Investing in a coaching program can be a game-changer for your business—but is it always worth the money? In this episode of Babies and Business Podcast, Avram and Rachel get real about their experiences with various programs, sharing what worked, what flopped, and the tough lessons they learned along the way. If you’re considering making a big investment in your business, this episode might save you time, money, and headaches!

Show Notes:

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram and Rachel share personal stories of investing in various business coaching programs, from $2K courses to $20K/year masterminds.

• How marketing tactics can make coaching programs seem irresistible but don’t always reveal the downsides.

• Rachel emphasizes the importance of delegating tasks and challenges the belief that no one else can do the job as well as you.

• The duo reflects on a $20K coaching program that didn’t work out as planned due to lack of time to implement the lessons.

• Advice on deciding whether you need a coach or if a specific solution or system is what your business needs.

• Their key takeaway: do your homework, ask the right questions, and make sure the program fits your specific business needs and time capacity.

Mentions & Resources:

OMG Machines – A program Avram invested in that focuses on teaching SEO and running an SEO agency.

Digital Harvest – Avram and Rachel’s digital advertising agency

Clockwork Accelerator –A program Avram and Rachel invested in, allowing them to take a month off to prepare for the birth of their son, Lincoln, without disrupting their business.

Seven Figure Agency – A $20,000/year program, founded by Josh Nelson, that Avram and Rachel invested in to grow a niche agency

The Blueprint Training – Created by Ryan Stewart, this program focuses on SEO and systems. Avram and Rachel purchased part of it to improve their processes.

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz – A book and system mentioned as a resource for managing business finances.

Mentioned Episodes:

E48 – How Clifton StrengthsFinder Transformed Our Business and Marriage[tcb-script src=”https://play.pod.co/embed/frame-v1.js”][/tcb-script]

Episode Transcription

Avram Gonzales: Someone recently reached out to me asking me my opinion on whether they should invest in a particular coaching program for their business or not. And I think what they really wanted was a simple answer. But it’s pretty nuanced. So we’re making this podcast! Over the years I’ve invested in quite a bit of coaching and training.

Rachel has been here for a lot of them. And we figured we’d tell some stories. Share with you our experiences. Times when it worked out. Times when it didn’t work out. And hopefully save you a boatload of cash and time the next time that you consider investing in something that will better your business or better you.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. Really important to take some consideration into these decisions that we’re making. Whether it’s a simple one time cost, or it’s a larger sum, we’re gonna give you some tips on maybe what to look at, and ask questions, the kind of questions that you would ask, and tell you some of the things that we’ve experienced, and what’s come from that.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, how to really evaluate whether it’s going to be worth it for you or not and open up some blind spots for you. I think it’s very easy to get excited about a new coaching program or a training system because let’s be real, it’s getting marketed to you in such a way that it is very enticing.

Rachel Gonzales: Well, people in marketing study those that they’re marketing to, so that they can have the exact message that will hit you dead on. So, you are, you’re being targeted.

Avram Gonzales: You’re being targeted. Everything is going to look really, really sexy from the outside.

Rachel Gonzales: And probably too good to be true, could, could be a little too good to be true going on there.

Avram Gonzales: hmm. And we as entrepreneurs have a tendency to fantasize about the upside and ignore all of the downside and the challenges that come with the upside. This is something that my friend Keala Kanae talks about a lot is the fantasy of the upside and the invisible downside. We pretend it doesn’t even exist.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: But we’re going to tell you and share with you four different stories today, different coaching programs that we’ve invested in. Anywhere from a, $2, 000 one time course all the way up to $20, 000 a year mastermind type programs. And everything in between.

So let’s take you back to 2016. I was, well Rachel and I had not met yet, and I was firmly planted in the affiliate marketing world selling other people’s products. But there came a time when I decided I wanted to do something more significant. I wanted to build my own business and an opportunity came across my desk called OMG Machines.

OMG stands for One Man Gang. And this program promised the ability to teach you how to start your own SEO agency search engine optimization, both the bare basics of getting set up and selling your first client, as well as the nuts and bolts of how to deliver the service top to bottom. So for me, it was adding on to my skill set, but learning the foundational aspects of how to run an agency.

Rachel Gonzales: Okay.

Avram Gonzales: Okay. The price point at that time was $10, 000 for the first year. I did not have the money. To safely make that decision it was around $800 a month when I signed up for it and I literally did not know how I was going to make that each month, but I did it because I needed to learn a new business model to sell services, but I already had all the skill sets of the marketing how to get my first few clients I had no doubt that I could do that because I had done that before I just needed a better framework and a system to operate from I chose to invest in that system and It laid the groundwork for what digital harvest is now today eight years later.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: So That program had a really specific purpose for
it. I knew that I didn’t know enough about search engine optimization in order to render a high, high level service. So I needed that piece to complete the puzzle.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure. So it was very specific to the thing that you already knew a lot about. You already knew that you liked it. You wanted more information about it.

Avram Gonzales: I did. The one thing that I think was foolish was the price point versus what I was generating at the time.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure. Well, like you said, you didn’t know how you were going to come up with that monthly payment.

Avram Gonzales: Mm hmm.

Rachel Gonzales: That’s kind of a scary proposition. I mean,

Avram Gonzales: it is

Rachel Gonzales: wow,

Avram Gonzales: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think I was making about $15,000 a month in the business. You know, so it’s like where does that bring you when when after all the take home is done? It’s like I really it’s really living paycheck to paycheck with a pretend business that was barely feeding my my house and home

Rachel Gonzales: Right. Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: So that was a gamble that did pay off, but I probably wouldn’t do it again

Rachel Gonzales: And it was a gamble. That’s the thing. So that’s kind of what we’re talking about here is that, um, there are a couple of things that if you’re looking to up your skill set or you’re looking for coaching or all these different things that are being marketed to you and you’re, you’re thinking that these are good options, these are some cautionary tales that we’re telling you plus some questions that you can ask so that you can be better prepared and avoid those pitfalls that often come our way.

Avram Gonzales: one thing I had working for me in that regard, was I had plenty of time.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: I had all the time I needed to sit down and watch hours of training and then do hours and hours of work in the business. So, 10 hour, 12 hour days were really common for me the first year, year and a half of that business. I guess the business that we now have today.

Because I was just devouring as much content as possible and then implementing it the same day.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: If I didn’t, if I had the time that I have now, no way

Rachel Gonzales: That would have been a very, very foolish

Avram Gonzales: Impossible to implement what I was learning and get a return.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure. Okay.

Avram Gonzales: Let me ask the big point, right? You got to get a return on what you’re putting in

Rachel Gonzales: I mean, that’s the point of marketing, right? If you’re not marketing, if you’re not going to get money back for the investment that you’re making into whatever upskilling that you’re doing, it’s not really marketing. You might as well be buying a piece of machinery or a pair of shoes or something that’s just going to be used and then gone.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, you’re investing something for your business. You need a return That’s the

Rachel Gonzales: need to be able to make more

Avram Gonzales: That’s the first story that was in 2016. I don’t know if I mentioned that the next one Rachel was in the game for this one. Let’s talk about it because because what we were doing is a big part of

Rachel Gonzales: I think I hadn’t joined your business yet. I hadn’t joined Digital Harvest yet. We started in October. I want to say with a

Avram Gonzales: Oh August of 2020

Rachel Gonzales: August. Okay. And then I joined the business in December of 2020, but I had been going through this process, had known a lot about it and we went through it together, even though we were working in our businesses separately.

Um, yeah, I love this accelerator. Exactly. So what this did for us, you know, we didn’t. We didn’t, go into debt for this. We had the ability to actually pay for this.

Avram Gonzales: It was like 4, 000 bucks to go through all the modules. It lasted about three months.

Rachel Gonzales: And I think it was a lump sum that we paid and, you know, later on, we’re going to talk about how I feel about lump sums when you’re paying for something in your business. but we’ll, we’ll get to that later. And what this really did for us is, you know, it, it did give us time back through the systems and processes that we did learn and the mindset, a lot, a lot around

Avram Gonzales: yeah What is the Clockwork Accelerator? What did it teach us?

Rachel Gonzales: Well, it taught us a lot about mindset, it taught us a lot about the different things that entrepreneurs face and the myths behind why we think that we’re the only ones that can do it. You know, a lot of entrepreneurs think, well, I can’t hire because if I do hire, then this person Joe or Sally or whoever isn’t going to do that thing as good as me.

But just think about it. We’re going to do some math here. Say you have six hats. And you’re not doing any of these things well. So you have six hats on, and maybe you might do 20 percent for each of them.

Avram Gonzales: Well, so five hats

Rachel Gonzales: Okay, five. Sure. Make it easy. So, you hire somebody. You hire Sally. And she comes in and she takes off one of those hats.

And she does it 100%. That’s the only thing that she’s doing. So she has all of her efforts on that.

Avram Gonzales: Mm hmm.

Rachel Gonzales: Do you think it’s likely that she would do better than 20%?

Avram Gonzales: Well, even if she only did it 80 percent as good as you it is way better than the 20 percent you were giving

Rachel Gonzales: Exactly, so even though maybe your percentage and her percentage don’t line up exactly, the efforts that she is able to put towards it are way better than yours. So right there, mindset shift, we gained so much from that. No longer afraid to hire because it is a myth. Please hear that. It is a myth.

If you think you are the only one that can do the service that you do, You are absolutely fooled. It’s a, it’s a myth. Hire somebody, it can help. So that’s what we learned. That bringing people on gives us our time back. So we were able to get time back by hiring people and delegating things out. We also learned how to delegate them and not have them boomerang back.

We learned how, you know, there’s a spectrum of control versus freedom. And just think about it. Freedom is on one side of the spectrum and control is on the other. And the more control you have over what the person is doing in your business that you’ve hired, the less freedom you have. So they’re on the opposite sides.

So you, you get one or the other. You don’t get both. You can kind of be in the middle, but that’s, nobody likes to be in the middle. It’s like, nobody has autonomy. Um, Anyway, those are some of the lessons that I learned from the Clockwork Accelerator. What were some of the things that you took away?

Avram Gonzales: Well, we were really, we were really interested in what the message was that they were sharing, which is clockwork is the path to being able to take a one month vacation and come back and your business has grown.

Rachel Gonzales: Yep. It hasn’t completely fallen apart.

Avram Gonzales: it has not fallen apart. Right. And so we knew that we were planning a family and that we wanted time off for the birth of our first son, Lincoln. And that was one of the big reasons that we signed up and we joined and he was born like

Rachel Gonzales: He’s born in 2022

Avram Gonzales: Under a year later. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, a year and a
half later

Rachel Gonzales: Yep, year and a half

Avram Gonzales: Right? So we had a little bit of runway to work with it. And I think Rachel covered all of the important stuff that we learned about delegating, hiring, having a mission, getting people on board.

You know, we learned all of these, these skills and mindset pieces that we didn’t have for really growing a business beyond just ourselves.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah,

Avram Gonzales: Where we found that we were still missing information was okay. What about some stuff that’s a bit more specific to our industry? Now we know the concepts of creating processes.

We, we had created processes for a lot of the stuff in our business, but it wasn’t like squeaky clean, like we could probably hand it over to the next person.

Rachel Gonzales: It was very much, let’s try this, let’s beta test this thing and see if we can get all the bugs out of it. And it just took a lot of iterations with it,

Avram Gonzales: And we still didn’t get it where

Rachel Gonzales: it wasn’t,

Avram Gonzales: we wanted to be.

Rachel Gonzales: yeah. And like before the, the OMG machines, that was very specific to the business that you’re in. Clockwork Accelerated was not specific to any one business or any type of business.

So it wasn’t b2b b2c b2 so it wasn’t business to business or business clients or customers or anything like that. It wasn’t. So, some of the suggestions that they made actually just didn’t apply to us as a marketing agency. So, it wasn’t super helpful and it was very much, um, theory,

Avram Gonzales: So one of the things that we would encourage you to look at when you’re considering something is how specific is this to your industry and your business and your business model?

Rachel Gonzales: right?

Avram Gonzales: I think we would still have done it again in a heartbeat, but I think our expectations would have been a little bit different.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, because, I mean, what we got out of this was how to delegate, having different mindsets. You just touched a little bit on it but like the having core values, having a mission and a vision and like things that drive our business in more ways than just money because when you have employees they’re not going to be motivated to bring you more money because it doesn’t mean that they get more money their paycheck stays the same even if your business grows and how can you motivate them to want to help your business grow like could it be a social cause or something like that?

So that was one of the great things that I thought really came from it, um, and like you said, it wasn’t specific to our, our, our thing, the thing that we were looking for, I think at that point we didn’t really know the problems that we had, I think we were getting, the more we saw things that weren’t the solution to what, the unknown problem that we had, the more we were like, this isn’t it, we need something more and different, but we didn’t know what that was,

Avram Gonzales: So let’s give you an example of, of an investment that we made that we feel a little bit foolish about

Rachel Gonzales: yes,

Avram Gonzales: at this point, because we were somewhat aware of the problem that we were trying to solve with this investment. But I think caught up in the hype of the program,

Rachel Gonzales: absolutely.

Avram Gonzales: and then thinking it was basically the ultimate solution for our growing the business.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, I mean for me, I thought that systems came along with it

Avram Gonzales: Well, let’s talk about this, what we did

Rachel Gonzales: you know,

Avram Gonzales: Right. So this was 2021. Um, my friend, John Victoria invited me to go to Josh Nelson’s Seven Figure Agency in Miami. And I went there for that weekend, met a ton of agency owners, was in the room with some seriously big hitters and just thought, man. I gotta be around this community because I learned so much just by hanging out and being in that room.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah

Avram Gonzales: So we decided to join that program It’s about or at least at the time it was about twenty thousand dollars a year investment. You could pay it monthly So it’s about fifteen hundred dollars and the reason that we said yes to it was because we did have the money available to be able to do so.

Rachel Gonzales: Right. It wouldn’t put us in a tight spot month after month We did have the money to put there

Avram Gonzales: And that was the most I have put towards a program month to month ever.

Rachel Gonzales: But I also think something that we didn’t actually take into consideration was the time investment. So while we could financially afford it, we could not on our time on the on the side of time

Avram Gonzales: The big promise, the big promise was how to grow a niche agency in, you know, choose a niche and then scale your business to a million dollars plus over the course of, you know, one to two years. A great promise and they’re, everything is in there to do that. Okay, but you just touched on it, Rachel. We were going to have to reinvent entire parts of our business

Rachel Gonzales: Correct.

Avram Gonzales: and our business model in order to succeed with the training.

Rachel Gonzales: Well, yes. And, you know, we were in this, I think we had existential crisis during this, this time that we were a part of this meeting or, uh, this, uh, group, because we really, didn’t like the idea of having to market or they were suggesting market to one business. So we chose solar just as an example and then you have to offer all sorts of other services in addition to SEO search engine optimization and that was just stuff that we weren’t, I don’t think we were prepared for that, and nor did we have the people to execute on that on a really high level.

And it was just a lot of promises that, the more we thought about it, it just did not fit with how we wanted to grow our business.

Avram Gonzales: Mm hmm. And by the time that we got into the program, then Lincoln was born. So we had like maybe six months of the program to really start getting moving. And then he was born and it was like, Okay, I still haven’t put this piece together. I still haven’t put this piece together. And we’re still serving all of these clients that we’ve had for years.

I was already squeezed for time. So, having to dedicate even more time to build out this entire engine. Hire the people appropriate for it to change up all the messaging. It was like start stop every other month trying to get things going and we just had to say, you know what? I do not have the time to dedicate to this program to make it work.

I think that’s really where it landed.

Rachel Gonzales: Exactly. Well, you know, it came down to it and we’re, I’m like, you know, we keep spending this money and we are not getting a return on this because we, and why? It’s because we are not able to actually put the time in. To get the return that could be possible. We don’t even know. But it just wasn’t possible with the time that we were putting into it.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, we realized like, so we joined the program and by the way, I would recommend Seven Figure Agency to many, many people, if you’ve got the time to dedicate to it,

Rachel Gonzales: Right.

Avram Gonzales: but that was really the big thing for us. We discovered though, that we still lacked some of the systems that we needed internally for our team to execute with very little oversight.

So while we had built our business to the point
of being able to take a month off with Clockwork Accelerator a year and a half previous, we were able to We were, we still had a lot of leaky bucket stuff going on in our, in our business. And it’s like, when it’s like that, you can’t, everything that was being asked of us in the program was just more of my time.

There was no getting time back and we were already squeezed.

Rachel Gonzales: Correct. So then that’s one of the things that we’ve taken into the future and that is Is this going to give us more time or is this going and it’s not invest time now to get more time later. It is, is it going to give me time back in a relatively short amount of time? Because if that is not the case, that is not something we can invest in right now.

So that’s something we’ve taken into the future in our considerations.

Avram Gonzales: Well, like we made two new recent hires and we know that for the short term, this first like 60 to 90 days is gonna require a lot more time for me than normal.

Rachel Gonzales: Correct, but you are already seeing in one month, not even a month span, it’s like two weeks already with one of them, um, you are already finding time back because you’re, you are finding that when you delegate something is totally delegated. You no longer have to go back and touch that one thing that you talked about before.

Avram Gonzales: And so this short term, we know it’s a very short term crunch for me, is going to give all of that time back and more.

Rachel Gonzales: And you know, we had, we didn’t even list this on, on the, the things that we wanted to talk about. We invested in a very inexpensive program about how to hire and, and what to look for when you’re hiring people. And, it was just so informative and it gave us the confidence to really, own it.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah,

Rachel Gonzales: It was just really, really impressive.

Avram Gonzales: think we could and probably should do an episode about it later, because it was such a different experience for us. And I had never paid so little for a training, I think, and gotten so much

Rachel Gonzales: Yes,

Avram Gonzales: So yeah, we’ll talk about that one. I didn’t consider it for this one, because I did secretly want to do this other episode later.

Rachel Gonzales: awesome. Okay.

Avram Gonzales: So let’s talk about the fourth one. Okay.

Rachel Gonzales: So this one serves us to this day, has been invaluable, and the price point was much less than anything we have spent to date as what we’re talking about.

Avram Gonzales: so some of the things that we learned from our time with Seven Figure Agency was we just did not have the systems and processes and the full confidence in how we were going about things to raise our rates, continue, you know, bring more clients in, like just, You always want to make it better as an entrepreneur

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, well and, and we want to stay up to date in our search engine optimization changes

Avram Gonzales: so much.

Rachel Gonzales: so much, so frequently. So we must stay at the top of our game all the time.

Avram Gonzales: Mm hmm. So we spent $2, 000 a one time thing to invest in a core part of The Blueprint Training by Ryan Stewart. There was a part of his process with SEO that was very attractive to us in that we knew looking at what was provided and then speaking with somebody on his team. That’s, that’s a key thing. We spoke to somebody on his team to find out that that was the missing piece for us.

They are really good at the systems side of business, particularly in our industry.

Rachel Gonzales: Something else that was very attractive to us was we do not currently use a project management system. Like a lot of people talk about like Bootcamp or, ClickUp or, there’s, there’s other ones like Monday and stuff like that, Asana, you know, all those things. There’s so many of them, we don’t use them.

We use spreadsheets right now. And in The Blueprint, this guy says, I grew my business to, how big was it before he changed from?

Avram Gonzales: was like 3 million a year, 4 million a

Rachel Gonzales: He grew his business to three million, four million dollars a year before he changed from project management on spreadsheets to something else. And I think that’s wonderful because I think that you avoid the pitfalls of not really knowing how your systems are, putting it into a system, and then you have this whole other system that you don’t even know.

In addition to not knowing your systems, you don’t know how to communicate that to another kind of software. So spreadsheets are super easy. That was one of the things that was like, Oh, wow, we can get around this. Cause I, I know my way around that

Avram Gonzales: We’re already doing some of that. Um, there were other elements of the program that, that I looked at how we needed to start transitioning and selling our services. The way that it’s positioned, the methodology that was being shared, it’s like, we need that. So it was very clear when we looked at The Blueprint, they have these five different areas where they focus and they can help you with your agency.

And there were two of those areas that we thought, yep, we need that. So we purchased it a la carte and we got those areas and we got everything that we needed, right? Um, it was later that we chose to enroll in some of their ongoing training, which just helps us get access to some of the new things that they roll out when changes happen with search, is happening all the time.

They bring in experts to brush up the content that’s in the back office and it’s just been a really great resource for us. That makes a lot of sense because we pulled the information out. We have a team that can now execute on it. And the systems aren’t so cumbersome or difficult for us to set up to run themselves.

Rachel Gonzales: Exactly. And you know, you know, when, like we said, through our experiences, we’re going to help you see maybe questions that you might ask and considerations that, you know, a lot of people think that they need a coach, but maybe you need a solution instead. Maybe you need to buy something that gives you this, this piece that you just put into place, you know, with the blueprints, they have so much already built out for you and then they show you how to build things that are specific for your agency and it’s very much plug and play, really, just put it into your systems and so maybe something like that is more your speed and you need that for your business.

You need a solution as opposed to coaching where they’re going to talk to you about it. conceptual things, and then you need to go out and put them into place. Maybe that’s more time than you have to invest.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, I think that A lot of people that are starting out think that they need a coach.

Rachel Gonzales: Yep.

Avram Gonzales: You’re wrong. You need to let life and experience be your coach, and you need to purchase the expertise to fill in the gaps and the blind spots that are in your way. And in fact, I think you need to bumble through those blind spots and become awakened to the problems.

Rachel Gonzales: Right.

Avram Gonzales: Before you go hiring a coach and spending thousands of dollars to fix a problem that you don’t even know is a problem

Rachel Gonzales: Yep.

Avram Gonzales: That was our I mean that’s running through all four examples that we shared. So there are there are things that we didn’t know were problems until we grew bigger, right. We’re solving problems that we didn’t actually have.

Rachel Gonzales: Well, and having the experie
nce too of like having your service offering be whatever this is, and then seeing, okay, is this still relevant for search engine optimization? Is this going to get them the result that we require? We’re constantly looking at our service offering to make sure that it stays up to date in helping our clients have a ranking where they need to be, you know,

Avram Gonzales: I remember when I was doing, um, a lot of leadership and training for, uh, the team that I grew in a company called Empower Network, my network marketing days 10 plus years ago. And one of the things that I would tell my, my team members a lot is, you can’t steer a parked car. So people would be coming to me with advice and I would, you know, what do I do about this, this?

And then I would say, well, have you done, you know, and it’s like the bare minimum of what is expected to have success. What have you done this week? Well, I haven’t like done this. Okay. I can’t help steer a parked car. When you are moving, I can give you one small piece of advice that will really, really help you. But I can just sit there and talk to you and nothing’s ever going to happen and nothing’s ever going to be applicable for you if you haven’t taken any action.

Rachel Gonzales: You might just glaze over and be like, well, this is way more work than I want to do. Right. Cool.

Avram Gonzales: So if you’re new, you don’t need a coach, you don’t need a mentor, you need life to teach you some lessons.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah,

Avram Gonzales: And then it’s well worth discovering what the problems are to then just go get the solution for that particular problem. But you really don’t need somebody motivating you, keeping you accountable.

Look, if you can’t get the work done, maybe entrepreneurship isn’t, isn’t for you. If you need somebody motivating you.

Rachel Gonzales: Right. Well, and also, you know, entrepreneurs have a lot of different hats, so, um, maybe some of these are undesirable to you, and you really don’t want to deal with them, um, and that’s why you, as you grow your business, you get to have other people come in and fill those hats, but it does start out with you, um, like you said, bumbling your way through it, doing all these different things, seeing what works, and then building your business enough so that you can hire, and it’s a big, it’s a big process.

So, um, yeah. It takes time.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah. So do I need a coach or do I just need a solution?

Rachel Gonzales: Right.

Avram Gonzales: Another questions to ask. I could not encourage more due diligence. So are there guarantees in place for the program? What do they look like?

Rachel Gonzales: Are you able to interview the person that actually offers the service?

Avram Gonzales: Or, or some of the coaches or something that are rendering the service?

Rachel Gonzales: Can you talk to somebody before you buy, to ask them few questions?

Avram Gonzales: Are there references that you could connect with?

Rachel Gonzales: Sure. Are there, do they have reviews up for the services that they provide? Sometimes those can be bought. I get it. But, I mean, they are worth looking at.

Avram Gonzales: How many people have been through the program? Like, is this a program that’s been around for a couple years and they’ve had, you know, a couple hundred, a couple thousand students? If it’s been around for more than one season or more than one launch, that means they’ve refined it. They’ve grown the business, the support around it.

I’ve bought a lot of training in the past that had great information and terrible support and follow up, which really ruined the experience of what I had purchased.

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely. Well, and then I think also we do, you do have to remember the people that are selling to you, like we said, they are marketing, they have a message that is going to hit you in many different ways on your pain points, but they are selling you something for money. It’s all about money for them.

Avram Gonzales: And they’re, they’re the least likely to paint the real picture for you of what it’s going to look like on the inside Because they want you to part with your money. So in some ways, I think it’s best to also talk to some people that it didn’t work out for them,

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: Right? Why didn’t it work out? You know, we recommend Seven Figure Agency all the time with the same caveats we shared today.

Rachel Gonzales: Right. Exactly. If someone talked to you, you’d say, absolutely. If you have this much time. If you don’t have that much time, it’s not a good fit for you and it’s okay. If things don’t fit just move on. There are other things out there um, you know also something to consider is If what you’re purchasing is going to grow your business and it maybe 2x 3x 4x to your business What would it do to your processes. How would that growth affect you? Are you ready for it? Do you have a plan for that? Are you going to hire? Do you have systems in place that when you hire you’re able to train them and get that freedom and time back? Or is it going to break your business?

Avram Gonzales: Have you thought that through?

Rachel Gonzales: Exactly, because that’s a possibility.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, those are some great questions to end with, the four stories that we shared. These are all the things that Rachel and I considered before purchasing a new program.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: That make it a no brainer. I think, you know, first things first, you really got to think it through.

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely.

Avram Gonzales: And I think it’s worth talking to somebody else, get a second opinion of somebody that’s not vested in you purchasing the program.

They’re vested in you and your success. Maybe somebody that’s traveled the path from you already, that’s a good place to start.

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely. And then the next one is, you know, I think, be a good steward of your money. We’ve mentioned this before the podcast profit about Profit First and how to do that. It’s, it’s how you manage your money and know the percentages that are going to keep your business healthy. When you have those percentages and you’re allotting all of your money that way, then you actually know what is there to spend on your business to market it and to get those trainings. But if you don’t know that yet, I would suggest before you invest in anything, look at profit first, get your business in order, because the sooner you do it, the smaller your problems will be.

The bigger your business grows, those, those money problems that you have are going to get bigger and bigger with them. More money does not say or does not solve money problems, it just makes them bigger. So more money, if you’re bad at managing your money it’s going to be more money that you’re bad at managing and it’s going to be more things on the line. So be a good steward of your money and look into Profit First I would definitely listen to that podcast episode and I would definitely look into Profit First by Mike Michalowicz because It has been Instrumental in our business growing and maintaining and going with the ups and downs of business.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, we’re at less risk because of how we are taking it

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely, we’re within the percentages that are going to be okay.

Avram Gonzales: And the last thing is, is, you know, making sure that it’s the right fit for your problems, and actually becoming aware of what your p
roblems are, that, man, I don’t know how to do that for you from here, where I’m standing with this podcast, because it takes a whole conversation, only you know, and it can take a second opinion to help you know what your actual problems are and what the bottlenecks are in your business and, and how to go about knocking those out. And if you knock them out in the right way, life’s a lot easier than if you took the similar journey to what we just shared today.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. Yep.

Avram Gonzales: So with that, we’d love to ask you a question. If you check us out on social media, @babiesandbizpod on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all those good places, we’ve got a question for you answer on the post.

What’s a program that you invested in that you’d recommend to others and why? So it could be about anything business related. We want to know what it is and why like why did it make a difference for you? I think that’s important when you start sharing and recommending it for others. All right. So we appreciate you for tuning in today.

If you’ve got questions you want to ask us, you can always email hello@babiesandbiz.com. And we’re still looking for those five star reviews on Apple Podcast and Spotify. So hit us up, give us that love so that others know just how badass the babies and business podcast really is.

Um, with that, we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Rachel Gonzales: Bye for now.