📍 Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. This episode is going to be a wake up call, especially if you're an entrepreneur, not a flashy one with a lot of bells and whistles, but a real one. I wanna talk about the overwhelming flood that we face online today, because I know you've seen it too. The business coaches that show screenshots of $100,000 days or $200,000 month.

The self-declared ad experts that waive testimonials, like a surrender flag, the 5K per day mentors who tell you that you're just not believing in yourself enough, and don't even get me started on the funnel Builders who guarantee new patients or clients without knowing a thing about your systems, your audience, or even your business model.

These offers show up in your feed. They show up in your inbox, and they sound tempting. Especially when you've tried what hasn't worked yet. They say all the right words and they make you feel like you're just one funnel away from making your first million dollars or your second million dollars or one funnel away from a $500 day.

But here's the truth. Ads and funnels aren't the problem. The problem is paying for performance when you haven't laid the foundation, that makes it scalable. Now, I'm not against high ticket programs because I am one, but I build businesses from the inside out. I help people create brands and systems that don't just launch, they actually last.

So if you're in that place where you're thinking, I just need someone to run my ads, I need patience in the chair, I need clients on the phone. I need money in my pocket. My bank account is running dry. I have to run payroll. I just need ads because ads equal money. I want you to pause because before you spend a dime on paid traffic, I wanna get your foundation set.

I wanna talk about what actually moves the needle, what actually makes a business ready for growth? Because what if I handed you 100 new clients right now? Could you take it? Could you take it on and execute perfectly? If your answer is yes, what about a thousand? Could you do it? You'd probably welcome it because the money would be great, but is it sustainable for your company, for your brand?

So let's kick it back. I'm gonna tell you a few stories in this episode about real clients that I've worked with, what we've done, how things have worked. I'm gonna shorten up the stories enough so that you know what happened. This first story is about a dental office that I worked with that wanted more implant patients.

If you're not in dentistry, that's okay. A dental implant is something, most of us know what it is. If not, it's not really important for the story, but that's what this client was all about. They wanted more implant patients. This particular practice had great reviews, very high tech equipment, and that was really the pillar of strength they were leading with.

They had a team of genuinely kind team members. But their online presence, it looked like every other general dental office. And if you know anything about dental, every website, I swear to you, they look the same. I'm telling you the same photos, the same layout, the same color schemes, and sometimes the logos are so close.

It's like there's one marketing agency for all of dental practices. So the first thing we did was strip it all back. We mapped out who this practice wanted to serve. We repositioned their content around what real implant patients care about, which is fear, financing and transformation, not tools, not technology.

Really understanding what comes with an implant patient once that clarity was in place. The team's confidence shifted because they understood that there was no break in the process, no break in the communication, no break in where we are going, where we're headed, and what the outcome and what success actually looked like to the team.

Their consultations increased without ads because we took a completely different approach to what their website looked like, what their marketing looked like, and who they were reaching out to to actually get. These patients in the chair. Now, when we did run ads, which let me just tell you, I argued against running them because in my opinion, with the changes and the shift we made to their website, to the marketing, to the overall approach, I don't believe we needed ads.

But this particular owner doctor was insistent, so we did. The leads we received from that were warmer. They were easier to convert, and they stayed longer. They were actually patients who came for the implant. But with the future services that we offered, they became patients for life, not a one time, one stop shop place, because that's not long term sustainable.

We became one with the patient. We became a place they continued to come to. Now, clarity isn't fluffy branding work. It's how you communicate to the right people at the right time. It's about getting a patient that not only wants to stay a patient for life, aside from the implants, but also continues to send you other patients because word of mouth is everything, especially in this industry. Now, what we did for this dental practice, it actually applies to all industries. I even had a health coach who kept attracting price shoppers, and once we rewrote her core message and aligned it with her zone of genius, she stopped discounting herself and started selling 12 week packages.

With complete ease, and that happened before she even ran a single ad. The thing is, is we've got to know what success looks like to you and what success looks like to your patients, your clients, and your customers. Now, the second thing that I wanna talk to you about is auditing what you have. I always say that you can't fix what you haven't evaluated.

I had a med spa client that came to me super frustrated. She has spent over $6,000 on a local funnel agency who promised her membership leads. What they gave her was a broken booking link, a few Google ads, and a series of super generic emails that were templated. I believe the same for every single med spa that they dealt with.

And this client of mine was furious, and honestly, I don't blame her. So we did an audit. We pulled real numbers, real pages, real emails, and what we found was that they didn't have automation or follow up. There was no real offer or structure. There was no email nurturing. And together we rebuilt the sales system all the way from how we wanted to launch their founder's launch with 50 founding members at a discounted lifetime rate.

We implemented a membership menu. That the team members could walk through with confidence and we trained her front desk to close those monthly packages, like pros, right at checkout. The thing is, is that she didn't need more traffic. She needed a conversion system. Now she has that $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue from clients who are actually showing up, and that's what a foundational audit can do.

We think that the rat race is getting the marketing ad spend out there, but what are you doing with what you have? If you are just out there running marketing dollars to get 40 new clients a month, 40 new patients a month, but you weren't taking those 40, that 100, that 150, and turning it into monthly residual income, all we're doing is getting the one stop shop.

And you can't actually calculate what your marketing spend is because you will forever have to be in a marketing loop. Monthly ad spend should only be a short term solution. It shouldn't be something that you have to forecast in your expenses every single month because you rely on that to get you the new business or the long term sustainable business.

The next thing I wanna talk about is showing up before selling. So I'm gonna tell you about a small business owner that I worked with, and she sold a custom home product, handmade, beautiful, that she was struggling with sales. She thought about running Facebook ads, but I told her to do this first. I wanted her to document the behind the scenes share why she started Share a Real Client install.

Explain what it means when a family chooses the handmade version versus a mass market version. I wanted her to really walk through the whole process in how she did this documentation. She went from three orders a week to 11 in a week and under 30 days, and not a single ad spend was spent. She just shifted her perspective.

She shifted what the client or the customer would perceive their experience would be. The key is that people trust people. And if you show up consistently and authentically, they start to see your value long before you actually pitch it. The next part I wanna talk about is building systems that actually scale.

One of my wellness clients, used to panic Every time a new client inquiry came in. She didn't know where the intake form was or how to onboard them or when to follow up, and what I mean by that, you might be thinking, wait a minute.

She was panicking when a new client would come in. She didn't know where all this was. What are you talking about Now? The thing is, is that everybody has their own version of what onboarding looks like, and onboarding is simply the process of what happens when you get someone new. What does their onboarding frame timeline look like?

What is that for your business? Now you might have a really streamlined process where you have a form people fill out or a process at check-in. There's a lot of different things that you can choose. But this particular client had an organization like you can't imagine.

So we mapped out her entire client journey, every single touch point, and I was the test client. I wanted to see what it looked like. From inquiry to intake to payment to follow up. Everything runs on workflows, and so what does that look like? We needed to map this out so that it was consistent for every single person.

When I first got the intake form, I was shocked because literally there were questions on there that had to do with a special event she was running. That was actually a year and a half earlier, but she didn't realize the question was still on the sheet. My first question was how often are you looking at your intake forms?

And then once we got to the consent forms, it was so overwhelming because there were so many consent forms. There were more consent forms and more things for me to read. Then her just getting my initial information, we had to streamline this. It had to be better. After we were done, we had a much more streamlined process of questions that mattered, consents that were appropriate for a new client or a new patient, and we saved different consents for just those types of appointments.

We created true systems a couple of weeks ago. I followed up with her on all of the processes that we had created a few months back. And she said, I actually look forward to getting my leads now because everything is so organized. She isn't getting feedback that it's too cumbersome to fill things out.

She isn't getting that same feedback that her new client didn't fill out the forms 'cause there was too much and they just wanted to do it when they came in the office as the power of having systems understanding what needs to be collected. When is the right time to obtain different information? And how does it look like for a new person to come in and experience working with you?

Does it feel easy? Does it feel like, holy cow, there's a lot of CYA going on here. Your business should feel like it's working for you, not like you're tap dancing through.

And that's why I often give every single new business owner that I talk to, or every business client I talk to, the founder's program idea. It's built around getting your business off napkins and voice notes and into structure from pen to paper, to execution. It's for people who know that they have something powerful and they're ready to operate like it.

Building in these founders programs so that you can have that residual income every month, but it's easy to get people enrolled in it. I often talk about dentistry because so much of my world has revolved around it. So this next story is again about a specialist office, a dental specialist office. I worked with them and they were ready to spend about $4,500 on a funnel company that promised more sedation cases than she could actually handle.

And when I asked her if her Instagram posts had mentioned sedation even once in the last 60 days, her answer was no. Her email list was cold. She had no literature or marketing whatsoever that even mentioned sedation. Her website had nothing about it except for one page that had an FAQ on it.

Where there were two questions that talked about what it was like to have sedation, so we created three weeks of warming content, testimonials, FAQs, behind the scenes prep. We trained her team, we updated her website. We worked on SEO. We had an actual funnel for her email campaigns. By the time her ads ran, which again, we didn't necessarily need to do them, but she was stuck on them because of the company she had signed up with.

The community was already primed.

Her as didn't have to educate. They were just inviting people in. And guess what? Her cost per lead was 60% lower than the average for her area. I want you to remember that it's really easy to fall into the trap of blindly trusting an ad manager who doesn't understand your scalability. I've had multiple clients who have hired agencies.

That sent weekly reports, but numbers mean nothing. CTR high leads none, but the numbers meant nothing.

As I've stepped in with each of these clients, we've learned their pixel was tracking wrong, the calls were booking, but on the wrong page, nobody catches these things. But once we fix the problems with the way these things are working and the way the funnels are operated

we can actually see the transformation happen in the ads. You can get more engagement more. You can get clients and patients that want to stay with you, that aren't scared to work with you forever. Here's what I wanna leave you with today.

You don't need the next $7,000 marketing expert just because they posted a graph. You need to know what you do best, who you serve best, how your systems support that growth. And what you want your business to look like six months from now. When you connect with other marketing professionals, you need to understand what success looks like for you and what success looks like for your ideal client.

If your business is built on shaky ground, no ad is going to save it. But if it's built with clarity, integrity, and real systems, you don't just grow, you actually scale sustainably. Take the time to lay the groundwork, your future self and your bank account will. Thank you. Let's take a breath and pull all this together, because that's what the, that's good moment of every episode on No Silver Spoons is about.

In this episode, we uncovered a few things. One, you don't need more noise, you need more clarity. Two. You don't need a funnel that only looks pretty. You need a system that supports you and the growth you want for your business. Three, you don't need to chase the trendiest platform or the next big thing.

You need alignment with your audience, your offer, and your values. Four, you don't need a thousand new leads. You need five qualified ones who believe in what you offer and stay with you long term. Number five. You don't need to perform, you need to build. The moment you stop looking for the shortcut and start building the road is the moment that you become unstoppable.

That is what makes your brand trustworthy and that's what sets you apart. So if you're wondering how to move forward, start by looking inward. This isn't some sort of program I'm trying to sell you where you have to sign up under my mentorship. I'm literally telling you right now.

Is your brand communicating clearly who you are? Are your systems making it easy for someone to say yes? Is your team set up to win or are you carrying it all alone? Is your foundation strong enough to scale? I have seen so many businesses that just think they need to spend marketing money, but they're not doing the things to make them scalable.

They're not training their team to be consistent every time they interact with a client, patient, or customer. When your brand speaks, your systems work, your message lands, that's when you grow with grace. That's when marketing finally works. That's when clients show up, when they stay, and when they bring others with them, and those are the really good moments.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of No Silver Spoon. For more information on how to have me speak with your team, train your team, or attend your next meeting, check the show notes for ways you can connect with me. You can head over to sarah beth herman.com and schedule a call with me at any time.

I would love to mentor you or to speak at your next event. I hold the position of fractional CEO or CFO in organizations nationwide, and I would love to fill that space with you. For more information on mentorship, free digital downloads or training provided by me and my team, check the show notes for those links.

I'll  📍 catch you on the next episode.