High Ticket Programs: The Key to Rapid Business Growth (with Amethyst Mahoney)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode.

I grew up really poor and we moved around a lot. So when I was 12 years old I wanted to eat more than once every other day.And I had been a top seller for Girl Scouts, selling calendars for the choir, selling candies, and all of these different fundraisers I had done for school. But I never got to keep that money. I was so jealous of that. I would go in and hand over hundreds of dollars and still hadn't eaten that day.And I thought that was pretty lame. So this summer when I was 12 years old, I decided to go door to door and sell googly eyed critters.And I talk about this a lot in my Tarot Empowered Business System book, what happened and how it ended up doing a lot of market research and everything. And I was just really, really good at it.And so ever since then I've always owned a business, even when I grew up and got my PhD and my master's degrees and became a psychologist. I had started doing tarot when I was 12 years old.There was a deck that had found me in a house we had moved into, so I was doing that on the side as well, not professionally, just for myself. But what I noticed after years of doing psychology is everyone was pretty upset with therapy in general.People would get a little bit better and then kind of regress. And so I started using tarot with my clients and taught some of my fellow colleagues how to do it. And we were getting amazing results.But because of the stigma of using the cards, people told me to shut it down. So I quit after 13 years as a psychologist and went and became a tarot reader full time.And now I teach people to use the cards in their own businesses.So to really bootstrap my business, I decided that I was not going to spend a whole lot of money on getting fancy systems and doing the full website and all of those kinds of things, which I figured out you don't need any of that. And my focus was live streaming. I also did some speaking. My first telesummit that I was invited to was in front of 14,000 people.So as you can imagine, that really skyrocketed my business. And I love speaking and doing live streams. I don't like wasting a lot of time doing content creation on social media.But when I would get onto live streaming, about 30, 45 minutes most days of the week, I would make so much money.And in fact, I made my first $250,000 just by live streaming and getting people's information, having a short messenger conversation with them, and then getting their credit card information and entering it into paypal. And then I switched over to stripe, and I would just enter it myself.So I had their credit card information, and I didn't need a button or anything, but just literally say, I want to work with you. And we would talk about what that would look like, and then I would take their payment.And if it was an ongoing program, which many of my programs were a 10, 000 program for six months of coaching, then I would just charge their card every single month until I got things set up where it would automatically charge for me. So in the very beginning, you can make a couple hundred thousand dollars without anything, really.I mean, you just need to figure out how to connect with the audience, either if you do reels or you do social media. But I love speaking and then take their payment. So I decided to start a Facebook community.And this was back when people were saying that you had to do ads on facebook. You couldn't use groups to do Facebook.I was the first person that I know of who ever came out with a program on how to use Facebook groups to actually grow your business. This was like 15 years ago before everyone started doing it.And a lot of the big name people that I know who make seven figures, I'm in a group with them, a networking community, and they laughed at me. And a year or two later, they were the ones doing programs about how to grow a facebook group.So the first group I grew, it was wild, and I just led everyone in. It wasn't super focused. It was around tarot and growing your business, but it wasn't dialed in.And I had 14,000 people in that group, But I wasn't making a lot of money specifically from the group. And so I was getting really overwhelmed and really tired of people just kind of taking over. So I destroyed the group.I was like, that group's a failure. But what I did was I started a new group, and I grew that one to around 2,500 people.And that was when I made my first $250,000 year just specifically off of getting clients through that community. So having a community where people can meet can be really great. It can be awful.But if you do it right, it can be really, really great to have people step up into your higher level programs, into coaching programs and into bigger courses that you have created without a lot of work. So I get a lot of flack for this from people and a lot of people who aren't making money especially give me pushback on this.But the best way to bootstrap your business and to make a lot of money quickly is to create one focused program, package or offer that is very specific for your clients and price it as a high ticket program.Now when I say high ticket program, a lot of people flip out and they're like I have to start with freebies and $9 things and $27 things and I can't charge any money until I prove myself or I have to build up to it.That is going to take years and you will be lucky if you make it to that point because of the amount of time you'll waste and the amount of money that you'll spend trying to get to the higher price program. So when I say high price program, I mean something that is high priced for you.A lot of my clients will start with even a six week program priced at 597 and if the person buys that day, they will mark it off to 4 97. So anything starting in that range up to a thousand, $2,000 or 5,000 or $10,000 program is high ticket.You have to kind of figure out what that means for you. We know the psychology of pricing and things change around $2000.But when you're first starting out, a 90 day, 1500 dollars package or a six week for 497 after the markdown is a perfect place to start.It will help you get clients, get a lot of money coming in and give you breathing room to then create lower price products and offers that will serve more people. But if you start with higher priced, you are going to thank me for that.If you really want to bootstrap your business, you have to create an offer that is hopefully a little bit higher ticket like I've talked about, but also speaks to a specific problem, something that people could google that they really want to know about and something that is urgent for them to solve now.So if you're trying to do something vague like I want to help women in transition or I want to help people lose weight or something that's very general, then it's going to be very difficult to get clients quickly.But I have a freebie called the five Figure Framework that I use with my own clients and my own business to help walk through the steps of how to do this. So if you go to amethyst mahoney.com five figure-framework you can find it there if that's really hard to type out.If you just go to my name amethyst mahoney.com you will find the button for the freebies and you can download it there.What you want to do is you want to tie your offer into something specifically related to one of the five big areas that will recession proof your business. And so there are different ways to do this and different things that people have said over the years that are the recession proof things.But there are not three areas, which is what you'll normally hear. There are actually five and I go through some examples of that in my freebie.But whatever you do, make sure that you are showing up in a way that your clients understand that you have the exact solution that they're looking for. I know some people get really nervous about niching and things like that, but we're not talking about any of that right now.All we're talking about is focusing on a specific offer for the next 30 days. Then see how you feel about it from there.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guests.