Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Before we jump in, I want to share something exciting. In the next few weeks, I'm going to be curating a small group of women who are already making 500k or more annually to help them grow toward their first million and beyond. It's called the Millie Club. Here's what I know. What gets you to high six figures stops there. If this is you, you know that because you've already tried it all and you need someone inside your business showing you the way forward. So over six months, you, you'll work with me personally, plus my team and each other to refine your business model, prepare for hiring, simplify your operations, and build a business that grows more sustainably, profitably and independently of you. Applications and details are waiting for you@amyporterfield.com forward slash club. But I have to warn you, spots will go fast. I want to give you something today that I think will change the way you see your business. The struggle goes underground and you carry it alone and it's quiet because it doesn't feel like progress while you're in it. Once you can see the stage clearly, the years of effort that haven't matched your results stop feeling like a personal failure and they start making sense. The decision is to stop. To pull yourself out of the daily doing of your business and look at what you've built. My guest today is a dear friend of mine. One of them goes, that one over there, she's big money and it was my guest today. Her name is Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield, the ever amazing best selling author of Two Weeks Notice, Ms. Amy Porterville. I should have figured this out by now. If that sentence has been running in the back of your mind on the hard days especially, I want to give you something today that I think will change the way you see your business. You're in a stage of business that almost nobody has named out loud. I'm naming it today. I'm calling it the Quiet Climb. It's that stretch between 100k and 500k in revenue and it's the most demanding chapter of building an online business. It has its own rules, its own pressures, and its own reasons that the strategies that got you here will not get you further. Once you can see the stage clearly, the years of effort that haven't matched your results stop feeling like a personal failure and they start making sense. Today, I'm walking you through what the Quiet Climb is and why it's so structurally hard. The lie about the effort that's been costing you confidence and the one decision that Creates the jump to the next level. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit subscribe on YouTube or follow on Apple podcasts or Spotify. That's how you can be sure you get new episodes every week. Okay, let's get into it. The Quiet Climb is the stage between 100k and 500k in revenue. It's the long middle of an online business. It's where most online business owners live and almost nobody talks about it as its own chapter. It's quiet for a few reasons. It's quiet because the loud stages get all the attention. Six figures get celebrated. Seven figures gets the spotlight. The years between them, where the building happens, get skipped over. In almost every story, you hear about how someone made it. So you sit inside the stage doing the work, watching the women on either side that get the spotlight, and start to wonder if you're the only one who hasn't broken through. You're not. You're in the climb. It's quiet because nobody's talking about it. It's quiet because the numbers look fine from the outside. On paper, 200k, 300k, even 400k is a successful business. People in your life see those numbers and assume you've made it. So you stop talking about how hard it is. Because how do you say, I'm exhausted When the revenue tells a totally different story of success. The struggle goes underground and you carry it alone. And it's quiet because it doesn't feel like progress while you're in it. The first hundred k had milestones. The first hire, the first 10k month, the first launch that worked. The Quiet Climb is the stage where milestones stop being so obvious. You can grow by 30% in a year and still feel like you're just standing still because you've been at it so long that the early winds don't land the same way anymore. That's what makes the stage so isolating. The Quiet Climb is structurally one of the hardest chapters of business for four specific reasons. So let me walk you through each one. Number one, the strategies that got you here cannot take you further. You've heard this, right? The playbook that worked when you were trying to hit your first 100k, the constant content, the one on one work. The launches that were built on personal hustle. Those things stopped scaling. So somewhere in this range, you can keep running them the same way, but they'll start producing diminishing returns. The reason your strategies feel like they're getting harder is because they are no longer working for you. You've outgrown them. Number two, you haven't yet earned access to the kind of support and scale that founders at seven figures take for granted. You're profitable enough to feel responsible for everything, but you're not yet profitable enough to feel free of any of it. You're working without the buffer of a real team or predictable lead flow or a model that runs without you in the driver's seat. So every dip feels personal, because every dip is. And number three, your offers have evolved by accident. You've added a course, then a membership, then a coaching program, layering one on top of another one with every launch you do. They now coexist in your business without a clear hierarchy. They compete for attention, they confuse your buyer, and you can feel the friction even if you can't name it. Number four, the world keeps telling you to add more, post more, build more. So you do. And the fog gets thicker the harder you push. At this stage, more effort produces less clarity. So when you sit there at 9pm wondering why you've been doing this for years and the breakthrough still hasn't come, I want you to hear me. You're not the problem. The Quiet Climb is the chapter you've been in. It's structurally hard, and almost nobody has named it for you, which is why it's been feeling like a private failure when thousands of business owners are inside it right now. Naming it changes things. Once you know what stage you're in, you can stop trying to escape it through more effort and start working with it on its own terms. Which brings me to the second thing that I want you to walk away with today. The lie that's been running in the back of your mind for years. Because once you understand the Quiet Climb, you can finally see why this lie has been costing you confidence and why it isn't even true. The lie sounds something like this. If I had just worked harder, been smarter, showed up more consistently, I'd already be at the next level now. Sound familiar? I want to look at that sentence with you. Because the math, it just ain't mathing. Effort grows in a linear direction when you're starting out. More hours in, more results out. That equation works at the beginning. Somewhere around the stage that you're in right now, that equation, it just stops working. Effort becomes the constant in your business, the thing that's always there. If effort were the variable that produced the next level, you'd already be at 500k, 700k, a million in revenue. You've put in plenty of effort, quick interruption. But we'll be back soon. Earlier I mentioned the Millie Club, my private coaching program for female founders earning 500k or more annually. Well, I wanted you to hear what happened for one founder after joining. Her name is Sarah, and here's what she said. When our business was on track to end the year in the red, joining the Millie Club felt like a leap of faith. And it turned out to be the smartest move we've ever made. One conversation with Amy gave us the clarity and strategy we needed to refine our offer and completely transform our results. By the end of that year, our revenue had doubled, our Profit margin hit 30%, and our business was stronger than ever. The Millie Club truly changed the trajectory of our company. How good is that? That's what happens when you get outside eyes on your business strategy from someone who's done what you want to do, and a community of women who understand the complexity of growing to seven figures. So if you're earning over 500k annually in your business and you've already tried it all, head to amyporterfield.comclub to apply. I'll be in touch personally soon. The receipts are everywhere. The early mornings, the launches, the years of showing up while everyone around you was choosing easier paths. So if effort isn't the variable, something else is. The variable at this stage is alignment. Whether what you're doing matches who you are now, who your buyer is now, and where your business is now. You can pour another 12 months of effort into a model that's slightly misaligned. It won't change the result. It will only exhaust you faster. That's why the lie keeps you stuck. It tells you to add more effort to a problem that effort can't solve. The lever at your stage is alignment. And alignment requires a different kind of work than you've been doing. Which brings me to the third thing that I want to talk about. The decision that creates the next jump. Spoiler. The decision is more difficult than working harder. The decision is to stop. To pull yourself out of the daily doing of your business, even for a few hours, and look at what you you've built. Look at what's there right now, generating the results that you're getting today. The business you have, with all its current quirks and challenges, not the one that you meant to build. Now, this sounds simple, but it's not. At this stage, stopping feels dangerous, right? There's always a launch coming. A team member who needs an answer, a client who's waiting. Your inbox hasn't been empty in months. I know what Some of you are thinking right now, amy, I literally don't have time to stop. If I stop, the revenue stops. And I hear you, and I want you to hear me to stop and look feels like a luxury you can't afford. The opposite is closer to the truth. You can't afford not to. And I'm not talking about taking a week off. I want you to take a few hours with your calendar and with a notebook. Maybe it's a Friday afternoon where you can close your laptop early and look at what's working in your business with the same honesty that you'd bring to a friend's business if she asked you to look at hers. That's it. That's the pause. Let's get honest about your business. Now, let me get specific, because vague advice to pause and look doesn't help anyone. Right? Here are six things you can do this week with the time that you have. Number one, look at where your week goes. Pull up your calendar from, let's say, the last 14 days. Look at what happened, not what you had planned. Where did the hours actually go? Which meetings actually energized you and which ones absolutely drained you? Which tasks could only have been done by you, and which ones have you been holding onto out of habit? Number two, look at where your revenue comes from. Open your last 12 months of revenue and break it down by source by where the buyer came from. You'll likely find one or two channels carrying everything and a handful of others that consume your attention without producing significant returns. This single exercise has changed the trajectory of more businesses than I can count. Number three, read your own sales page out loud. Just read it the way that a stranger would. And notice where you kind of wince. Notice where you start to skim. Notice the language you wrote two years ago that no longer matches who you are or who you serve. Now the places you stumble are the places your buyers stumble to. Number four, Ask your best customer one question. So choose the customer whose results you're most proud of, the one whose transformation is the cleanest, who did the work and got the outcome. Ask them this. What almost stopped you from buying? Their answer will tell you more about your gap than any survey or framework or expert ever could. Number five, make a list of what you would stop if you were starting your business today with everything you know now. What offer or program or channel or commitment would you not build? Again, most business owners at your stage are carrying weight from decisions made by an earlier version of themselves. The pause is your chance to set some of that weight down number six. Notice what you've been avoiding. Now there's something. There always is. A conversation, a decision, a number you haven't looked at. A truth you already know but haven't said out loud. Ask yourself this. If a trusted advisor sat across from you right now, what would you not want them to see? Whatever just came up, start there. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. You're not behind. You're in the Quiet Climb. It's a stage with its own rules, and it can feel very isolating. Your effort has been pouring into a stage that doesn't respond to effort the way the early stage did. The variable at this stage is alignment, and the way you create alignment is by stopping long enough to look at what you've built. You have six exercises in front of you now. Block 90 minutes on your calendar before you close out today so you can actually do them. Take the pause so you can start moving forward. And if you want to take this work further, my free training the Revenue consistency formula is the next step. I'll walk you through the three systems that determine whether your business stays stuck in the Quiet Climb or starts moving out of it. They are your messaging, your offer, and your lead generation will pinpoint which one is out of alignment for your business specifically. So sign up@amyporterfield.com Training you're in the Climb now. You have a name for the stage, a starting move for this week, and a place to go deeper when you're ready. Thanks for spending this time with me today. If this episode names something that you've been feeling lately, I want you to know that I see you. The Quiet Climb is real, and you're not in it alone. It's a stage that you move through. Stay with me and I'll show you what comes after it. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, hit follow so you can catch every new episode. I'll talk to you soon.