How to 4x your income and impact without teaching extra hours.

Welcome to The Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for edupreneurs, the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators. Just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to up level your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator in business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. 

We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in. 

Hello. Hello. It's so good to be chatting to you today. Now, before I dive into this episode. I would love to invite you to my upcoming Masterclass because it's all about this topic. It's all about how to 4X your income and impact without teaching a million hours. And it's going to be super juicy. I'm diving into things like hybrid courses how to go about it and specifically the most valuable thing is really how to sell a course online and fill it with students so that you can make amazing money. 

And I'm going to share my four step system for doing that. It's going to be on the 22nd of July at 6 PM Central European time. There are limited spots in the room and we've already got a good couple of hundred people have signed up. 

And so I would love to see you there. If you are an educator or teaching business owner who wants to sell courses. And free up your time and make more money and create more freedom. Then please join me in that masterclass. I'd love to see you there. 

Today I'm going to be talking about how you can four X your income and impact without teaching a gazillion hours, sacrificing all your precious time to do it. Let's start with this. Here's how you don't exponentially increase your income and impact. Okay. 

 You don't do it by trading all your time for money. Now, I know this is the model that we grew up with and it's the way the society works and it's just the natural thing to do. I know that, especially as educators and teaching business owners. But I don't believe the model to even vaguely go for, because it is very limiting and it is not sustainable.

Let me ask you this. If you wanted to make 10 K a month in your teaching business, how would you think to do it? How would you make 10k a month? Your first thought is most likely teach more hours. Maybe shift some one on ones to some small groups. enrollll more students. So teach more hours, enrolll more students, and shift to like small groups, like three people, maybe five people max, and just teach more hours. 

But the question now is, Would you really want to make 10k a month if it meant being stuck in classes all day? Now, if that thought lights you up and you're like, yes, I want to do that. Actively teaching all day is what makes me so happy. Then amazing. Then you should do that. 

There are people in this world that absolutely would love to do that. And then I think you should do it. You should do whatever makes you happy. But for me, my experience was that it was exhausting and I don't mean teaching is exhausting, I love teaching.

My entire business is built on teaching people how to do things. And I love helping and impacting and serving people. That's what a teacher loves. That's why people go into teaching anyway. So it's not that it's not that I don't enjoy it. It's that it's the amount of it is exhausting to teach for six hours a day is exhausting. 

It's draining for me. And maybe it's because I'm an introvert and I just literally cannot talk to people for that long. But it's really tiring. I feel very, very tired after that. And for me it feels like this teaching treadmill that never seems to stop. And that's why I was like, as an online teacher trying to make more money and stuff, I was like, the next step would logically be to just teach more classes and do this and this, this. 

But it just felt so against what I actually wanted and what I wanted was more freedom. So what I wanted was 10 K months or five K months. Cause at that point I was making like a thousand to 2,000 a month. So five K months, 10 K months. And 20k months, whatever it may be. And I wanted it without having to trade all my time. I wanted it so I could still go and spend time with my family.

I could, hang out, take the day off, hang out with my nephew and nieces and just have that flexibility. So the question is if you are teaching six to eight hours a day and yes, you're making 10 K months, would you be happy doing that? If it meant that you had to like literally be at your computer every day or wherever in those physical classes every day.

And it meant that you couldn't just go on holiday or take the day off or have the morning or. I don't know, would you be willing to do that? For 10 K a month, you couldn't have time, but you would have money. And so when I think of that, I'm like no, time is the most valuable resource ever. My time is so valuable because money can always be made, but time when it's gone, it's gone. 

So the question I always asked back in the day was, how can I make more? But without giving away all my time forever, because for me, that trade your time for money model, which most educators and teaching business owners work within, it is like this treadmill. You show up, you teach the class, you get paid.

You show up, you teach the class, you get paid. You show up, you teach the class, you get paid. It's constantly this active thing. And if you don't show up and teach the class, you don't get paid. So that's not freeing for me. And I am all about freedom. If you've been in my world for some time, you will know freedom is like my number one thing.

It's one of the top, top values. And so I was like, I need to make money without giving away all my freedom because I just cannot fall for this. And so my solution was to sell scalable, relatively automated courses and group programs.

And I say relatively automated because you can't completely automate everything, but you can automate a hell of a lot of stuff. And, for me finding that solution within two years, I had five X to my teaching income. And I took my hourly rate from 20 to 500 an hour, all from working smarter and hyper strategically. The way that I saw it was work hard now and free myself in the future.

And don't get me wrong, those first two years or so in building my business and shifting to selling courses and things like that, like they were hard. I'm not going to sugarcoat it and be like, it was easy. It wasn't easy. Like I worked hard. I spent all my time learning skills. I put in the reps. I put in the energy and I grafted and I worked on the side of my teaching job and I woke up at like 6 AM 

 I worked and then I taught and then I worked on my business after that and I did that for two years. And then I quit my teaching job. And so I'm not saying that it's going to take, energy and time to do this. If anyone tells you that they're lying to you, but once you build these assets, you are going to be able to leverage them for years.

And that's why I talk about working smarter. Instead of teaching repeatedly, the same information over and over again, take that information and. Methodize it, make it a process and build it out into a digital curriculum that does the teaching heavy lifting for you, then learn how to sell that curriculum and package it into an offer and sell it and then fill it with students and then keep scaling up.

And basically that's the most freeing thing. And you might be thinking, okay how can I actually teach someone in a course? You might be thinking that's not possible that you can get a result for someone if you're not physically there. And this is why I want to introduce the term hybrid courses to you.

And this is what I'm diving into in the Masterclass. So if this is something that interests you, definitely click the link below this podcast to register. But hybrid courses is not completely prerecorded. So if you thinking I'm a language teacher and I want to teach someone, how to speak, how can I do that through a prerecorded course or whatever. Obviously you can't get someone to speak through a prerecorded course.

So there's this hybrid form of courses where you are delivering it in a certain way, and you have a live component and that live component is done in a smart way, not in a one on one way, in a scalable way, in a group way, and it's just done intentionally that in a way that it is scalable.

So you could have five students in that live. You could have 10, you could have 15, 20. You can have a bunch and there's ways of doing it. So definitely join the masterclass if you want to hear more about it. And as I mentioned in the Masterclass, it really is a limiting belief. It's a limiting belief that you need to be there in front of someone to get them a result.

And as long as you take your knowledge and your expertise and your process and your method and you build it out. In a good way, in a way that takes someone from A, where they are now to B getting the result they want. And you know that that process works and you've got the experience and you know how to create shortcuts and you know how to help people overcome their obstacles.

Then you can do this in a digital curriculum, you can get this person a result. And if you don't know what you would help someone with or any of that, then maybe this isn't the right thing for you. But if you have an expertise, you've gotten people results in something, it might not even be what you're teaching right now.

It could be you're passionate about baking and you're exceptional at baking incredible cakes with buttercream icing and this and that. You could create an entire course on that and a business on cake baking. I've seen it happen. And I've seen it do exceptionally well. It could be in your hobby.

It could be in your passion. Any thing that you've done that, people want to do, you could create a offer around that and sell it and get someone a result and impact more people. So on top of this, you're actually impacting more human beings because you're not trading your time.

And that's another thing. Why do people become teachers? Because they want to help other people. They want to serve. And so imagine being able to serve like five X more people and impact five X, 10 X more people. You can through this model. And that's why I'm so passionate about it. 

The next way to increase your income, and this has to be done is to upskill yourself and specifically in moneymaking skills. Things like marketing, selling, offer creation, public speaking, copywriting, speaking on video, creating content. 

All of those skills in today's world will make you more money. And when you build these skills, you will increase your earning potential. And the amazing thing about this is that all of these skills are learnable. And I can tell you that with a hundred percent conviction, because I started with zero in pretty much all of them. 

And when I started five, six years ago, whenever it was, I knew nothing of pretty much all of these things and I became pretty good at many of them. I have been able to do some crazy things and learn some insane skills in a couple of years. And those first two years in particular was a very big learning curve. But there was a direct correlation between the skills I had and the money I made. Direct correlation. Once you learn the skill of being able to sell something online and someone buys something from you that isn't connected to your time, once you learn that you are going to see a big growth in income and you're going to see a lot of time coming back to you.

And I want you to think about it like this. For two years going and doing your MBA, it takes energy and time to go do your MBA. Of course, you're going to have to graft in those two years. You're going to have to learn new things. You're going to have to study.

You're going to have to do whatever you need to do to get that MBA, right? But once you have your MBA. You are more qualified and you can increase your earning potential because you've developed skills. You've got another qualification. Now, the thing is you're not getting a qualification, like a certification by doing this, but you're getting real life skills and money making skills.

And when you equip yourself with money making skills, You will make more money. You will increase your earning potential. You will regain back your time. And so I'm very passionate about this and I think it's really important. If you think you can four X your income and impact without learning new skills, it's not possible unless you just kept teaching a lot of classes. 

If you were happy to do that and you were happy to just keep doing things the way you're doing them now, then amazing. This is probably not going to be relevant to you, but if you have someone like me who really wants their free time, really wants freedom, really wants to be able to travel, wants to be able to make more money, wants to all do all these things, then a prerequisite must be that you must upscale yourself. 

Now, if you're like, oh, but I hate marketing and I hate selling. And I'm so bad at all of that. Sure. Cool. That's how pretty much everyone feels, including me, but how badly do you want it? The question is, how badly do you want your freedom? Is it bad enough that you are willing to learn how to sell something?

Is it bad enough that you're willing to learn how to market something? Is it bad enough to learn how to speak on video or to create content or to, create a scalable course? For me it was. I really wanted my current situation I was not happy in and I needed to change. So I really wanted it.

I really wanted a life that I wanted. I wanted to be able to travel and see my family whenever I wanted and have freedom and not be teaching all day. And I wanted it so bad that I was like, cool, I'm going to learn these skills. I'm going to push myself out of my comfort zone. I'm going to push myself to my edges.

I'm going to do things that make me deeply uncomfortable. I had to conquer so many fears and push through so much resistance. But I got to where I wanted to go. And the people that I really love to work with are those who are hungry for change, who are hungry for creating more in their life.

They know that they have this potential. They know there's like this untapped potential. They may be scared of the path that's ahead of them, but they are ready for it they're ready to change their life. They're all in. They're not like cool. I just want things to be handed to me on a silver platter.

Like they're willing to pull their sleeves up and get to work. To create the life that they want. Because that's me. That's how I've done it. And that's how I've been able to do it. And those are the kinds of people that I see create results, especially in the Digiteachers Biz Academy and the coaching clients I work with, the people who are hungry for change.

And are willing to upskill and push themselves past their comfort zone. They're the ones who create results. And those are the people that I just absolutely love to serve because you're me. I'm just like a couple of years ahead of you, but I've walked that path.

I've done the thing. I've been in the trenches and I can really intimately, see and experience things with you because I know how it goes. I know how it feels because I've walked that path intimately. So those are really key things is upscaling and learning how to package an offer and sell it.

That is scalable. That doesn't rely on your time. Those are like essential. Now, if you want to learn these things. If you are hungry for that, if you are ready to make more money, if you're ready to upscale you, it's the middle of 2024, we're six months away from 2025. There's a beautiful opportunity here to actually learn the skills that you need to create a scalable offer and sell it online and flood it with students and work with students you love and regain back your time. 

And impact more students and all of these amazing things. There's such an opportunity here and I want you to see it. And if it feels like a yes to you and you're like, yes, this is what I want.

I want to learn and I'm ready. Then I would love to see you in my Masterclass coming up and yeah, it's a live one. Once it's done, it's done. And it's the 22nd of July at 6 PM. I hope to see you there. You can click the link below this podcast to sign up. Otherwise just email me or message me and I can give you the link.

Now I hope this was valuable and I hope it activated something within you. And I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and I'll chat to you soon. Bye

  Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I have some exciting news for those of you who are wanting to learn more about how you can launch a course or group program online and fill it with dreamy students.

I'm hosting my Free Quadruple Your Teaching Income Through Launching Courses Masterclass soon. I'm going to share my four-step launch success system that will help you launch any offer online and fill it immediately. It is a life changing system that has helped me make make hundreds of thousands of dollars online, as well as change the lives of many of my students.

This masterclass is free. It's going to be live. There's just one session and there are limited spots in the virtual room. Click the link below to join us. 

I appreciate you so much and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.