and you on average. I yeah, like like I know there people are gonna respond and be like, Well, I know someone, like I mean, I mean on average, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Well I'm just curious again, I need your hot takes on this stuff. People, let's say we have coaches listening to this who are doing $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month. How much time should they be spending learning AI and Claude?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

I think you need to be understanding how insane it is. Yeah. Because here's the thing so people want work. And so if you are hiring people and they are purposely manually doing everything, like they they want work, guys. And so you need to be educated enough to know, hey, like I want you to automate this. Um, and uh you need to be in the same way, okay. Many of you are probably using Chat GPT right now instead of Google. You need to be using Claude Workspace so that you are fully understanding what it can do for you. Does that make sense? Yeah, even like the other day, I was challenging myself. Like, I'm I'm still very new to Claude Workspace, extremely new. And so I had a day where everything I did, I just asked Claude what it could do within that. Yeah. And it absolutely blew my mind. Again, it's gonna take me an extremely long time to build out everything we talked about that day. Um, and I will probably use Kat and Margaret to help me build all of those things. But yeah, it's crazy what it can do, and I do think you should have an ish, like, and then this is why I've challenged you. Am I gonna be the person learning Cloud Workspace? Yes. Yeah, but I've challenged you still have it on your computer and be using it.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yeah, I'm using it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yeah, and and just so you guys know, we're challenging every single one of our employees has a Cloud account and they all need to use their credits.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, that's so interesting. Um, because with and just a general, maybe maybe it's not the same for everyone. If someone were to hire like a good VA who and use a little bit of automation, how many hours a week do you think they could get back into their business?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Oh, so many people are spending so much. Like, okay, just for an example to open your eyes. So we have a finance specialist on our team. She, one part of bookkeeping, it takes her every single month when the month finishes, it takes her about five to six hours to do this like one project between Thrive Card and then grabbing a CSV and then organizing it into bookbooks, right? So it comes up as one of her tasks that she's like, I'm gonna figure out if Claude can do this. And she creates a Claude project for this specifically, and it now is taking her one hour a month. So she just gained back four to five hours, and that's just like one task.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Um, and so, like, of course, it depends the size of your business, how much is going on. Um, but it is it's absolutely insane the hours you can't get back. Yeah, but now again, that is an area where I'm not getting rid of her because I still need her to run that project.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Totally.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

But I can use her and her expertise. Like, one of the conversations I was having with our ops team is that I don't see AI as replacing operations, I see operations people being able to do multiple jobs, and therefore companies are gonna stay around for so much longer.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

That's how I view it.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

No, I like that. So, and I've noticed this so often when our clients come in, they get to 10, 15, 20k months, they get a VA in. Usually I find that they're able to, with the time that they've gotten back, now increase their client load and how many people they can take on.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

So I have found, and it's it's a general rule of thumb in my mind, is like let's say you spend two or three or four grand on a VA or an admin plus the AI, you want to make sure that your revenue coming in is that much more, at least, if not like higher.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yeah, so one of the the rules that I always have is every hire we have should make back their salary times two at a minimum.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

So, excuse me, if we're making a hire and if the company's in a gross income has not grown from that hire within six months, we're probably gonna let go of that hire.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Um, maybe it was the wrong hire, maybe we were pushing at the wrong bottleneck. It's not necessarily that individual's fault. Um, but you never ever, if you have made a hire and your income is not growing, that is a red flag.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Yeah, 100%. For sure. Yeah, and that's where like I think maybe sometimes people, I don't know if you've seen the same thing, they hire someone, but then when they get their time back, they're not then spending that newfound time on the right things.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

Yes, there's definitely a huge thought process out there that oh, you hire yourself out of your company and now you're doing nothing. That is a very, very dangerous message.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Exactly. I think, and I think I I mainly get this messaging from like a guy like Dan Martell, where he's just like, every time you get an hour back, put that hour towards something that basically at this point only you can do that is the most leveraged and will make you the most money. Yes, right? And I think that that's an important thing to do. Like for a lot of people, my guess is if you are doing between ten and twenty thousand dollars a month and you get five hours back a week or ten hours back a week from admin, spend that extra time in content and conversations and sales calls. Yeah. Because you do just those an extra five to ten hours a week, and you can probably add an extra five to ten grand a month to your business.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

The other thing I would say is make sure you're still getting in front of your clients. Um, you got the advice, this was years ago, that you needed to not spend any time in front of your clients anymore. And it was, it was yeah, I I don't know. I still look back on that time and I actually like feel sad about it because you love our clients, you love spending time with them figuring out what's going on in their businesses, and suddenly you were given this advice that that was a waste of your time. Yeah, and I just I don't think that's a waste of your time.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

This is where um I wish I had hard and fast rules here. I need to come up with a framework for this. Yeah, is that there's a lot of things that you're going to, as you build your business, realize that bring you joy and light you up, and then there's a lot of things that don't. Yeah. And it's okay to lean into doing the things that you really do enjoy. Yeah. For me, like I still want to have some part of a say in my client's experience and in how they're building their business. Um, and I enjoy the content side of things, like I enjoy these different things, and sometimes I was given advice of just like literally you need to fire yourself from every position possible. Literally. When it's not necessarily true, that's how some people build businesses. That's how some people want to just own a business, not operate in the business, um, but other people aren't that way.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

And so I think that's interesting and important to understand. Okay, we've been going for oh, 15 minutes, that's not bad. Um, I wanted to talk about a couple things. I wanted to talk about when people should hire like another coach to help them with their process. And I also did want to touch on setters and some of the AI setting stuff that we're testing out. Not because I think that everyone should do it, but because it's it's just interesting, it's just interesting. Yeah. Um, so I wanted to quickly talk about co-coaches. That I wanted to actually help people understand that there's a couple things that they should probably do first before they hire a co-coach. The first thing is we've recommended to a lot of our clients, like, and this usually happens again at the $20,000 to $30,000 mark, is you get so filled up with clients. Now, a lot of people, once they get filled up with one-on-one clients, they just like I'm gonna hire someone to like take on more clients. And that's not a bad idea, but I often try to get them to shift their structure of their program before that.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

I'd highly recommend that.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

So, what I usually recommend is like, let's say you're doing weekly one-on-one calls with your clients, is to move it to like bi-weekly calls and add in a group or community element. Because what we've noticed is we've helped some people start to hire a co-coach at 20k months, but if you make some of these structural changes, so make it a little bit more hybrid one-on-one, you're able to usually get up to a $30,000, sometimes even a $40,000 a month without hiring a co-coach, which basically you just have way more cushion and profit in the business.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Which, like, I and I know so many people when you're at 20 grand months, you're like, damn, I'm rolling in dough. Like, I can make so many hires. Guys, trust me, hiring is way more expensive than you think it is. It's not just like, oh, I'm writing a check for four grind, like it's so much more than that. It takes so much of your time to train, then you have people quit, then you have to retrain, then you have to do a million interviews. Like, trust me, you want to shift to a hybrid model before you start bringing coaches coaches.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

So before you bring in co-coaches, shift to a hybrid model. And usually, right before you hire a co-coach, increase your prices. Yes. Because here's what I've often found that let's say you increase your prices by I don't know, it's a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, 300 bucks a month, whatever it is. Usually that price hike almost pays for the co-coach.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

And again, this is what you want. Like you want that co-coach to come in and they have 2x, their salary.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Exactly. So, a couple of different things to think about before hiring a co-coach. Um, I want to talk about the setter thing. So, if you don't know what a setter is, a setter is someone that comes in and sets up appointments. So they will handle your DMs for you and book sales calls. Yeah. And basically, historically, we've always gotten people to hire humans to do that, um, which we still do for some of our clients. But we've started to test out AI setters. And I want to put a big flag here of like this. We are in testing mode. The word in tests. We're in testing mode. Um testing can be very frustrating. This might epically fail over the next couple months. We've just started to test this with a couple clients. We're testing it out ourselves, where And these are clients who are at making 30, 40 grand a month, etc. So we're starting to test out AI software that can number one, it can send out messages to new followers, which if you're if you've been following our podcast, a lot of the people who work with us are getting 20, 30, 50, sometimes 100 followers per day. So the nice thing is these AI setters can send out the first message, like the new follower message. The other thing this AI setter can do is it can take the entire conversation to book a call. It can study all the calls that you have booked in the past, and it can learn from you and basically use similar flows. Now, there is a lot of bugs and kinks and hiccups with the system, okay? Like for one of our clients that booked them a meeting in the middle of the night. Like there's still hiccups. Or the one the one AI setter was like starting to give medical advice, and it was Yeah, it was like, no, my goodness. You can't give medical advice. Um, so you can't like diagnose someone or like be like, hey, send me your results from your Dutch test, I'll look them over. No, no, no, no. So, anyways, there are hiccups, okay. It is kind of funny, but it's also like, ah! But we so here, some initial results. Some of our clients have started to book just as many calls with AI as they were before as a human. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. That is crazy. That is crazy. So there's a lot of hiccups, a lot of bugs. Um, but I was telling some of our scale clients on Monday, I was saying, I really at this point believe that in the next two to five years, AI setting is gonna be the way. Yeah, I really do think so. And so we're right now in that like testing messy phase. Yeah. Um, but it's very interesting. Yeah, so absolutely. Anyways, AI setting can not only fully book these calls, it can send new follower messages, but it can also do follow-up messages. So, what it can do is it can scrape your entire Instagram and it can be like, hey, these are all the people we're gonna send out 30 or 50 messages a day as a follow-up to all these past leads as well. So it can do the follow-up, it can do the new follower messages, it can take conversations to calls, it can also take people commenting keywords, start a conversation and take it to a call. Like, it can do all that. Um, and so it will just get better and better and better. Absolutely. Right now, it's good enough that we're like in test mode.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

Um, and so again, this is yeah. In the next my goal in the next 60 to 90 days, I was gonna say 30 days, but like, no, no, no. Let's say 60 to 90 days is to get more of our clients on it, more of it working well, less hiccups, us learning it ourselves, so that fingers crossed, we can be ahead of the curve.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Either, either we're gonna be ahead of it, or we're gonna be the first people to be like, nope. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

So if you keep listening to the podcast, either in a couple months I'll be like, everyone, jump on this, this is the best thing.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Or gonna be like everybody, jump off the ship.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, go back, like like don't give AI any information. Yes, yeah, it'll be either or. So, anyways, folks, those are a couple things. Um, if you're on a spot of already making $10,000 or $20,000 a month and you know that you need help with hiring, doing your time audits, automation, all that kind of stuff, feel free to reach out. We'd love to support you. Um, it's a different stage. It's basically what got you to do this place in business is not going to get you to the next stage. Absolutely. You have to learn new things, you have to become a different person. Um, and uh, it's a big fun journey. Yeah. So, anyways, folks, that's the podcast for today. Hope you enjoyed it. And uh, I guess we hope we see you in the next one. Thanks, guys. Bye for now.