Mariah Coz is a business architect, a multimillion-dollar mentor, and the founder of Fearless CEO. She’s been in the game for so long that I called her the “Dumbledore” of online business. 🧙 

This is a fab conversation about building community inside your group program, imagining up the most empowering enrollment experience for high-ticket offers, using the “Champagne Client” approach to speak to the most aligned people, and how to deal with imposter thoughts when working with our dream clients.

“There are high-level clients sitting and waiting in the wings. I called it “Lurking in luxury.” They’re not responding, they’re not the loudest, and they’re not commenting on your content … But all the people who are just silently watching you? They’re literally waiting for you to put something out there that speaks to them and resonates with them.”   – Mariah Coz

Highlights from the podcast episode: 

We discussed:

[02:26] Mariah’s story  of becoming a business mentor

I feel like I have lived a lot of different lives before becoming a business mentor. I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve been the singer in a band, I have traveled around the country, made documentaries, done all sorts of different fun things, and dropped out of school to do some projects. I went to a very non-traditional school, a sort of education situation, for sustainable building and sustainable design. 

One of the things I became really interested in and that I built my first digital business around was actually renovating vintage campers to be off the grid with sustainable materials, ecosystems, and all that kind of stuff. I got really interested in that, way back in 2014. I started a blog about it, I started teaching workshops about it, and that turned into my first online course business, which is just totally unrelated to business coaching, or anything like that. 

I built that into a successful business using relationship marketing, affiliates, joint ventures, and things like that. Then, of course, what happens really organically is that people start asking you: “How are you doing that?”, “How do you set up your course?”, “How’d you do the tech?”, “How are you marketing it?”, “How do you do these affiliate promos?”. People just started asking me how I was running this little course that was all about living in a camper or living in a tiny house, and before you know it, I was starting to partner with people, I was helping them build their businesses.

So, I was like, “You know what? I’ll start another blog where I’ll talk about the behind-the-scenes of what I’m doing.” and that very quickly took off. I applied a lot of the same principles. Again, I was always really focused on relationship marketing, joint ventures, affiliates, and just on partnerships and how we can connect with other people who have audiences. Podcasts, for example, are such a great way to do that now. Then, when I started that business, which is now Fearless CEO, that really took off. 

There was a time when I was running both at the same time, just busy. Then, the business side did start to eclipse my first business and I started focusing on that. That was, I think, in May of 2015 when we launched our first little mini course under what is now the Fearless CEO brand that used to be called something else. And then… here we are now, seven years later. 

It’s amazing to me that I’ve been able to stick with this. I mean, we’ve gone through a lot of evolutions. We’ve definitely changed our business model many times. My own philosophy has changed many times and will continue to. But it is kind of crazy to me that I’ve been able to stick with the same business for seven years when I used to just hop around doing different things every six months. So, there’s something right going on here, because I’ve been able to continue enjoying it for a long time.

[06:33] How social media can easefully fit into our business 

It’s really interesting because I do think that there are some people who you see on social media and you can tell that it is so authentic and very genuine for them. It feels like they are literally in their art form when they are on social media. It feels like there are some people who love to create for that type of platform, they love to create that type of content, it comes naturally to them, and they’re good at it. 

You can tell that it really does feel like an authentic expression for certain people. However, that person is not me. I was really late to social media. Even joining Facebook or Instagram didn’t happen until years and years after I had already been growing this business. 

Primarily, like I said, I focused on relationships and email list building. So, building a community on my email list, which sounds old school, but I still preach it because you don’t own the social media platforms that you create all this content for. You’re creating your profile, you’re getting your followers, you’re doing all this stuff, and then you could just lose your account at any time, which has happened to many of my friends and colleagues. So, I always was really focused on emails and really focused on relationships, like partnerships, whether that’s affiliates, promoting other people, doing joint venture webinars, doing guest posting, guesting on podcasts, or blogs, or something like that. 

If you love social media, continue doing that, make the most of it, and get in while you can, but make sure you have a backup plan. Make sure you have your own platform that you own, which is getting people onto your SMS list, getting people onto your email list, getting people to follow you on platforms that you own, and getting people to follow your podcast. 

Personally, I’ve never been great at social media. I’ve never been consistent, never been focused on it, never really cared. It’s always sort of an afterthought to me, like “Oh, I just found this thing. I’ll post it really quick, or whatever.” But, especially right now, even just in the last few weeks, I’ve been really thinking “Now is the time for me to leave social media and focus on those platforms that we own. Not even kind of bridging it like, ‘Oh, I’ve got one foot there, one foot here’.” 

I’ve always focused on our own platforms, but I’m still kind of dabbling in Instagram. Now I don’t really see the point in dabbling in social media anymore. If you’re not going to go all in on it and own those platforms, then, really, what’s the point? So, for me, it’s really shifting back to a lot of the things that grew our business back in 2015 in the first place: blogging, partnerships, relationships, podcasting, all those things that feel kind of classic, but I think they’re very timeless. 

I do have a free training on my website that’s “How To Run Your Business Without Social Media” and how to transition off social media. We did this whole training for our clients that I decided to make public because I really do think this is a conversation that a lot of people are having. 

If you love social media, then stick with it, I’m not going to argue that people need to get off of it or anything. But, if you don’t love it, I just don’t think that it’s the best place to spend your energy. Even though it feels like you have to and it feels like a requirement at this time, it’s really not and I actually really love and admire people who just opt out of social media altogether.

[10:45] How to build community online with your group program

I think that this was a really hard choice for us to go off of Facebook. I still don’t know what the perfect platform is. Like, Circle is a great platform and there’re lots of other ones that have similar functionality. 

Being on Facebook in a free group where you don’t own the platform. It’s free, so you have no recourse. There’s no support email for Facebook. There’s no way to fix something and I have had the experience of being blocked from commenting in my own community groups. We knew that we had to move off of there when my coaches and myself got blocked from being able to comment and post in our own groups, and it’s just nothing you can fix. Obviously, you don’t own a platform like Circle, but you pay for it, so there’s customer service. You’re not just going to get kicked off for no reason and there’s some way for you to get support.

For us, we use Slack as a team, we’re in Slack all day, every day as a team talking to each other, it comes very naturally to us. So, choosing Slack was something that worked for us. Now, do I think it is the end all be all, the best thing that everyone should be using? Not necessarily.

If you’re going to choose a platform that’s off social media, I do think that you need to think about your audience. For us, business owners know Slack, and a lot of us use it as business owners, maybe with our teams or something like that. But, if you’re in a totally different niche, you might be having a community that has never logged into Slack before, and never used it, so that probably wouldn’t work for you. You want to pick something that feels familiar enough, or that feels like something they can adapt to.

We’ve been happy with that Slack community, but I just keep thinking there is an opportunity for something better. I just don’t know what it is yet, though. There are really good alternatives, but I just keep thinking that, eventually there’ll be something that feels even more organic and natural that people like to engage with.

The main thing, though, is that the platform is not what to get stuck on. The tech, the platform, that’s not what’s going to make or break your community. The main thing is that you have a bunch of people who have a common interest or a common goal they’re all working towards, you have people who are on the same journey together, even if they’re at different stages on that journey, and that you have you as the leader are showing up and setting the tone and creating the energy of the space. I think that’s really important too. All of those things are going to be what keeps people engaging and having fun in there, not necessarily like “oh, did I pick the right tech platform?”.

[15:06] The system for selling high ticket offers without sales calls

For years and years, my team has been using social media, but only as a communication channel to have one-on-one conversations asynchronously with people in the direct messages, not as a social media platform to post content on, which I think is very interesting. 

We have leveraged [social media] into a multimillion-dollar business, but not in the way you think. We did it totally privately, behind the scenes in the direct messages with people, and not by posting content or getting comments, likes, views, or anything like that. It’s a totally different approach for us, we essentially use social media as an alternative.

The reason we started doing this, with the DMs specifically, is that for a really long time, like 2017, 2018, and probably even more than that, all of my emails were blacklisted, all my emails went to spam, and my email address wouldn’t deliver to any inboxes. It was just this huge tech issue that no one could solve, but it was ongoing. So, I had to come up with an alternative to email and it was private one-on-one conversations in the direct messages of Instagram or Facebook Messenger or something like that, as a way to get around the fact that all of my emails were going to spam. 

To back up a little bit, I transitioned to a high ticket program from a self-study course business, in January of 2018 with the new year. At the end of 2017, I had been selling $1,200 self-study courses like a lot of us had been at that time. I went to a mastermind meet-up in person, which is such a powerful experience to be in person with other people who are maybe a few steps ahead of you, and they’re sharing about their business. I was really inspired by one person that I met there who had a $14,000 program. At that time, back in the winter of 2017, I did not know that people could charge that much, I did not know that was even possible. I didn’t know about anything high ticket. I didn’t even know that was a world that existed until I talked to that person about their business. They told me “Well, I basically work really closely with my clients, and I help them create this and that, and we do all these things together.” I was like, “Wow, that’s so fascinating.” 

So, then, by December 25, or something, into January of that year, I launched a $10,000 program, my first high ticket program. In those first few months of 2018, I tried my best because everyone told me that in order to sell something at $10,000 or $15,000 or more, you have to do sales calls, that is a requirement. That’s what this particular mentor that I had at the time was telling me. So, for two or three months, I really did try. I tried to do sales calls. I was so stressed, so tired, and so burnt out. I’m a raging introvert, so really, it wasn’t working for me. I was so anxious, and because I was doing all the sales calls myself at that time I would take it really personally when someone said no, which I know I shouldn’t have but I just couldn’t get away from it. It got to the point where my team told me “You are going to crash and burn. We’re concerned for your mental health. We’re concerned for your energy. You’re really burning the candle at both ends trying to do these sales calls.” And I was like, “You know what? We’re either going to shut down this whole high ticket program idea and go back to selling $1,000 courses because sales calls are no longer on the table, or let me try one thing.”

In this frustration and desperation, I was like “this is the last straw and if it doesn’t work, then we’re just going to shut it down and move on and do something else” but with that feeling, I created this new system of enrolling people, one-to-many in a high ticket program using a combination of trainings and a webinar-style training, but it’s a webinar you’ve never seen before, and using the process of intentional follow up via both email and direct messages and SMS. It was really just something I put together at the last minute to be like, either this is going to work, or we’re going to not do this at all anymore. And, it freaking worked! 

We enrolled 30 people over the course of three days into our $10,000 program back at the beginning of 2018, using this process. That weekend that we did that literally changed the trajectory of our entire business. I was like, “Oh, crap! Did I just figure that out? Did we just actually do that?” Then, it was even more shocking. I’m an evergreen person, I like to make a live recording once and then get that whole system on evergreen automated. So, I put all that stuff that we had done during that three-day live promo, put it all into an automated evergreen thing, and it was working on evergreen. People were enrolling in the program. They were watching the recorded video, I was answering their questions asynchronously in the direct messages and they were just enrolling in the $10,000 program. We enrolled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that way. 

Eventually, of course, as always happens, people started asking me: “How are you doing that?”, “How are you enrolling hundreds of clients without sales calls?” like, “What is going on over in Mariah’s world?” People were shocked. They were like, “That’s not possible!” It literally didn’t exist and now you can kind of see it taking over the internet. People told me it was impossible until I did it. Then, of course, that turned into people asking how I was doing that, so I started out by teaching a very small group of people as a little tiny pilot thing and started teaching a couple of people how our whole system works for selling high ticket without sales calls. We use a combination of pre-recorded assets, we use a combination of automation, and that personal touch of direct messaging with people using either their Instagram profile or Facebook Messenger or something like that. That then took over our whole business as well. That blew up. 

It started with a handful of people in a little pilot round and then by the end of that year, in 2020 when everything went crazy, we had 300 people in High Ticket Hybrid ™. I always thought it would be this tiny little program, like “I’ll teach it to a group of 10 people. It’ll be super quiet. It’ll be like my secret little side project.” and it just blew up. It took over our whole business and it became what we are known for. 

It’s really interesting because I don’t like to be on social media creating content for that every day, but we have really figured out how to use those social media direct messages to truly connect with people. What we do in that process is yes, chat back and forth with text, but one thing that’s so powerful is voice messages on all those platforms. You can use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Voxer, LinkedIn Messenger, and Instagram messenger, but using the voice message feature just to send a little 30 to 60-second voice message to someone is so powerful. We discovered that, usually, you can enroll a $10,000 or $20,000 client with a 60-second voice message, without a 60-minute phone call. It’s just as impactful and a lot more convenient to be asynchronous, not just for you as the coach and the CEO, but also for your clients and customers. People are really busy right now. Everyone has Zoom fatigue, they don’t want to get on an hour-long call, just to learn about what your program includes, it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

People are skeptical of sales calls. First of all, they can’t even find the time in their schedule, and then they have to show up at a certain place. It’s just a barrier to them enrolling. People are really skeptical of those calls because they’ve had bad sales experiences before, and I don’t blame people for not wanting to get on sales calls and thinking they’re going to get trapped. I just never want someone to feel that. 

I give people all the information, it’s laid out. We put it in video format, typed out on a page, and in visuals. We give people all the information they need. We say “Hey, we’re here. We’re available for you to ask us any questions that you have. We’re always here to chat with you, but there’s no pressure. We’re not going to make you pay on a phone call or anything like that”, and I think it’s wild that that’s the standard right now.

Sales calls are just such a barrier. There are time zones, people are busy, and more. There’s really no reason in the modern age that you should have to schedule a call to get the information and to have those conversations. I think especially for a lot of our clients with chronic illness, or disabilities, or childcare – I mean a lot of people have inconsistent childcare – it’s not possible for them to book multiple sales calls a day. So, this system allows you to sell your courses in the pockets of your day. If you have a quiet moment, or if you have two minutes here and there you can just respond back to your messages. A lot of people are like “Oh, yeah. I’m just on my couch watching movies with my kids and responding to my DMs, and that’s it.”

[28:13] The Champagne Client Concept

I have a mini-course on Champagne Client messaging, and I am giving everyone in The Campfire Circle’s audience a coupon code so they can get it for free. 

We get asked a lot about the Champagne Client concept. It’s not something that I was aware of, until years and years of just doing it organically, which is kind of how a lot of things go for me. Usually, I don’t really know what I’m doing until after, and then I can look back, break it down, try to put a framework around it, and be like, “Oh, yeah. I guess I do have a process. I thought I was just doing that intuitively.” 

A lot of people would ask: “How do you target your Facebook ads so that it only lands in front of people who are ready to invest or people who are the right fit for your program?”, or “How do you attract all these clients? How are you creating content or whatever that’s attracting all these high-level people?” It’s not a Facebook Ads setting, it’s not anything like that. It is a very specific process of speaking to the highest-level client that you can imagine. All this really requires is courage, and this is what I teach in the Champagne Client course. That’s the only thing you have to do.

The problem is that a lot of people are walking around creating content for the absolute newbies and for people that they don’t even really feel aligned with serving or working with, to be honest. So many people are walking around saying things like, “Well, this is just who I have in my audience, so I need to create content for them”, or “Ugh! I just always attract people who aren’t ready for my programs,” or “I just need to create content for the newbies because that’s the biggest pool of people, right? That’s how I’m going to attract the most amount of people.” Well, if you keep doing that, you get stuck in this cycle of creating content not for your ideal clients, but for people who aren’t really ready for your program. Then, you wonder why you only have people in your audience who aren’t ready for your program. And then, you’re frustrated that everyone’s telling you they’re not going to invest in your program, and it just keeps going around and around.

The thing that I had to realize is that there are a lot of very high-level clients kind of sitting and waiting in the wings. Lurking in luxury is what I call it because they’re like lurking, they’re not responding, they’re not the loudest, and they’re not commenting on all your content. So, you think that you have to create content for all the newbies because those people are commenting and telling you XYZ. But all the people who are just silently watching you? They’re literally waiting for you to put something out there that actually speaks to them and resonates with them. In the Champagne Client course, you’ll see how we really shift things around. One example was: “how someone with no experience, no resume, and no topic or something can get a speaking gig.” Basically, I’m like, “You’re just creating this piece of content for like the worst client, why would you do that?” and that someone said to me behind the scenes “Oh, I really wish I could work with famous authors to turn their books into speaking gigs and speaking talks or whatever.” so, I’m like, “Okay, so why don’t you change it from ‘how to you know how to book a speaking gig with no experience and nothing to your name’ and everything is bad, to say something like ‘how to turn your best-selling book into a successful speaking gig’?” Do you know what I mean? Like, why don’t you call that out and speak to someone who is at the top of their game or at the top of their niche, or those dreamy clients that you want to work with?

We just go in and overhaul people’s content, just in that way over and over and over again, so that they can really shift. It really is fundamentally a shift from speaking to lack, scarcity, and fear, and always just calling out like pain points. So, instead of being like, “you’re suffering so much, this is what you need.” what if you just spoke to the people who are your dream clients and are successful in some way, but they need what you have? Again, if you want to work with famous musicians or you want to work with best-selling authors, or whatever, why aren’t you saying that? Why aren’t you writing articles and content for that? We have hundreds of testimonials from our clients saying: “I posted my first piece of champagne client content and a celebrity just booked into my program.” 

All of these Champagne Clients, these level 10, high-level clients are sitting in your audience, they are following you, they’re watching you. You don’t know it, because you’re not speaking to them, but the minute that you put out a piece of content that speaks to them, and that’s designed for them, it’s like they magnetize and come out of the woodwork and start coming towards you. You will be shocked at the shift that can occur, but it does require courage. A lot of people are just too scared to do that because they don’t think that they’re good enough to work with those people or they just think “oh, no, I just always attract newbies who can never invest in my programs, so we’re just going to keep talking to them.” but you have got to make that shift.

When we think about nonprofits, it doesn’t even have to be money. If you think about what the ideal situation is, there’s this movement, they have this huge social media following, the leader is super inspiring, and they have this amazing story, but they haven’t turned it into money yet. So, it could even just be about what those foundational things that your ideal dream client has in place are and how to leverage your hundreds of 1000s of social media followers into donations for your social impact project. 

Your Champagne Client is not just someone who has a lot of money, that’s not what it is. They have these features, or these attributes, or these like foundations about them that make them such a perfect fit to come in and leverage those things in your program.

A lot of artists come in with that scarcity mindset as well, where they have had that starving artist mentality, and a lot of people in the nonprofit sector are conditioned to just assume that it’s really, really hard to get contributions or to have people spend money or something. But what if there’s someone out there who’s like, “Gosh, we have so much money in our fund we don’t even know what to spend it on.” and why not speak to them?

Your Champagne Clients are waiting, and that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter how much stuff you post out there, you might get zero comments, but you get 10 DMs from perfect-fit clients. They’re not commenting and they’re not really necessarily engaging in the typical sense. It might look like crickets on the outside, but you’re getting really high-quality clients in your DMs privately that actually turn into clients and that’s the main thing.

[37:49] How Mariah embodies the Fearless CEO

“Fearless CEO” is so much more than just a name, which sounds so cheesy, I know. At the end of 2021, the name, the rebrand, and everything happened in less than a month. I had the idea. I went out and bought the trademark from other people. Someone else had a defunct, old URL that they hadn’t been using for a long time, so I bought the trademark. I went and did all the stuff. We did the rebrand and it was about a month from having a new idea to it being done. 

I was really in a phase of becoming super aware. I deal with impostor syndrome all the time. I have anxiety, I have depression. I’m always very open about mental illness. I just can tell when I am the biggest thing holding me back. I’m just hyper-aware of when I’m the biggest thing holding me back and I am in my own way. 

I was journaling and thinking about things and I was like, “Imagine if I could just suspend my fear that grips my heart every day because I’m so anxious about everything? Imagine if I could just suspend that fear for 24 hours. What would I do in those 24 hours?” So, I started doing that and practicing and imagining and then being like, “Well, okay. I’ll just post that thing and see what happens.” or “I’ll just send that email to that person and pitch myself and see what happens.” or “I’ll just redesign that thing and see what happens.” Do you know what I mean? Like, “Okay. So, I’m just going to suspend my fear and if I was fearless for 24 hours, what could I do?” I kept doing that over and over and really exploring what that looked like. I became fascinated with how differently I was operating day to day out of fear. 

I think the irony of this is that this was happening as our business experienced explosive growth. We were the most successful we’d ever been, everything looked like it was the most perfect thing. We got the Inc. 5000. We were one of the fastest-growing companies in America. As that was all happening, I was just getting increasingly and increasingly anxious because that was a lot of pressure. So, my fear had increased, as the success increased, because I was so afraid that now we had achieved this level of success, that I was going to mess it up, I was going to ruin it, I was going to break it, or I was going to do something wrong. I started just tightening up as the success increased. I just started feeling more and more anxious. 

So, the Fearless CEO was really my way of working through that and finding a title, an identity that I could embody and step into. A lot of times, I have to think about it, I have to choose. Every morning, I have to choose: am I going to show up as a Fearless CEO today or is my anxiety going to get the best of me? And sometimes it does, I’m not a Fearless CEO every day for sure. When I thought of it, it popped into my brain, and I thought “that is an identity and a word that I can embody.” It gives me almost an alter ego to say “If I was going to show up as a Fearless CEO today, how would I act? What would I do? What decisions would I make? How would I communicate with people?” 

It’s different for everyone and there’s no definition of who it is and what it is. But, how is Mariah going to show up as a Fearless CEO today? and I needed that. I desperately needed that at the end of 2021, because I was just consumed with the fear of making a mistake or messing it up or of people being mad at me and I needed that reminder. 

I needed that identity to give me the opportunity and just the space to show up fearlessly again. Then, we rebranded. 2022 has been so different because we’ve been experimenting a lot and, again, just really trying to be like, “Well, if I was being fearless… I’ll just freaking go for it. I don’t care what people say, I’m going to try it.” So, I feel like it’s just given me an avenue to do that. It has changed the way we operate, the way we teach, and the content that we teach our clients because operating like a Fearless CEO really does touch every component of our business. It’s so much more than just a cute brand name. It really has shifted how we teach and how we communicate with clients, and how we operate at every level.

[43:53] The open possibilities of having an evergreen program

If you sell courses, high-ticket coaching, low-ticket virtual digital products, or whatever, I think having evergreen mixed with live launches is the ideal situation. I’m really not an either-or person and that’s actually why our program is called High Ticket Hybrid™. I take a hybrid approach to everything and there’s this very like black and white thinking out there, like: “you either have to do this or that”, “you have to do sales calls or no sales calls” or “you have to do launches or evergreen” and it’s like one is evil and one is good. I mean, that’s true for so many different things in this industry, like mindset or strategy, and one or the other is the winner. 

But for me, everything working together is your best bet. You are going to have more resiliency and sustainability if you have a hybrid approach to your program delivery. It’s not that coaching is good, and courses are bad, it’s that they’re both great and if you combine them, they’re even better.

I just believe in the hybrid power of doing multiple things together and that’s why I use that word. “Ecosystem” is when you have an evergreen program where people are applying for your coaching program year-round, you’re accepting applications all throughout the year, and people will have an established evergreen window to enroll and to make their decision. Usually, people might have some sort of bonus or something like that during that enrollment window. Then maybe once or twice a year, also having a live promotion, live enrollment, live launch, or whatever you want to call it. 

That is a nice combination because they actually work together and when you do go to do a live enrollment or a live launch once or twice a year, all the people who had applied for and gone through your evergreen funnel during the year leading up to that are warmed up and ready to join at your next live promo. So, it really does help to have both. They work really well together. They actually feed on each other and work together really beautifully. 

Having evergreen, for me, is just like a sense of calmness. I will say that evergreen is not passive, it’s proactive. When you’re on evergreen, the beauty of it and what I love is that every single day I can wake up and say, “I can make a sale today.” It’s kind of cool that when my program is on evergreen, I could post something or I could send an email, get an applicant, and then enroll someone by the end of the day. 

And that magic is just open to me. Evergreen feels like this open possibility that magic can happen at any time. I mean, I might make a $10,000 sale today and who’s to say I won’t? And I love that. That possibility is exciting for me. Anything is possible every day on evergreen, there’s no limit, and there are no rules.

The opposite of that is having only live launches, and I’m not dissing live launches, because I love them and they’re part of the ecosystem, but if you only have that, then in between your live launches, there’s none of that possibility and magic of like, “Oh, what if I wake up to a sale tomorrow? That would be cool.” Instead, that’s literally not possible because there’s no link. 

I don’t think of having evergreen as passive income, or passive sales, I think of it as open possibilities. With it, anything is possible, and you can go out there and make your own magic any day. You can follow up with those 10 leads from last week, go and send an email, post on social media, do whatever you want to do, drum up some interest, and let’s get this thing going.

With an evergreen program, you’re allowing people to access the support they need when they need it most because it most likely won’t line up with your launch schedule. There’s the example of helping someone get through a difficult personal time. This person is going to come to you, they’re going to be like, “I need help today. I just discovered your method. I just discovered your website. I need your help.” Then, are you going to tell them “No, you really need support, but you have to wait six months”? 

Depending on what you teach, it’s just as urgent for people, it really is. It’s something that they need right then and there. So, just giving people the opportunity to access that support and coaching from you is, I think, a kindness that you can offer to people.

Internal urgency is the most important thing. Countdown timers and expiring bonuses, all that stuff doesn’t matter and isn’t the real thing. 

The real thing is: are you communicating the value of your offer in a way that makes people think “this is a priority for me because I care about it, because it feels right, and because I’m excited”? If they read your copy or they see your video, would they think “Why would I wait six months? That would be crazy for me to wait six months for, when three weeks from now I could be shifting my mindset, I could be shifting my life, I could be having this whole new experience”? You want people to be driven by that. By the positive, like “I’m running towards this wonderful outcome that I’m so excited about. I can’t wait to get started.” Rather than “You’re going to miss out! You have to join right now! Your life is going to be terrible if you don’t join!” That’s not the vibe.

The vibe is “Hey, how soon do you want to start experiencing shifts? Because it could be happening in a week or two if you join.” So, just getting people excited about what could happen instead of this “bad punishment type of thing” is how we like to approach things. Then, it’s just always an open environment and what makes it empowering is giving people the information and being there to answer their questions, but they’re not pressured, one way or the other.

[51:50] Mariah’s big dreamy vision for herself and other fearless CEOs

I don’t share content consistently, what I do is I do a virtual conference two or three times a year where I basically share all my thoughts in one day, in a big giant thing. So, one of the thoughts I’ve been thinking lately and that I would like to share is that having grown our business very quickly over the last few years, hitting the Inc. 5000, and the $5 million mark I think it’s very important to assess and really make sure that that is what you want. 

What I want for everyone is that they assess what the best business level, level of scale, or design for them is. That’s why we love the hybrid business model, because hybrid is customized to each person. Someone’s hybrid business could be courses plus coaching, someone’s hybrid business could be low ticket plus high ticket, and some people’s hybrid business is done for you plus coaching. It’s like there are all these different options. 

So, it’s really making sure that everyone is getting in tune with what their goals are unique to them. I know it sounds so cheesy, but again, please don’t build your business based on someone else’s goals, what you saw on social media, or on guilt that you have that you’re far behind everyone else is going faster than you.

There’s a lot of hard stuff that comes with scale, or that comes with growth. Like I explained to you, I felt just so anxious and terrified, the more successful we became because I was like “there are so many things that I could mess up now”. 

I just wanted to put this in your ear, for everyone who’s listening and for the people that I serve, that I really want them to have this most beautiful business that is designed for them, and not based on other people or fake arbitrary goals that they picked up from the internet or something like that. So, I just really want everyone, including myself, to continue to refine, refine, and realign with what that looks like. Make sure that you’re regularly checking in with yourself like, “Hey, am I on the road that I’m meant to be on? Oh, yeah, it seems like I took a detour a few exits back, and I need to get back on.” So, I think that I think that’s important.

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Resources from this episode:

AMAZING news! Mariah has given our listeners a FREE copy of her Champagne Client Content Kit mini-course (normally $300.) You can find all the details for the course here, and use the coupon code Campfirecircle, until 3/1/2023 to access the course.

You know what else is free? 14 LinkedIn Content Prompts: Build your personal brand and thought leadership, show up for your target audience and grow your know-like-trust factor with your professional audience on LinkedIn.

Connect with Mariah Coz: 

Website: fearlessceo.co

LinkedIn: Mariah Coz

Instagram: @mariahpcoz

YouTube: @MariahCoz

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: Tania Bhattacharyya

Instagram: @taniabhat