Molly Mahoney: Making $80,000 at Disneyworld?! | The Creator CEO Podcast
Molly Mahoney – a coach, a public speaker, a business owner, and a full-fledged Creator CEO – is wrapping up her fourth straight year of netting $1M+ in sales.
Since joining SamCart, she’s raked in over $5.2M in total revenue and boasts one of the lowest refund totals of our nearly 80,000 creators.
The founder of the Prepared Performer and her self-titled business, Molly Mahoney, has one of the most successful business models we’ve seen from a creator, and she gave us insight as to how she acquires and retains high-ticket clients every day.
Any creator or founder running a 5, 6, or even 7+ figure operation can learn a ton from Molly’s learnings as she’s built and scaled multiple businesses.
Keep reading to learn more and watch the full interview on YouTube here.
The big breakthrough: From part-time hobbyist to Creator CEO
We dug back into Molly’s SamCart history from her dashboard, recalling when she started off on the platform in 2016. At the time, she was only using PayPal to collect payments from her clients – aspiring musical theater performers – and sold the program for $47 via Facebook Live, where she would be on every day for 30 days.
She hit a stride of success, and eventually raised the price to $97. She saw more success, so she raised the program price to $197. Rinse, repeat, and finally, Molly’s selling her musical theater program for $497, allowing new customers to pay in-full or via a payment plan. Fast forward three months? Molly’s net $50,000 in profit. That’s when everything changed.
Now, seven years later, she has hit and surpassed her breakthrough moment and sustains 7-figure annual revenue year after year.
Recurring revenue: How repeat business drives Molly’s bottom line
Digging deeper into Molly’s dashboard, we learned her 389 active subscribers (that is, customers who purchase from her businesses on a recurring basis) net her $87,000 a month in what we call MRR, or monthly recurring revenue.
“Right now, we’re pouring way more attention into our current clients, so we’re trusting that we have this here so we can go out and bring in new sales as well,” Molly shares.
“If you focus too much on the MRR and you forget about the other new stuff, you could slowly get into trouble. But I can rest in the fact that this is solid – I have 11 other team members and other business expenses, but it’s so cool to know that we’ve built up to this place where we’re able to consistently bring in business.”
While she still offers other products and services that new customers can buy individually, those subscriptions and memberships bring in passive revenue every month so she can focus on new-client acquisition and other important aspects of her business.
Where SamCart has enabled Molly Mahoney’s growth
Like any other eCommerce platform on the market, SamCart is merely a tool. Knowing how to leverage its features and benefit from them is the mark of a successful creator. Molly has been with us from the beginning, so she knows a thing or two about SamCart and she shared some of her favorite aspects of the tool with us:
- Easy-to-build sales pages: “You make it very easy for a hot mess like me to put together a sales page. I’ve made a sales page while waiting in line for Splash Mountain at Disneyland. While in line for that ride, I brought in another $20,000 client because you’ve made it so easy.”
- Simple conversions with saved payment: “New customers come through and get a free trial or spend $1 to access some of our top posts, then we start the conversation to get them into a higher-level program. Because we have their card on file, we make it easy to charge them right away so they don’t have to enter their information again. It’s like concierge-style.”
Bringing IRL customers into the digital fold
One of Molly’s main offerings includes public speaking and speaking at events about her success as an entrepreneur and founder. It’s notoriously difficult to convert people at an event or a conference, but Molly has made it seamless to take her in-person audience and bring them into her digital world:
“When I’m speaking on stage or doing a training, I’ll have people message my Instagram account with a word, typically something like ‘human,’ and if they do, there’s a triggered response that sends them a coupon code or my free lead magnet.”
That free lead magnet helps Molly acquire these new prospects and bring them into the fold, but she uses a few different Order Bumps and Add-Ons to convert them into paying customers. Once these new prospects are in her SamCart portal, they’re able to see even more offerings and cross-sells available and can checkout immediately with their stored credit card.
From first-time spenders to high-rolling buyers: How Molly gets more customers to spend more money
While she has customers all across the spending spectrum, Molly has made her successful living on the backs of her top spenders – some spending 5 figures or more on her products and services. We asked how she manages to make her customers spend more, and she revealed to us that it’s a 3-step process:
- Daily activities: Unlocking the algorithm – spending time every single day on what Molly calls “humanism,” including talking with her clients on a regular basis. Even in her entry-level offering, Social Sales Stars, she meets with clients three times a week. This allows her to build connections, referrals, and trust.
- Weekly activities: Create a weekly action post, be it a YouTube video, a social post, a blog, or even just text on LinkedIn or Facebook that creates new value and draws people in with a sticky call-to-action to learn more or get in contact.
- Monthly activities: Have at least one scalable offer, be it a webinar, a group sales call, a masterclass – anything that allows you to sell in a group setting – to get more people rallied around what you have to offer.
“We did $120,000 last week,” Molly shares candidly during our conversation. “That was literally me and my assistant. We don’t have sales people. We’ve tried to bring other people on to help do sales, but all-in we spent maybe five hours last week on sales.”
TL;DR – Give people consistent chances to take action and buy more stuff, then allow them the opportunity to engage with you and create that human touch.
With this process, she’s been able to generate a customer lifetime value of almost $1,700 – a number that has consistently grown year over year.
Acquiring, qualifying, converting: Molly’s customer journey flows
After bringing new prospects into the fold – particularly for her program, Sales Stars – Molly sends them through an application process to help qualify these potential customers and send them to the best products and services based on their needs.
“You land on our website and find this application. If you don’t already have an offer – something to sell – it says ‘Oops! I don’t have a business yet’ and takes them to a different page. There, they can sign up for the first modules of our Sales Stars course to get them up and running,” Molly says.
On the other hand, some prospects will complete this application and be uniquely qualified for one of Molly’s higher price point options. She then funnels people into a sales chat where they continue the conversation to ensure they’re a good fit and that they’re ready to take on the financial investment of joining this Sales Stars program.
Finally, she sends these prospects to a Google Doc rich with information on the program, what they can expect from joining, and a FAQ to squash any final objections. At the bottom of this Doc is a link to her SamCart sales page, where people can checkout with ease.
Offering multiple payment options has also contributed to her mile-high conversion rate, especially for her higher-ticket items and memberships:
“The whole (Sales Stars) program is $10,000, so we offer a payment plan or they can pay in-full. At the end of the year, we check in with each client and determine if they want to pay in-full, opt-in to go month to month, or leave the community,” says Molly. And many of her clients stick around because she makes it so easy.
“You want to hear my secret sales pitch?” Molly says. “There are really three versions. The first one is hi. The second one is hey there. The third one is hello. That’s it. I messaged a client the other day and said ‘I have a surprise! You’re coming up on your year anniversary, and we’d love to continue supporting you.’ She paid in-full right away and we charged the credit card on file. It makes it so easy.”
What’s changed now that Molly is a 7+ figure seller
When you scale your business from $30,000 a year to over a million dollars in annual revenue, things are bound to change – and there are things Molly no longer fears as she’s turned her business into a juggernaut.
She shares: “I don’t worry if and when people cancel their membership to my content club. It’s part of the game, and I’m so much more cool if people cancel because that’s a good sign that they aren’t a good fit for working with us.”
SamCart in particular has enabled her to make her business run smoother and collect payments easier. She can trust that her courses are running smoothly in the background, that her payments are being collected every month, and that her MRR will be reflected on the back end of her environment.
“One day, I was getting my nails done and I was able to welcome a $26,000 client,” she shares. “It’s that easy with SamCart. I closed the sale with one hand.”
“AI-ifying your whole business”: What’s next in business for Molly Mahoney
“We actually launched our AI Content Club in 2021, so we've been doing so much with AI for a really long time. But the big thing that I've recognized is that most people are using AI just for their content,” Molly shares. “They're not actually using it to make sales, so let's talk about how to actually make sales.”
She shares that now, she and her team are working with clients to AI-ify their whole business. “Just this weekend, we launched our suite of AI tools that we've built using our templates. All of our mastermind members get access to a whole suite of tools that allow them to write their masterclasses, write long, juicy social media posts – we’re bringing it more into the SOPs so that it's not just on the content side, but it’s part of their entire business.”
In just about 7 years, Molly Mahoney has scaled her way up from the everyday hobbyist creator to a certified, wildly successful Creator CEO – and she’s not alone.
Every day on SamCart, we see our top creators enact strategies that help them surpass the 5- and even 6-figure mark each year in revenue. You could be the next Creator CEO that makes it big on the SamCart platform.
See what we’re all about: Start your free SamCart trial today.
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