Just Between Coaches – Episode 153
Scaling? You’re Probably Doing It Wrong (Victoria Hajjar)
Victoria Hajjar: This opened up a whole new world for me and it really enabled me to understand how scaling is done at any level of business. I started incorporating that into my own business and with clients, and I’ve been able to see growth trajectory, you know, double or triple over the year.
Melinda Cohan: In a world where scaling your coaching business can feel like an overwhelming endeavor, how do you transform your marketing and sales efforts that reach and impact more people without losing the personal touch? I’m Melinda Cohan and you’re listening to Just Between Coaches. I run a business called the Coaches Console and we’re proud to have helped tens of thousands of coaches create profitable and thriving businesses. This is a podcast where we answer burning questions that newer coaches would love to ask a more experienced coach.
Scaling isn’t just about growing bigger. It’s about growing smarter, sustainably and aligned with your purpose and vision. How can you set the stage for scalable success without losing the heart of your work? Let’s explore that topic today. I’ve invited Victoria Hajjar to the show for this conversation. She’s the founder of Ugly Ventures, a consultancy dedicated to helping female entrepreneurs scale their businesses from six to seven figures by refining sales and marketing strategies. And she’s assisted numerous startups across various industries, including SaaS, hospitality, and E commerce. Welcome, Victoria.
Victoria: Thank you so much, Melinda. That was a beautiful intro. I’m so excited to be here and talk about growing our businesses to the next level.
Melinda: I love this topic. I’m excited to have you on the show. Before we dive in, would you mind sharing a bit of your background with our listeners?
Victoria: Oh, absolutely. I’d be happy to. So I’m the founder at Ugli Ventures because business can be ugly sometimes, especially when it comes to sales and marketing. So my career has been really unique as it’s always been marked working directly with business owners, with founders, entrepreneurs and investors. And I’ve been able to gain what I call a trial by fire education. Getting behind the scenes of incredible businesses, working hand in hand with unbelievable founders, you know, million dollar months founders that have built billion dollar businesses. And I’ve gotten to walk hand in hand with these founders and really get under the hood of what’s going on in their marketing.
This is why I’ve leaned into focusing on this scaling stage of business. It’s complicated and there are not a ton of resources that fit. It’s really geared towards case studies of Coca Cola and things that just feel very out of reach for smaller businesses and folks that don’t– they want to grow, they want to scale. But maybe they’re not thinking of having an IPO. There’s varied ways that we can grow and scale our business, and it doesn’t have to look like a Fortune 500 company. And so this is really the methodology, the frameworks that I’ve honed over the years. It’s a place that I love to be because I think it’s a very exciting time working with founders that are dreaming big. Right. And dreaming big can look all different sorts of ways.
Melinda: Well, let’s start right there, dreaming big. Because when it comes to scaling, that’s kind of at the heart of it. So I want to dive into that. What’s your perspective around the necessity for dreaming big? Because a lot of coaches that I find with the startups that we work with, they dream big initially, but then maybe they’re not continuing to dream as big.
Victoria: Well, I’m going to reach into my own coaching and consulting because so many women, especially, go through a similar trajectory. When I got away from working inside businesses and started my consultancy, to be honest, the beginning stages of it was more of a necessity than a conscious decision. Because I was, you know, newly married, newly pregnant, I wanted to find a career for myself that was going to allow me to be home with the kids, that was going to allow me to kind of balance all of these pieces of life. And so because of my background, I had so many wonderful contacts. My business, about 10 years ago started just kind of picking up the phone and saying, you know, what do you need help with?
And of course, went through these stages that. Melinda, I know that you guide people on, which is how do we build our offer? We have to have conversations. We need to understand what people need. So going through those pieces, and I found myself two, three years into the business, really with my head down, going through the motions, always feeling behind, not really having a lot of systems, not having a lot of support in place. And to be honest, I didn’t question it for a while because I was just so in the throes of having young kids. The business did what it needed to for me. It got me that income that I needed. It replaced my job that I had. And it was great for a while.
But once I stepped back, I started really feeling burnt out by what was going on and kind of understanding that I was functioning in a model that wasn’t particularly scalable. Right. And I think nowadays, you know, group coaching, group consulting, all these things are. Are in the vernacular, but about 10 years ago, it was not really. It wasn’t really the case. So, you know, I, I knew through my background when I was working inside other businesses with founders and especially with these investors because they’re building in a different way. I understood the concept of scaling. I understood it cerebrally, but I didn’t really know how to put all of those pieces into place.
And that’s when I really started shifting into, you know, how can we make this easier? What are the things that we can do instead to sort of make things flow more with ease. And when I went through that journey in my consulting career and of course being attached to incredible founders, one of the founders that I’ve worked with in the past is named Dan Martell. He’s the systems master. And being in his orbit and really getting my hands dirty in his business opened my eyes to really, for the first time being like, oh, wow. There is a way not only to systemize your marketing through funnels, I’m going a step beyond systemizing the meetings that you have, systemizing the reporting that you’re doing, systemizing how you set goals, how you set targets. Those KPIs, right? How do you manage those KPIs?
This opened up a whole new world for me and it really enabled me to understand how scaling is done at any level of business. I start incorporating that into my own business and with clients, and I’ve been able to see growth trajectory, you know, double or triple over the year. Because not only are we setting the systems in place, we’re getting the right people on the bus, we’re getting the support, we’re able to reinvest in our business, which is a place where a lot of folks want to be, they aim to be. But again, when you’re in the day to day, it’s very hard to step outside.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you mentioned in the early days, head down necessity. You got to get these things built. You got to build the business behind the scenes. You talked about getting burnt out. I also find a lot of people get bored. It’s like, okay, I’m just doing this again. And they forget to come back out of the necessity. Once they get that flywheel going, it’s like, now let’s come back and look at the vision. Yeah, let’s come back and look at the big idea and the big why and either revisit it or reimagine it, which is imperative to provide the fuel for that next level. Without that, you’re just going through the motions and you don’t have that enthusiasm, you don’t have that passion behind it anymore.
Victoria: Absolutely. First of all, anyone Listening to the podcast right now is already ahead of the curve, because, Melinda, with what you teach and the foundation that you give your students and your members, that’s something that many folks hunt and peck for that information around the Internet. You’re piecing it together over time and even simply having their ideal client avatar, having your messaging right, having your offers tight, having that flywheel set up, having those funnels set up to get to that point takes a lot of grit, it takes a lot of focus. And often what happens, this boredom point, it’s so interesting because we’re running as fast as we can to set up all of these things, and that takes up a lot of our time. It’s frustrating. It’s a learning curve, but we all have to go through it.
And that’s where zero to three years, more or less, you’re in it. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. One of my biggest philosophies, when we’re talking about scaling, you need to understand enough to give it away for all of us. Getting our hands dirty, doing the things, sending out the emails, setting up the funnels, setting up the tags, all those things. I think there is a necessary first stage in business where we all have to go through that. I certainly did. And what it allows us to do is understand these critical pieces of our business. But once we start getting to the next level, which really starts with getting some folks to take over some things so we can buy back our time.
Going back to Dan Martell, I just finished reading his book. One thing he says that I just think is so brilliant is this idea of the replacement ladder. His whole thing’s about buying back your time. But the replacement ladder goes through these critical stages in entrepreneurship where you shouldn’t be sort of investing into your business to start just having folks executing a bunch of things that have never been executed before, like net new, the idea is really like you’re getting your hands dirty building all these things, and then you are paying to bring people into your business to start buying back your time. That could start at the bottom rung, which is managing your inbox and your calendar, for example.
And that could be a very minimum investment into your business. But then that frees you up to think about that next layer, which is customer service and delivering on the product. And then beyond that is marketing. Beyond that is sales. And the final leg is leadership. So having some structure into how you should be investing into your business. The point of inflection, I think, for a lot of folks is saying, okay, I’m getting a little bit bored because all of this action sort of slows down when all the stuff set up. But to me, that’s where the real work begins because I think we get distracted. This shiny object syndrome is real and there’s so many ideas and the creativity that’s pumping through when it comes to marketing.
But if you understand that the real function of marketing in your business is to set up. You had mentioned the flywheel, so that’s something that I also am very big proponent of. You set up your, as I call it, the 24 by 7 marketing flywheel that needs to be set up. The real purpose of marketing is to iterating and improving that flywheel for the lifetime of your business. When we start unlocking performance in our marketing, it’s not about these big radical guerrilla marketing campaigns that make all the difference. For most businesses, it’s nothing more than a 10 degree shift. And more times than not in the messaging, right?
A 10 degree shift. By doing AB testing, making sure what you’re saying is connecting with our prospects, we are refining what that client journey looks like in these stages of the flywheel. There’s so much depth in each tactic of marketing. That’s the fun part, I think. But I don’t think a lot of people talk about that.
Melinda: No, I love it. And I want to go back to something that you just skipped right over super fast. But I want to pull it back out. It was when you were talking about Dan Martell’s book and that replacement ladder and the importance of buying back our time. And you said that’s really where scaling begins, is in finding those places where you can bring in people doing stuff you’ve already gotten your hands messy with. You’ve already figured out you have to have knowledge and then you delegate it, you hand it off.
And then you said, the next area that we buy back our time, the next area that we start scaling and put our attention on is the products and the delivery and then the marketing and then the leadership. And I would add in that order. And that’s very important because what I see is people, when they reach that burnout or that boredom or they got the foundation and they’re like, okay, now what? Let’s go to what’s next. Oh, it’s time to scale. The place they jump to is the marketing and they’re like, I’ve got to reach more people.
Victoria: And they start investing in ads or something?
Melinda: Right? And they start investing in ads when they’re not even sure who their avatar is yet, but they’re like if I do ads, I will scale or let me go create three more programs because if I have more programs to offer, I can scale. You know, there might be some truth to that. It’s the phrase in that order that is so important that I really want our listeners to grab ahold of with everything that you said. So, ladies and gentlemen, when you’re listening in, if you’re excited to scale, it starts with buying back your time.
So I really appreciate you taking us into that and then talking about it’s not the grandiose, it’s the 10 degree shifts. Because that I think is another misconception. When people hear the word scaling, they think everything has to be big. And usually it’s the 10 degree shifts that happen now. And it’s not very much, but the trajectory leads to big and that’s what people get confused about. Say more about that.
Victoria: Well, I think an interesting thing to chat about is where people get stuck. I primarily work with women, so the women that I work with come to me normally when they feel like their business has plateaued. They’ve reached their edge of their ability, they’re comfortably making these six figures. Right. They’re pretty happy because now you’ve sort of replaced a traditional salary. Love that. But as we know as business owners, top line revenue doesn’t particularly translate into our take home pay. In my own business, there’s a lot of conversations. I wonder if anyone can resonate with this. You know, my husband works in a traditional job and we started having conversations years ago where he was like, you’re the factor, you’re the variable here. Like, you are the one that is able to unlock uncapped growth in your business.
Whereas, you know, if you have a spouse or partner that has like a fixed income in a corporate job, their growth trajectory is quite capped. So again, I think this conversation is very interesting for people to start having in their own heads. Are really realizing that if you can get these pieces right and you have to do it in the lifestyle, that is right for you. Right. That potential for growth is. There’s no limits on it. But where do people get stuck? More times than not, they’re stuck between the delivery, the customer service, so the kind of like the product area and the marketing area. When that plateau is reached, the idea becomes, let me start working on another product.
A huge mistake is often trying to dive into a different segment. Right. Solve a different problem. And so what ends up happening when you are selling a product that have two ideal client avatars. So let’s Say you’re a coach that works with high level executives, but you’re like, oh, I can also help people that are looking to move up the corporate ladder. Right. Totally different ICA. Right. We’ve got leaders and wannabe leaders and the messaging for them where they hang out, the influencers that they’re listening to. It’s like two completely different tracks. If we want to connect and convert two different ideal client avatars, then we need two different landing pages, two different email sequences, two different ad sets with totally different messaging.
How do we handle social media? Then we start speaking to different people and so our message and our brand gets diffused. But if you’re a fan of Donald Miller, he has this quote which I love. Oftentimes it’s not our product or service that’s flawed, it’s the way that we talk about it. I believe that if we are holding steady in our products or service, we don’t go around tinkering with the offer. Right. We’ve validated the offer.This is really a growing through marketing problem. The way we grow through marketing is understanding what our biggest growth levers are, what are our opportunities. Because if you are pre 1 million in revenue, I can tell you, you have not tapped out your total addressable market.
You have not gotten deep enough into finding your ideal client and different ways to reach them, building out different lead gen sources, there’s more opportunity there. And often, if we decide to go after a different segment because we think it’s going to be lower hanging fruit, I’m telling you, absolutely is not. And the first step that I go through, it’s always going back to basics. Because even if we’ve gotten to half a million and we reached a plateau, 99% of the cases that I step into their business, we have to go back to brand clarity. That’s the first thing we do.
We don’t create brand from beginning. We say, okay, you already created your brand stuff with Melinda. We already know the ICA. Let’s touch stone on that and let’s do an audit. Does your communication strategy, does your marketing, does all of your stuff actually match or have you diverged from those core pieces of your brand and your business over the years? And 99% of the time the answer is yes. They have diverged from their original focus, original brand pillar and values and ideal client avatar and they started doing this disparate marketing program and in turn getting lackluster results.
Melinda: Yeah. And not only has the company often diverged, also the avatar evolves.
Victoria: Oh, I’m so glad that you said that.
Melinda: This is one of the things that we’ve experienced if we still had our messaging from all those years ago, our avatar, all of our listeners, they have evolved as the industry has evolved. So if we kept true to that, there’s a big disconnect. And so we had to go back and it’s like, okay, how does our messaging need to evolve to match the evolution? Which is why it’s important to go back to the basics and really touch on it.
Victoria: Especially during yearly planning is a really wonderful time to review all of this stuff.
Melinda: Now, when it comes to messaging, refining that, maybe updating that, going back, just really visiting that, how do you help your clients refine their sales and marketing strategies to support them in the scaling process?
Victoria: So again, I think the brand communication piece is, is a deep dive into everything that has previously been done. We review the ideal client avatar, we review our competitors. If you don’t feel like you have direct competitors, you can think of it as your sandbox, right? Who are, what are the other businesses? Who are the other coaches that you feel are playing in your same sandbox and doing a competitive analysis? What is the messaging that they’re using? What ads are they running? We can look at our Facebook ad library and understand what are the ads that they’re running, what messages is hitting for them. We can gain a picture of what’s going on in the marketplace and reestablish our unique selling point and position.
This is something we have to revisit and we have to refine from there. We look at, re looking at and refining the basics like our mission statement, our values and pillars. And we, we say, is this still relevant? Is this still important? Right? We do a psychoanalysis of our ideal client avatar and we really go deep into, you know, what are the things that’s on their mind? And it’s a wonderful time to do sort of group sessions. And this could be as easy as inviting everyone for a virtual coffee to have a candid conversation because it’s so valuable to be in community, in conversation with your ideal client, and recording those zoom calls, getting transcripts. Again, this is not new stuff. Things that I’m sure you encourage people to do at the beginning of their business.
But again, this is where, when we’re looking to get to that next stage, the processes we go through, once we understand what are their pain points, right? What are the pains? And we talk a lot in marketing about the painkiller versus the vitamin. A lot of us coaches and consultants out there, we’re so focused on the solution. And oftentimes, our messaging goes towards very solution oriented, very vitamin oriented. And we’re not meeting people with their pains that they’re dealing with now. Understanding what the economic and cultural environment is for our ideal client right now. So we can understand what those problems are through these conversations, through these surveys. And then we go through a messaging matrix process.
Melinda: I love it.
Victoria: Where we’re matching those pain points with our solutions. And then it’s about a testing, iterating and improving. Right. And a lot of what I teach and focus on is based on this idea of how can we set up the systems that allow us to test, iterate and approve. Because if we don’t have systems in place, not only in terms of automation, but also in terms of how we review the data. Right. What metrics are we pulling each month? Are we having conversation with our team? Even if it looks as lean as just a virtual assistant, you need to be in conversation with your team and having these talks about what are the metrics we’re seeing. How do we improve upon these metrics? Testing the messaging through our organic social or through AB testing subject lines and testing some of these theories of pain point solution.
Melinda: Yeah. And I want to point that out. So many coaches, as we’re working with them in the early days, and helping them get ready so they have a strong foundation to scale. When they start thinking about scaling, they start thinking, I’ve got to go big fast. I love what you just said about it might just be you and your virtual assistant. That’s it. A lot of people overlook that because it’s like, surely that’s not doing anything. It’s gotta be bigger. It’s like, no, it’s you and your virtual assistant having a meeting once a month, once a week, whatever it might be to look at the details. That’s where the scaling happens. It’s like real feet on the ground.
So it might be you, it might be just you and two or three other people. It might be you and your coach and this is where it begins. I don’t want to overlook the very first steps of where it begins because from there, being a systems geek and gal like I am, when you can build it at that level, you’re building the good habits. So down the road, when it is you and a management team of five other people, you already have the good habits in place and now you’re just doing more of what already works.
Victoria: 100%. One thing I also want to mention is when we talk about scaling, this really refers to scaling revenue. Many of us coaches and consultants don’t have an appetite to have 20 or 30 people on the team. I don’t think I ever want to have a business like that. There’s plenty of people that get invigorated by that and love that. But I can tell you from the coaching businesses that I worked in, you could easily get to multiple seven figures with a team of three or four. And that includes contractors and stuff like that. You don’t have to have a band of full time employees to get to that revenue level. And you can make an incredible impact on the legacy you leave behind, the wealth that you bring into your family.
Being able to just scale the revenue to that point, keeping that small team, I think that’s the dream, right? Because many of us are considering the lifestyle that we want. Some love to have 100 people on the team and that’s what excites them. But if that’s not you, scaling is not out of the option. Just thinking about it in a different way. And it’s about the systems and the way that you lead this small but mighty team. That’s the differentiator between the ones that can unlock that revenue versus the ones that stay struggling.
Melinda: And that’s why it’s important. We started this conversation talking about going back to your vision, right? And being clear in that it’s not just your vision for your business, your top line revenue, it’s your vision for your impact, it’s your vision for your lifestyle. It’s about clarifying the vision for all that, to see where they all intersect. I know for me with Coaches Console, I always knew that I wanted to impact thousands of coaches. I knew that from the very beginning. I also knew what my lifestyle, what I wanted it to be. I was recently divorced, so I had a lot of time in the early years. But I met my now husband and you know, all of a sudden I’m a stepmom with two kids in school.
So the lifestyle and business, I didn’t give up one or the other. But it’s like how do they both work together? So you’ve got to have that clarity of vision because they inform each other. And I knew for me with the degree that I wanted to work with people, it meant a certain top line revenue to represent that goal, which meant I’m probably going to have certain team members. I never set out to say I’m going to have a team of 24 people. Woo hoo. Like that was not a thing. But I learned my way into it because that’s what matched my vision and helped me have my lifestyle. So do not discount going back to revisit that vision when you’re getting started scaling.
Victoria: Many times when we’re in that beginning stage, we’re running as fast as we can, getting people in kind of manually. We’re really muscling to get all of this done. But when we think about scaling, it’s really, how can we infuse more ease into that process, no matter if it looks like thousands or dozens.
Melinda: Yeah, it’s beautiful. Let’s summarize some of the things that we’ve talked about. I have loved having this conversation and I love that we talked about right out of the gate. It’s about dreaming big, that we have to go back to that. And I love that you, you gave us that trajectory where a lot of times we’re doing the necessities and we hit that point of burnout or maybe boredom, and then we have to get back into it. If you want to start scaling, it starts with your time. How do you buy back your time, those initial steps, and then the product and delivery and then marketing and leadership in that order.
And I love that you took us into the 10 degree shift concept. And we talked about where do you get stuck, how you can unlock your greatest growth, but you can’t buy into this false idea about let me create another product and go big fast. And I just love the details that you shared and the value that you brought. It’s all about going back to the basics. We can’t overlook that and reverse engineering that vision so that we have the lifestyle and the business and both can be true at the same time. Victoria, do you have any parting words?
Victoria: I think that the resounding message from all of that, and this is something that Tony Robbins says all the time, mastering the basics. Business, there’s a lot of voices out there, right? We can get really distracted and it can be very confusing. But if we do a few things really well, we really master the basic pieces of marketing, sales, leadership, right? Then we are able to unlock that potential. Right. Because we are not diffusing our time, energy, effort, and investment. So thank you so much, Melinda.
If anyone is interested in learning a little bit more about how to scale business, right? If you feel like you have reached a plateau and are ready to get to that next level, I have a free resource that might be useful to get those wheels turning. It is a guide on how to end marketing overwhelm. And it brings you through four core systems that I help people set up to grow what I call a scalable marketing machine. So if you want to grab that, you can go to Ugli Ventures and it’s ugli with an I. So uglyventures.com/overwhelm.
Melinda: Awesome.Well, thank you so much, Victoria. And thank you everybody for listening to this episode of Just Between Coaches. Like she said, you can find out more about her at Ugli Ventures. That’s ugli with an I. She’s got that amazing resource uglyientures.com/overwhelm. I want to thank you so much for coming to this show and bringing so much detail into this topic to help coaches keep growing and keep making an impact.
Victoria: Thank you so much.
Melinda: I’m Melinda Cohan and you’ve been listening to Just Between Coaches. Just Between Coaches is part of the Mirasee FM Podcast Network, which also includes such shows as Course Lab and Neuroscience of Coaching. For more great episodes of Just Between Coaches, follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. If you enjoyed the show and want to help spread the word, please leave us a five star review and tell your friends. Thank you and I’ll see you next time.