Graham Cochrane (00:02.4)
If your audience doubled tomorrow, it probably wouldn't fix your income. Because your problem isn't your audience size, it's how you make money from the audience you already have. And I know what you're thinking, Graham, if I just had more followers, more views, more reach, then my business would finally work. But think about it, right now, you're posting more, likely getting fewer views,
Your email list isn't converting like it used to and it feels like you're falling behind. That's not a content problem. That's not an algorithm problem. You have a math problem. Now I've built a multi-million dollar a year business working five to 10 hours a week and it has nothing to do with having the biggest audience. In fact, I've made more money with smaller audiences than I ever did chasing bigger ones.
So today I'm gonna show you how a small audience can actually be your biggest advantage and how just a handful of clients can replace thousands of customers if, and this is the big if, you structure your business the right way.
Graham Cochrane (01:36.142)
This is how most people view their business and maybe you can relate. Right now, they are making a certain amount of money most months on average in their business. And right now they have a certain size audience, be it on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or their YouTube channel, or podcast downloads, however they measure and wherever they show up online. And so they see the two numbers. They see money coming in and the number of followers
or people engaging with their content, AKA your audience. And I have said for years that without an audience, nothing is possible. But with an audience, anything is possible. Because you are not the asset, your offer is not the asset, your branding is not the asset, your audience is the asset. So I 100 % believe in audience building at all times because your audience, the people who love you, who know you,
who trust you, and trust is the big word, especially in this AI world, those are the people that are gonna help pay your bills. You serve them faithfully, you build trust, you will be able to create endless income from that audience. So yes, the audience is the asset. But think about how most of us view our business as if those two things are the only things we can dial up. If I just have a bigger audience, I'll make more money.
Or if I were making more money, it would be because I have a bigger audience. We look at people with massive followings and assume they're making a lot of money, and we look at people with smaller followings and assume that they're making hardly any money. This is a mistake. This is a giant misunderstanding of how business actually works. Now, I want to show you how this works. I want to encourage you today in how you can have a small audience and make gobs of money. But before I go any further, do you feel
like what I'm about to share with you, describes your business. I look at business owners and their businesses every day. I coach amazing entrepreneurs. I get to interact with incredible people who are trying to do good in the world and who are working really, really hard, but they're getting stuck, whether it's at $50,000 a year or $500,000 a year or $5 million a year. Wherever they are, they're getting stuck. This is what most entrepreneurs look like right now. Tell me if this feels familiar to you. They are running
Graham Cochrane (03:56.694)
a play or a model that I would describe in just one word, exhausting. It's what I call the exhausting business. And here's what it looks like. It looks like the content hamster wheel. You are like the hamster in that little wheel. No matter how hard or how fast you run, you don't get anywhere. You have to keep running. You have to keep posting. It used to be they said you could post once a week.
Now I have to post once a day. no, now once a day isn't enough. I have to post multiple times per day, multiple reels per day, and the reels have to be tightly edited. They have to have good hooks. They have to focus on these trends. They have to have trending audio. They have to have the right subtitles and captions and overlay text. my gosh, the content hamster wheel. I can't stop posting.
because I'm not growing fast enough to reach my income goals. Okay? That's just one piece of fallout from the exhausting business. Number two, launching webinars, funnel optimization. I'm having to push and launch all the time and I'm so nervous that this launch won't do what it needs to do because I need to make a lot of money off this big launch and I need lots of partners and affiliates. We gotta make money off this launch for this to work.
or I need to run a webinar every single week, or I need to have the most optimized funnel possible. And it's not just good enough to have a funnel, I have to have a highly segmented funnel with automations and optimizations. If they downloaded this lead magnet and they don't buy the initial thing, then follow up with them in a certain number of days to offer them this thing and then nurture them this way. if now it's been 30 days, make sure I put them into this sequence. And if they clicked on that, but didn't buy, them to this sequence. If they did buy, don't send them that, but make sure you send them this. It's exhausting.
funnel optimization. And isn't that a funny word by the way, if I just optimize my funnel? When are you ever gonna have a perfectly optimized funnel? How do you know that you've arrived at perfect optimization? That's a never ending battle. So does that describe your business? Another symptom of the exhausting business is constantly chasing leads. Whether they DM'd you on social media or opted into your email list, you are constantly following up, checking in with them.
Graham Cochrane (06:18.552)
to see if they want to work with you, see if they want to go deeper with you. Chasing potential clients all around the interwebs. And you're using scripts, just floating this up to the top of your inbox, just checking in, just circling back, just following up, whatever the language is, it's disgusting, because we're all tired of hearing it, we're all tired of doing it, we don't want to bug them, but we want to bug them because they say, the money's in the follow-up, the money's in the follow-up, so we're chasing them around. Or your calendar's just full,
with discovery calls, meaning free sales pitches that don't land clients, where you spend 30 minutes at a time, an hour at a time, pouring your heart into this person, trying to meet their needs, overcoming objections, making your offer only to have them say, I gotta think about it, I gotta talk to my spouse, all of which is code word for I don't want it, but I wanna be polite and nice, okay? So this is what most entrepreneurs are doing, and it is exhausting.
If you feel like any of these things, you have built a business that requires constant activity just to survive. Not even thrive. You're not even thriving. You're not even at the income level you want to be at. If you are doing these things, you have built a business that requires constant activity just to survive, to tread water, to move nowhere. And if this is you, I got good news for you.
It doesn't have to stay like this. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not the problem. There's nothing wrong with your industry or your niche. Their niche is not the problem. It's the model. Your business model is the problem. And the great news is you are not your business model. You get to choose what model you want to employ. And so I'm gonna give you another model today that's gonna get you off of this hamster wheel. It's gonna get you out of survival mode and get you into thriving mode where you're making more, working less, and you're not chasing
A big following.
Graham Cochrane (08:31.566)
Because if you're being honest, if you stopped posting for a week right now, would your revenue drop?
I just got off of a seven day luxury cruise with my family. My phone was off for the whole week. My laptop was off. I didn't even bring a laptop. No work, no phone, just spending time with my family. When I got back, checked my bank account, not only has it not gone down, it's gone up. People were sending me money, tens of thousands of dollars while I was gone on the cruise. That is possible for you.
if and only if you change the model.
Graham Cochrane (09:20.696)
Because the model that you're running right now is built around a myth, which is the bigger my audience, the more money I'll make. And I understand why. I understand why we think if I just had more leads or more people watching my stuff or more subscribers, I'd make more money because again, we look at income and we look at follower or audience size and we conflate the two. And so we think, well, I'm making a certain amount of income.
and have a certain audience size, if that audience size doubled, I would double my income. But you're missing the point. This is not how business works. And the good news for you is that you can stop. You could just stop trying to grow your audience so big because that's a never-ending battle. Yes, I want you to grow your audience. You always want to be in audience building mode, but you don't need to wait for the audience to grow to make more money. You don't need to fight the algorithm changes or the AI slop that's taking your place.
You don't have to be irritated or scared or overwhelmed or exhausted because audience growth isn't the fastest or best way to grow your income. Audience growth is the very last thing you need to think about. Again, don't mishear me. I'm not saying don't worry about your audience growth or you shouldn't want to a bigger audience. I don't think you need a bigger audience. If you have a small audience that's designed well around an ideal business model like I'm gonna teach you, you'll be fine.
But audience growth should be the last thing you worry about. Business model first, audience growth second. There's an old story about these two lumberjacks and they have this wood chopping competition. See who can chop the most wood in a day. Lumberjack one, chops and chops and chops nonstop from sun up to sun down, okay? Lumberjack two, chops for 50 minutes and then takes a 10 minute break every hour.
on the hour. At the end of the day, Lumberjack2 has chopped more wood than Lumberjack1 and Lumberjack1 is livid and confused and he says, how in the heck did you get more wood chopped than me? You took a break every hour, I saw you. Lumberjack2 says, when I took a break I wasn't resting, I was sharpening my axe.
Graham Cochrane (11:39.982)
You see most entrepreneurs are swinging harder.
Graham Cochrane (11:47.512)
but the smartest ones are sharpening their axe. Swinging harder today looks like more content, more effort, working late hours on the weekend attached to our phone or a laptop. Sharpening our axe.
Graham Cochrane (12:09.24)
Sharpening your axe looks like a better model and a better offer.
Graham Cochrane (12:19.81)
Here's something really, really key for you today. You don't need to work harder. You just need to make more.
Graham Cochrane (12:32.098)
You don't need to work harder and you don't need a bigger audience. You just need to make each action and activity and each audience member worth more.
Graham Cochrane (12:55.694)
Okay, let's get practical. If you want to grow your business, you say, Graham, I want to make more money in my business. I will tell you, and I'm sure you would agree, there are only three ways to grow your income. More leads, better conversion rate, higher prices. Those are the three levers that we can play with. Three dials we can mix and match. If we get more leads, that can increase our income.
If we can increase our conversion rate from say 5 % to 7%, that can increase our income. If we can charge more for everything that we sell, well then that can increase our income. Of those three, only one could double your income instantly. And it's not more leads.
Graham Cochrane (13:46.2)
fastest way to grow your income is to make each customer you have worth more.
Graham Cochrane (13:57.304)
The fastest way to grow your income is to make...
Graham Cochrane (14:05.89)
The fastest way to grow your income is to increase how much each customer is worth.
Graham Cochrane (14:15.054)
The fastest way to grow your income is to increase how much each customer is worth.
Graham Cochrane (14:36.142)
Let's say for example, let's do the math. You want to make $20,000 a month consistently. Very doable, not hard. If you have a $20 offer, you need 1,000 buyers.
Graham Cochrane (14:52.27)
A thousand buyers every single month. This is the model that so many people are doing. They're trying to sell $20 ebooks. Or they're an author trying to sell $20 physical books when they don't even keep the whole $20. Amazon takes 30%. If you have a publisher, they take a whole bunch. You've got to print the book. You're coming away with a couple of bucks per book. But let's say you're selling a $20 book and you get to keep all $20 or $20
a month membership, right? You need a thousand buyers. That's insane. How hard is it to get a thousand people to pull out their credit card every month and say yes to you? But if you had a $10,000 offer, well, you only need two buyers every month. How much easier would it be, and will it be for you to just go find two people a month to say yes to your $10,000 offer, then to find a thousand people
to say yes to your $20 offer.
Graham Cochrane (15:55.872)
If your business needs thousands of customers, no offense, it's fragile. If it only needs a few customers, it becomes predictable. It actually becomes fun and less stressful.
Graham Cochrane (16:17.684)
Most people don't have an audience problem. They have a business model that demands too many people. That's the whole point I want to make today.
Graham Cochrane (16:33.09)
Going back to book sales, my second book was called Rebel. And for Rebel, I wanted to hit a bestseller list, whether it was New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, any of the national bestseller lists. And so I went on a campaign to do just that. I hired the best book launch coaches in the world and I followed their play and we talked about this.
a couple of weeks ago about mentorship and coaching, like the fastest way to get where you want to go is to find someone who's done the thing you want to do and pay that person, sit under their teaching, run their play and do it. That's exactly what I did. It became a five month launch where I ran their exact play. And the punchline is, is it worked? I sold enough copies of Rebel to hit the USA Today bestseller list. But I spent five months
practically begging people to buy a $25 book from me. It came from one-off book sales, it came from my email list, it came from speaking at events and doing bulk book purchases, all of the above. But functionally speaking, I spent five months trying to sell enough copies of a $25 book to hit the USA Today bestseller list, and I did, and the book made $62,000 during those five months.
I don't get to keep all of that money. I had a publisher. We've got printing costs. You got Amazon and Barnes & Noble, everyone taking their cut. But let's just say, let's just say that somehow I got to keep all of that money, all $62,000 for working my butt off for five months to try and sell thousands of copies of this book. And then just a few weeks ago, I was in a small room and I made an offer.
to a few people of $25,000 and I sold five of them within minutes. Okay, five times 25,000 is $125,000 and I didn't even have to beg. I simply presented an offer to a group of people and five people immediately said yes without having to think about it.
Graham Cochrane (19:00.334)
This is the tale of two very different worlds, two very different approaches. If you have a low ticket offer, like my $25 book, like a $97 course, or even a $500 course, yes, that's low ticket. If you have a low ticket offer, it requires, in order to hit the income level you wanna hit, mass.
Graham Cochrane (19:30.616)
persuasion at scale. You have to get incredibly good at persuading people en masse at scale all the time. But if you have a high ticket offer, especially one that is absolutely irresistible to your ideal customer, the one that when they hear it, they cannot pull out their wallet fast enough to buy it, it requires less effort but more precision.
Most people are too lazy to discover and learn how to...
Graham Cochrane (20:10.872)
Craft?
Graham Cochrane (20:17.518)
craft, present, and sell high ticket offers with precision. But it's one of the most valuable skills literally you will ever develop. It requires no convincing. It requires no manipulation. It requires no obliterating objections. It requires no awkwardness. It doesn't even require one-on-one discovery calls. But there is an art and craft to crafting
presenting and closing high ticket offers.
Graham Cochrane (20:59.854)
To reach the income level you want this year, you don't need more buyers.
Graham Cochrane (21:09.166)
To reach the income level you want this year, you don't need more people. You need fewer, better buyers.
Graham Cochrane (21:28.578)
One of my clients, her name is Aiko, I love her story because it just brings this message home. She teaches English pronunciation to native Japanese speakers. Meaning she's not an English teacher, she's not teaching Japanese people how to speak English, she's helping them pronounce it better to work on their accent. So these are people who are trying to do more interaction with the English speaking world, whether in America or the UK.
and this could be business people, could be athletes, could be actresses, it could just be people moving to America. She helps them with their pronunciation.
IKO has a YouTube channel with 500 subscribers. Not 500,000, not even 5,000. 500 subscribers. And she does about $30,000 a month in her group coaching.
Graham Cochrane (22:42.274)
Now most people would look at a small YouTube channel of 500 subscribers and laugh and say there's no way that's a real business. I need at least 50,000 or 500,000 subscribers to be making $30,000 a month consistently. No, you don't. You need a better offer and a better model. Again, audience size is not what determines your income. It is the model, it is the structure, it is the offer, and it is the price of that offer that determines all of that.
Graham Cochrane (23:17.774)
One of my clients, his name is Brandon, and he teaches people how to study the Bible. He was going from selling low ticket offers, making around $6,000 a month, to starting to come into my program, and we helped him craft a high ticket offer for the same type of people we thought would never be able to buy a high ticket offer because he was just teaching the Bible. And he went from $6,000 a month to $72,000 a month.
Graham Cochrane (23:47.116)
His audience size didn't change. His niche didn't change. He didn't change. His offer changed.
Graham Cochrane (24:14.018)
One of my clients, Alex, owns a franchise and was trying to get out of that franchise and wants to do more independent coaching and consulting with other business owners and came into my program, didn't know how to even get that started, didn't even have a website and thought he needed all these other things in place, no real following, just a little bit of connections in the industry of people that know about him and know what he's doing. I said, stop worrying about...
growing or building all these tech things out, just craft a new offer, reach out to the people you know, and let them decide whether they want to take you up on that offer. He sent one email, sold 11 people into a $9,000 offer.
Graham Cochrane (25:05.582)
This was within a week of joining my program and feeling overwhelmed, not sure where to start, feeling like he's at the beginning of this online journey of building his brand out and thought he'd have to wait for years and instead sent one email presenting a brand new, better offer to a few people that he had contacts with and made $100,000 and that's if they don't renew.
Graham Cochrane (25:46.552)
with a small audience, with fewer clients.
You can have high income and maybe more importantly, more freedom. When you don't have to chase down or service or interact with thousands of customers, your life gets a lot simpler. Your life gets a lot easier. And the quality of your clients goes up. This is one of the hidden benefits to working with fewer people and having a smaller customer base is that if they are premium customers, which they should be, then they are
better customers because they care about it more, they're invested more, they're leaned into you more, they will do what you say, they will respect you more because your prices reflect your brand and their commitment level reflects.
Graham Cochrane (26:36.802)
And their investment with you reflects their commitment level, so it already attracts better clients who, guess what, will get better results following your program because they are all in and committed.
Graham Cochrane (26:55.918)
Okay, so here is the missing piece. At this point, if you're still with me, most people just try to raise their prices. Okay, Graham, I'm gonna just raise my prices. And it doesn't work, though. If that happens, if you go raise your prices and it doesn't work, you're gonna be frustrated. Why didn't it work? And if you've tried this and it didn't work, why didn't it work? And if you think about trying this just by raising your prices, it's probably not gonna work. Why? Because you don't know or you haven't yet learned how to increase perceived.
value and communicate your higher prices the right way.
Graham Cochrane (27:33.752)
So you can't just charge more. You don't just raise your prices blindly. You have to become worth more.
Graham Cochrane (27:46.006)
And no, I'm not talking about credibility. No, I'm not talking about getting a degree or a certification or having fancy logos or getting endorsed by someone big. I'm talking about learning how to uncover and then...
Graham Cochrane (28:03.754)
I'm talking about how to discover for yourself and then uncover for your prospects the true value of what you do. And you do this by creating what I call an irresistible premium offer. It's something I actually call a magic offer.
Graham Cochrane (28:21.654)
I don't have time to go into detail here about what a magic offer requires. It's certain ingredients that go into it like an ideal recipe to make it work. But at the end of the day, what makes an offer magic is a clear outcome. What is the client gonna get if they implement your teaching, if they implement your system, if they do what you said, what is possible for them? People don't buy products, people buy outcomes.
Graham Cochrane (28:53.432)
People don't buy vague promises, they buy specific results. That's what you need to be selling.
Graham Cochrane (29:02.776)
So a clear outcome for a specific audience, a specific type of person. And that's how you usually arrive at the outcome. When you have a specific type of client you wanna work with, then you know what they really want. Not what everybody wants, what they want. And if you know what they want, what their challenge or their pain is, what their dreams or hopes are, what problem they have that you could solve, what outcome you could deliver for them, now you know what to sell, what to package your offer around, what outcome, what result they would want to buy.
Graham Cochrane (29:37.486)
So have a clear outcome for specific audience and then the wrapper and packaging has to create high perceived value because guess what? There is high value in what you do. You're just undercharging because you undervalue yourself. You don't actually know the true value of what you do. You think you do based off of, well, this is what everyone else charges for this. That's not your true value. That's just copying what everyone else is doing and they are undercharging because they have not discovered, like I told you, their true value. That's your first step and that's your job.
It's not anybody else's job. They're not gonna discover it for you. You have to discover your true value and then learn how to uncover that to your prospect, which is the way you describe it, present it, and show it. And there is an art and science to doing this.
Graham Cochrane (30:43.918)
I'm gonna give you a solution for this in just a second, but just so we're clear as we wrap this up, you don't need more followers. You don't need more content. You don't need more leads.
You need a better model.
Graham Cochrane (31:03.352)
And that model starts with one thing, a high priced...
Graham Cochrane (31:12.718)
A high value offer that doesn't require thousands of customers to work for you.
A high value offer that doesn't require thousands of customers.
Graham Cochrane (31:36.661)
If you don't fix your offer,
If you don't fix your offer, none of this works. You're stuck. You're done. You will be frustrated for over...
You will be frustrated for the next 10 to 20 years as you jump from trend to trend, idea to idea, wondering why it's never working, thinking that you're broken or the algorithm is against you or the niche or the industry doesn't work anymore and none of those things are true. It has everything to do with your offer. This is why I've created an entire event around this one thing. My clients realize after
My clients come to me wanting to make more money and work less. And the number one thing I tell them to do is fix your offer. So I have created a five day coaching experience called the 10K Offer Challenge. This is five days of live coaching with me where all we do is I teach you how to craft an irresistible high ticket offer for your industry right now, right where you are. I believe
without a shadow of a doubt, if you had an irresistible $10,000 offer, it would change your life. You are one $10,000 offer away from the life of your dreams, of the income of your dreams, of being able to pay off all that debt, being able to live in the neighborhood you wanna live in, be able to send your kids to the school you wanna send them to, to be able to have more time with your family every afternoon and evening and weekend, and being able to travel and take trips and turn off your phone and have more money in your bank account when you come home. You are one.
Graham Cochrane (33:20.104)
Offer away and the type of offer you create makes all the difference. So we literally walk you through over five days What's the recipe to create what I call a magic offer? How do you structure it? How do you fulfill it? How do you sell it without having to get on to sales calls? And how do you install it into your current business today? We have clients who come to this event every single time without fail and make ten thousand fifteen thousand twenty even fifty
$10,000 during the five days while we're doing this while they're learning this Like I can't tell you or think of another event you could come to this year that will make you more money than my 10k offer challenge
Graham Cochrane (34:05.794)
This event is the missing link to everything you want in your business. It's the best thing you'll do all year for your business. And it's the shortcut to your dream. So I wouldn't waste time looking at a bunch of other random stuff. Just come to the next 10K Offer Challenge. In fact, it's starting in a few days. I'm gonna link to it below in the description or the show notes. You can go to 10kofferchallenge.com right now. You'll see the current dates. As of this episode dropping, we're gonna go live in a few days. So get your ticket.
The VIP tickets do sell out, so get those before they're gone. If you want more time with me and you want me to be able to answer your specific questions every day as you get to come an hour earlier and get group coaching from me.
Graham Cochrane (34:53.794)
But don't waste any more time trying to grow your audience, trying to grow your followers, trying to do all the different stuff when you have a pretty pathetic offer. We can fix that in just five days.
Graham Cochrane (35:12.618)
once you get this offer right.
you stop chasing growth, and your business finally starts working for you and not the other way around.
Graham Cochrane (35:30.094)
Click the link below to get your ticket to the next 10K Offer Challenge that's happening in a few days, and I'll see you there live, and we'll blow up your business together.
