James Bonadies 5 Get Rich Tips to Making $25 million.
It seems unwise to not take advice on how to make $25 million by someone who actually made $25 million…especially when they’ve given you their specific get rich tips!
That’s why we’ve been so excited about working with James Bonadies. This guy was a high school teacher just a few years ago, and now averages over $400,000/month from his online coaching business where he teaches people how to use Google to make steady income.
What started out as a side hustle quickly transformed James’ life, and he wants people to know how simple it is.
Seriously, this is a video of how he explains it to a five-year-old!
James Bonadies has an awesome training video about the exact strategy he uses to help local businesses connect with local customers, but this post is not going to focus on that. Although we do highly recommend you check it out and learn from James yourself!
Here, we want to focus on what James says are the five keys that shot his business forward and made it possible for him to get where he is now. Not only did his coaching program bring in $25 million, he and his team have sold millions of dollars over the last couple years for other coaching programs using these exact strategies.
Let’s get into it from James’ perspective…
Get Rich Tip 1: High-ticket magic to…
Get Rich Tip 2: Build recurring revenue
So, if you’re a coach, a consultant, a service provider, or just someone who wants to grow and sell their knowledge and change people’s lives—this is for you.
I want to first touch upon why so many gurus and experts in the industry talk about the importance of high ticket offers. And although I agree with it, we need to understand that there’s a little bit of a magic fairy dust that we sprinkle on the high ticket that enables us to build in a recurring revenue.
Because high ticket offers and building in recurring revenue are major pieces of the coaching business.
And they have enabled us to weather the storms through scary times. Our recurring revenue is what not only kept us afloat, but thriving through those the-world-is-shutting-down times.
When COVID was in full force and it seemed like nothing was operating, we shut off our ads and still brought in $600,000/month in recurring revenue.
This is a million-dollar must-have.
These two points here are a must-have.
So, let me explain how combining high ticket offers with recurring revenue setups are the answer to your financial freedom searches.
High ticket vs. low ticket and the Lambo method.
When I first started in this game, my mentor, Dan, would always say,
“James, anybody who could afford a monthly payment of a Lamborghini would buy a Lamborghini.”
Key wording here: if they could afford it.
If someone comes to the Lambo dealership, able to afford one, and they leave without one, then you as the salesman fumbled.
I envisioned my coaching program as the Lamborghini of local marketing. When I envisioned that, I realized that if people were coming to a phone call, and we are paying to get them on that call — why would we let them walk away? Why would my team walk away from a sale when they could just arrange it at a different payment plan?
Still a high-ticket offer, but broken down into two-pay, three-pay, four-pay, 10-pay, and even 18-pay.
- So, someone who paid for the entire offer upfront would be a one-pay at $3994
- Someone who did it in two payments would pay 2 x $1997
- 3 x $1397
- 4 x $1050
- 10 x $499
- 18 x $297
See what’s happening here? These are our actual payment plans.
So, what happens is we get a very big chunk of people —about 40%— that pay in full. We swallow our pride here. We understand that not everybody has a big chunk of money sitting there, and we definitely don’t want to get people to go broke.
Our sales team is trained to hit them with the 1 x $3,994 — and then be quiet. And then we feel them out.
We try to understand where they are financially with just a simple sales script. And if they’re like,
“Look, I really can’t do it…”
then our sales team will ask them,
“Okay. What were you thinking when you came to the call? How much did you think this would cost?”
And we often get answers like a couple thousand or so, and the classic: I just don’t have $4,000 right now.
So, we ask,
“Okay. How much money do you have today?”
Very often, we’ll get an answer around $1,500. So we’ll ask,
“Okay. Could you do $2,000?”
We work them down the line and, in case you didn’t catch the mathematics above, they pay more money the farther down they go.
About 70% of our clients go for the 1, 2, 3, or 4-payment options, and about 30% go for the 10 or 18.
Essentially, we build out a bonus material—which is just splintered off pieces of our program—and we deliver these bonuses to people once they’ve paid in full. So, once someone has made their final payment (whether it be the second, third, fourth, tenth, or eighteenth) we’ll send them the bonus.
However, we give them a 90-day window to grab this bonus opportunity.
90 days.
So, for example, if somebody came in on a 18 x $297 plan, has made three payments, and—within 90 days—they hit up our support chat and say,
“Hey, I would like to pay off my balance so I can get these bonuses.”
We simply subtract the three payment amounts they’ve made, and give them the original full-pay price.
So, we still get them in. We still pay for the call, commissions are still earned, and we still make that sale—we just make it in a way that feels easier for them.
That’s how we built in a recurring revenue model within this exact same program.
This works like gangbusters.
I only know of myself, and my mentor Dan, who brings out payment plans like this. Learning this from the get-go allowed me to not really struggle at all with building my coaching program.
No matter what—they come to a call, do not let them off the phone without coming in on something.
That way it pays for the call and, with a nice bonus program built out, you’ll create some recurring revenue for yourself. The deal you close today will bring in revenue next month. That’s what we do and it works—it works fantastically.
Plus, if you continually focus on increasing the long-term value for your customers, you can very easily make more money than you’d initially pitched.
How? For example: a lot of people go in for the 18 months and, if we keep providing them high-value, they won’t want to lose access to us.
So, they’ll keep paying the $297. So, what started out as a $3,994 deal now becomes a $4,291 deal. But the value must be there all the time.
It all comes down to strategic pricing structure and building out that recurring revenue by delivering high value!
Now, when it comes to questions on high ticket vs. low ticket offers, let’s just do a little bit of basic math here.
If you sell something for $4,000 and your goal is $40,000 per month—you’ll need to sell 10 of them per month.
If you’re on the low-ticket side, and you’re selling something at $400 per month, that’s now 100 sales you have to make this month.
And I know some of you are going to say,
“But James, it’s harder to sell someone on a $4,000 price than it is to sell a $400 price!”
No. It’s not. Quite the opposite, actually.
The effort required to make 100 sales is more than required to make 10.
Because if you’re selling hundreds of something per month, you’re probably not doing it on sales calls. You’re doing it from a landing page, from a sales page, and you’re hoping that someone reaches into their pocket without even talking to anybody. There’s zero human capital being utilized, which might sound like it saves you money in the short-term, but something like a coaching program needs to convince people that your program fixes their problem. And it’s a lot harder to do that with copywriting.
Whereas on a high-ticket sales call, you get to actually have a conversation with somebody, make sure they understand what they’re getting, find out what their pain points are, and if your coaching program fixes it.
So there’s more copywriting needed, more sales tactics needed, and more opportunities for pitfalls than if you’re just driving people to a phone call.
Maybe you’ve heard this. It’s the truth.
You’ve probably heard tons of people say it, but I wanna drive this point home that when getting to a $40,000 / month coaching program, I’d rather make 10 sales than 100 sales.
Envision the number of sales you need.
Get Rich Tip 3: ‘One’ is the most powerful number
I want you to always—and I mean like literally always—remember that if you start to have more than one aspect of your business, like more than one funnel or more than one ad, you’re gonna run into massive problems. I stand by this through and through.
The power of one, as a coach, consultant, or service provider.
- I have my $25 million coaching program.
- I have another $1.8 million coaching program,
- another $1.2 million coaching program,
- and then multiple others in the six figures.
They all had one ad
they all had one funnel
they all had one really good offer
they had one angle with one course
and they brought everybody to one phone call.
And the reason why the number one is so powerful in business is because when you go to three ads, five ads, six ads, or you start running different funnels or you try a few different offers and packages or begin upselling or down-selling and everything…
…you are going to convolute your business and you’re going to waste more time.
The most important thing is taking care of your clients—and I promise you that will suffer if you start trying too many things.
When you keep everything very simple and and you focus on perfecting your one, always aiming to make the customer experience better and better, you will find it very easy to run your business and you literally will probably not even need more than one employee.
Please take my word for it—because I’m coming from a place of knowing here. I’ve made mistakes in the past over hiring because I got caught up in the more fiasco. More ads. More whatever. And I quickly learned that it was a mistake because most of our sales were coming from one ad anyway!
In its best month, my business brought in over $870,000 and more than 300 clients—with four people. We had myself, my business partner, one VA, and one COO. That’s it.
One is the most powerful number—remember that, okay?
That brings us to our final keys, which, again, are intertwined…
Get Rich Tip 4: Simple will scale
Get Rich Tip 5: System congruency
You cannot scale a coaching program when it’s convoluted. Period.
What do I mean by that?
Well, if you’ve got 10 different employees and they’re all doing different things and they’re sticking their hands into each other’s business and something gets handed off from one to another—your process will become hard to follow and it will suffer.
Your business will break down. You won’t scale. And you’ll probably lose your shit a little bit.
The easiest way to simplify your business, outside of just making sure you have one of everything, is making sure you have congruency in your system. Let’s dive into that a little more.
- Landing page (funnel-builder)
- Auto-responder (email marketing, perhaps?)
- Texting / calling features (cell phone, text line, etc?)
- Application (what type of form do you need?)
- Calendar booking (Calendly, ScheduleOnce, etc.)
- CRM (Pipe Drive, Clickfunnels, etc to track sales)
- Membership site
So, we’re looking at about seven different tools here. Now you have to ask yourself how you’re going to link it all together.
Sure, you can use a tool like Zapier—an amazing tool (most of the time)—but do you want to solely depend on one software running your entire business smoothly? I had a bad experience, back in 2020, where so many of my Zaps “broke” that I ended up emailing a dead list for over nine months. We lost out on a ton of sales because of it.
Now, I take full blame for that. But what if there was a better way?
How do we make the system simple, while maybe not spending $4,000 / month on seven different tools.
Use an all-in-one platform—like Go High Level—to keep everything in one place. We moved our entire $25 million business to one platform and finally made it simple.
We were able to get rid of our VAs, because using just one program took care of everything for a couple hundred bucks a month. That’s over $50,000 per year that we saved on programs and VAs that we could now put toward more important developments.
This means you not only save that money, you can also move faster, launch faster, and never have to worry about individual Zaps and pieces breaking because the whole system is integrated and works together.
So, if we’re running an entire $25 million business with just one software, why aren’t you?
I see a lot of coaches fall into this particular pitfall of offering too much and using too many different tools. Simplify everything, let go of all that weight, and you will rise. I firmly believe that.
Bonus key: Selling vs. transforming
The last thing I wanna talk about is the selling mistake I see a lot of coaches struggle with. And the reason I believe this struggle is so real is because people don’t understand that selling is not selling—it’s transforming.
If your coaching program can truly transform somebody’s life, like ours and so many others, then you’re no longer selling—you’re transforming.
You’re opening a door for them to experience an entirely new way of life, and then leaving it up to them to it is up to them to be motivated.
You can’t motivate somebody. You can try.
We’re here to transform. And if you’re not motivated, then we’re not going to sell you anything. Okay?
You want more clients.
You want more sales.
You want to go from selling to transforming.
You wouldn’t be here, reading this, if you didn’t.
Selling is your location, transforming is your destination.
More clients, more money, bigger impact, more time, and more freedom.
So, the question is,
What are you gonna do and why haven’t you done it already?
Very often on a sales call, you’ll hear the person say
I’m not sure if this is for me.
And my question then is
Okay. So, if your goal is this and you’re not there yet, why aren’t you there yet?
It’s because you’re missing this piece—us.
If you think someone is a good fit for your offer, and you know that you could transform them with it, then you should let them know that you are what they need to get where they’re trying to go.
We didn’t hit this huge milestone for no reason. We’ve learned all the pitfalls and tangents and shiny object syndromes that entrepreneurs fall into, and we are really good at keeping our clients from falling into them.
For a breakdown of exactly what we do, check out this post here.
James Bonadies’ Local Marketing Vault course is the first one we, the Inspired Idiots, have encountered that we 100% recommend to our viewers. It’s so straightforward and well-built that people grandmas are doing it!
Click here to watch his free training and sign up to enroll!
No one ever seems to regret it!
If you’re interested in making money online, but have no idea how — you are an inspired idiot!
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