The "Burning the Boats" Trap Killing Your Coaching Biz

Online coaches and consultants, if you’d like to sign your dream clients and scale, there's a link below that shows how we can help. It's a funnel, obviously, but it explains what we do if you're looking to scale. 

https://youtu.be/P_H2U2jxYCQ

I keep seeing coaches fall in love with the idea of "burning the boats." Go all in, shut everything else down, and bet the whole business on one new move.

It sounds bold and feels like commitment, but when you're trying to scale an established coaching business, it's one of the fastest ways to blow up everything you've built.

When you're starting from zero, going all in makes sense because there's nothing to protect. Once you have something working, that same move becomes the reason you move three steps forward and one step back.

I've made this mistake myself. I've shut down marketing teams too early. I've pivoted my ICP overnight. Each time, I cost the business months of progress I didn't need to lose.

In this video, I break down why scaling works differently from starting, why your new initiatives should be treated like a knob you slowly turn up instead of a switch you flip, and the exact stage where burning the boats actually is the right call.

Transcript

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The worst thing you can do when you're trying to scale your online coaching business is a concept called burning the boats. And in this video, I'm going to explain to you what this concept means and how you can avoid it like a plague. Just because burning the boats is going to make sure you keep going in cycles if you're trying to scale your business. And if you find yourself moving three steps forward and one step back, it's likely because you are suffering from this concept of burning the boats. So what does this actually mean? Burning the bolts just means when you have a new initiative that you want to test or a new idea that you want to implement, you completely shut down the thing that you were doing before that was working slightly. So let me give you an example of this. I have so many examples of this by the way. First example is say you are taking sales calls yourself and you are getting to a point in your coaching business where you want to add an additional salesperson because you are just tired of taking all the sales calls yourself. You're ready to leave the point where you are taking sales calls all the time. If you are suffering from burning the boats, when you bring on a new salesperson, what you're going to automatically do is just hand off all the calls to the salesperson and then stop taking calls completely overnight. And if you do that, you're genuinely going to like tank your business. So bringing on a salesperson is one way to scale your business. But burning the boats in this case is you stopping sales calls completely and handing off all your sales calls to this person immediately. And when you do that, you see they won't close as well as you can, they will literally just not close as many deals as you can. You see a huge dip in your revenue, and that's just not a good look. But ideally, how this should work normally is you keep taking sales calls as normal, you hire the salesperson, then you try to book more calls, and then you hand off the overflow to the salesperson. So you can see how you still kept the thing that has been working for you so far, but you've still been able to add a new initiative without burning the bolts, pretty much. That is a perfect example of this. Another one is say you are currently servicing like three, four different avatars right now, and you're still getting sales, you're still getting customers from servicing these three or four avatars. And because someone told you, Oh, like these other two avatars you're servicing, they don't have money. Narrow down on this one avatar. If you completely shut down all your marketing to the other people and only narrow down on one avatar just immediately, like you flip the switch immediately, you're going to see a huge dip in your revenue. When ideally you can just start to scale spend on that one avatar only and still keep the other things that you have running before and still keep those ones going. So you get the idea here, you don't want to be in a place where you are burning the bolts, quote unquote, when you have a new initiative because it just doesn't work. And I've experienced this so many times. I like seeing other entrepreneurs too as well talk about this concept. So you don't want to be that person now. When you're going from zero to one, like if nothing is working right now, then this is what you actually want to do. Like you want to be in a place where you are like shutting things down, starting again, launching things from scratch, just trying to find something that actually works. Like if you're going from zero to one, you want to be in a place where you're going all in, you're quitting your job to go all in on your coaching business, you're shutting down all distractions to record your course modules and so on and so forth. So that's when you want to ideally do this. But because we get rewarded so much for doing this when we are like new stage entrepreneurs, we get rewarded for like burning the boats because that's the only way you can actually find real success in a business. So because you get rewarded so much for doing this, you think that is how you need to continue to operate to grow and to scale your online education business, but that's not the case, right? Because you want to constantly be in a place where you are not starting from zero all the time. Because how people actually scale like businesses, from what I've experienced, is you start at zero, you go to one. If you want to go from one to two, you have to keep doing everything you were doing from zero to one at the same intensity that you were doing it before, and then add one to it to go to two. If you want to go from two to ten, you have to literally keep everything you were doing from zero to two that has to stay the same at the same intensity at the same level, and then you add from two to ten to it. So, what most people do is they go from zero to one, they are ready to go from one to two, then they shut down what took them from zero to one, and then they want to go from one to two. So, if you do that, you just keep seeing that you're going in cycles and cycles and cycles and cycles, and you won't literally scale the business if you keep repeating the same cycle because you want to be in a place where you're not burning the boats all the time, and you just have this stability when you find something that works, even if you have new initiatives. Usually it's never going to be a switch that oh, you need to shut this thing down and start this new thing. It's always going to be like you're turning a knob, so it's going to be a slow process to transition into the new thing, just so you don't sacrifice everything you've built from before up until now. A good example of this is like earlier this year, we decided to like stop marketing for the agency for a while just because we had like quite a number of clients that we felt like we could really scale aggressively. And after we made that decision, again, we suffered from this idea of burning the boats pretty much, and we shut down the entire marketing team, but let go of the whole outbound team that we have set up, which communicated this with the team that guys, we're not going to be marketing for the next few months just because we want to lock in on the current clients that we have. We renegotiated some terms that we had with some employees, and then it turns out, like one month later or two months later, that was a very terrible decision. And we already did a lot of things as a result of us shutting down marketing. So it's never going to be like oh, this huge leap that you just shut things down at once, you shut everything down. It's always going to be a knob most of the time and not always going to be a switch. Same thing happened to us last year as well, where we decided to change our ICP and change what we were targeting for our business. So before we were working with just purely creators who are starting their coaching businesses from scratch, and that was who we were targeting in our marketing messages, and that wasn't working. And we decided to pivot into helping just purely coaches who already had an established business. And again, we shut down the entire marketing system that we had before. And it turns out that if we had just waited like three more months, I would have figured out a way to solve the problem that we were facing before. We would have just maintained the same business we had before and not have to pivot. It just always happens in business where you have this new idea, you have this new initiative, and the most exciting thing to do is usually just to burn the boats and flip into this new thing, usually because it feels less painful than like it's more painful to not burn the boats than it is to actually burn the boats because it's exciting, and managing those two things during the period of transition is usually very painful.