Show Notes:

Shayla Boyd-Gill, the Family Freedom and Affluence Mentor and creator of the Luxe Your BusinessTM Sales System, is an EXTRAORDINARY and PROVEN business mentor and sales strategist who shows women entrepreneurs how to have it all – family, freedom, and affluence – while doing what they love. She teaches her clients to restructure their businesses and lives by boosting their high-ticket sales so they can make more money in less time without a heavy client load. She juggles being an entrepreneur with being a wife of 24 years and mom of six homeschooled children.

Links: https://shaylaboydgill.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/shaylaboydgill/ 

https://www.instagram.com/shayla.boydgill/ 

https://twitter.com/shaylaboydgill 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK9BexU-h69HbASYC_1OuDQ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaylaboydgill/

Sold Out Discovery Calls Cheat Sheet: https://laborbizcoach.lpages.co/sold-out-discovery-call-cheatsheet/

Episode Transcription:

Lindsay: [00:00:15] Welcome back to The Book Your Dream Clients podcast. We have a special guest with us today, Shayla Boyd Gill. And she teaches her clients to restructure their business and lives by boosting their high-ticket sales. She also has an amazing resource for us at the end, so make sure you listen to the whole episode so you can grab your free cheat sheet to learn how to book more sales discovery calls. Sit back, relax and enjoy.

Shayla, thank you so much for being on The Book Your Dream Clients podcast. I'm so excited you're with us today.

Shayla: [00:00:46] Thank you for having me be a part of your community today. I appreciate it. 

Lindsay: [00:00:50] Yes. I was so excited to see that you are on!  I talked to Shayla before we started recording, because this has nothing to do with business, but it makes me feel good that she's a homeschool mom. And I love that. So thank you for putting that in your information and in your bio, because I think everyone's always afraid to share those personal parts of you. So thank you for sharing that with all of us.

Shayla: [00:01:13] Yeah sometimes we think it's not relevant, but it is business. It's the business of running the family and running a business. So I always tell my kids you're part of my business, okay? So do what you're supposed to do. 

Lindsay: [00:01:25] I love that. Do what you're supposed to do. So tell us Shayla, how you got started and what you do. 

Shayla: [00:01:32] Yeah, it's a crazy journey. I love to tell people that from the beginning. So I started becoming an entrepreneur in 2003. And that's the same year that I decided to pull my first son out of school. And the very interesting backstory around that is his teacher - his first grade teacher said, he's amazing, super smart, but the problem is we don't have a system in place to support him and help him to reach beyond what he's doing.

So he was excelling in the first grade, but he was not emotionally mature enough to go to a higher grade level that he belonged. And she says, you know, if you keep him here, he'll be okay. But her big concern was she, she literally said to me, I'm afraid that we may dumb him down. So your option would be....private school, which was like in my budget at that time, that was like, what? But we don't have private school budgets. She said, or homeschool. I said, I'm not a teacher, how are we supposed to do this? And I just really decided to take a leap of faith. You know, I left my job. I was a construction engineering project manager, and I said, let me leave this job.

I understand processes. Okay? So I understand if I have some kind of structure in place, I can create a rhythm for it. So I created the process for homeschooling him, and it was a lot of trial and error. At that time, we had three kids. I needed to replace that income from construction engineering. And so I had asked myself, I'm like, okay, we have a two family income.

What can I do to supplement some of this income? I'd saved, I had savings from my job, but I said, I need to start generating something so that we can be in a good place. And the funny thing I asked myself, Lindsay was, what am I really good at doing? You know, everyone says, what can I do really well, how can I make some money? And the hilarious answer was I am really good at having babies.

What's the really cool story around that was I'd had really amazing pregnancies and birthing experiences. And what I understood was my community, many of the women I talked to, they didn't. And I couldn't figure out why. And what I realized is the way that they were preparing for their birthing experiences was not adequate.

Number one. And number two, once they got into the actual labor process and went to hospitals, if they chose to do that, They didn't have anyone to advocate for them. They didn't know the questions to ask. They did not have the resources to know that they had options. And so I became a childbirth educator and through that, I became a doula.

A lactation consultant... all the crunchy stuff you want, I was that, okay? [laughs]. And it was, it was perfect for me because it gave me flexibility. It was in my wheelhouse. I'd had that experience of having the doula and childbirth educator and midwife through my birth. So I knew what my clients needed. I built a six-figure business doing that with ease.

While homeschooling my child. What I didn't realize was I did it so well, I had built the business around me as the brand -  I didn't understand building the team, nor did I understand how to really manage the client load. So I did get overwhelmed and I felt myself burning out before I crashed and burned. I knew I needed an exit strategy.

Because as the children were growing I said to myself, can you continue to do this and sustain this business? And that one call at three in the morning when a baby's like, I'm ready... reminded me very quickly that I really liked my sleep. I don't think I can do this term. It's not working. And so how I got to where I am now -  I started shifting, what can I do now?

I'm good at having babies. I'm good at advocating. I'm good at training people. What I found where other birth workers were struggling to build their business. And people would come to me and say, how are you getting all these clients? How is it that you have this referral network, what are you doing? So I started training other birth workers and teaching them how to build their business. That morphed into training women in general, how to start your business. And now we're at the place where I really work with six-figure women entrepreneurs. And help them to scale their businesses. So that's the long journey.

Lindsay: [00:06:03] I love that journey. I think that is so amazing. I feel like so many things people can have in common with -  so many women can identify with so many pieces of your journey again, important.

That's why it's important to share every bit of it. Because we can latch on to all I can latch on to so many of Shayla's points and feel connected to her because she was open about it. I love that. So now you teach six-figure female entrepreneurs. What are those women coming to you for? They already hit six figures, and now what?

Shayla: [00:06:35] So the big thing when we look in the online industry, everyone's like, I say, what do you want to do first? When you first start your business, they say I want to make a hundred thousand dollars. I don't know why that's the magic number. But I want a hundred thousand dollars. And so you fight, kick and scream and get to a hundred thousand dollars, not realizing that there's a next level.

Right? And so they get there, but oftentimes it was a method that was used too hard, too time consuming or something again, not sustainable. Can you scale this thing that you've created? And so I find a lot of my clients will get stuck at six-figures. Like their real true number is somewhere between $75,000 to $250,000.

They get into this little circle at that range and they stay there. And so they're not able to scale to the next level or multiple six-figures or even seven-figures because they continue to do the same things they did to get to six-figures without the understanding that you have to make some shifts, those shifts may be in a team.

It may be in your process. It may be refining your offers. Something has to change. If you don't change anything there are several things that can happen. You may kind of put a cap on what you can do. You may find that you're going to exhaust yourself like I did as a birth worker, trying to take on too many clients to make even more money.

And the burnout is real, you know, who wants to burn out at a hundred thousand dollars, you know? And here's the truth around it. Lindsay. A hundred thousand dollars isn't enough. I know people don't like it when I say that, but a hundred thousand dollars that you've generated in sales does not mean that you have a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account.

You're not looking at the expenses that it took to get to that $100,000 in sales. The unfortunate truth is that money is not sitting in your bank account. You need more money. If you say that you personally want to have a hundred thousand dollars that you're bringing in to support your family, you need more.

Lindsay: [00:08:41] that is something that no one talks about. They talk about getting to six- figures and then they don't talk about the wall that the six-figure entrepreneur hits. And we have a lot of coaches who listen to this. So I think coaches go through the systems of getting there and then they keep using the same systems like you said, and then they know that they should invest in themselves continuously.

But they think, well, what should I invest in? Because everything else worked. I don't understand what I'm supposed to do after I get to six-figures. So they either rinse and repeat, or they invest in a brand new system and they start all over. And then the hamster wheel continues. 

Shayla: [00:09:22] Exactly! You'll see the cycle of like, I'm pivoting in my business. I'm doing this thing now because I need something bright and shiny because I don't believe I can scale this thing that I have. Because you haven't looked behind the scenes to see what can I do differently with the magic I already have? We don't need to start over. 

Lindsay: [00:09:42] No, so what do they do? 

Shayla: [00:09:44] So, you know what I find with my clients, a lot of them, they may be coming from a low ticket model -  where they've been taught, you know, volume, volume volume.

So you continuously have to bring in this cycle of people, you know, and you're not focusing on how to retain clients. I focus on helping them to build what I call leverage high ticket offers. And they're retaining clients for at least three years in their system. So we can get really caught up in focusing on, I need to market.

To bring more people in and forget to market and, or have discussions with people that are already working with us. The money is often right in your face. It’s right in your face. Someone needs a ‘next-level’ something in your business. But if you're looking outward, because you want to say, I have a list of 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 people.

It doesn't matter if you have the vanity numbers if you don't know how to serve them. And it's the same with social media. You can have hundreds of thousands of people following you, but if you don't know how to monetize it, it means nothing. Someone's selling you a program that says I can help you to grow your list or grow your social media. What are you going to do with it once you’ve grown it?

Lindsay: [00:10:54] That is such a light bulb moment. Yeah. What are you going to do? We get to 10,000 subscribers, 10,000 Instagram followers, all these numbers... and yeah, no one talks about that. What are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do when all the people come to your house and you’re not prepared?

Shayla: [00:11:10] You're not prepared for the party. 

Lindsay: [00:11:14] You’re not. So what is that next level thing? Like what do they do besides thinking of retaining clients? What if they have a business model where their clients  necessarily don't need to work with them year after year, after a year, what do you do? 

Shayla: [00:11:26] You are going to have some cases where you may do one-off consulting or a one-off service. That's fine. You still need to have a system in place where number one, you have an offer that makes sense. Number one, financially, for your business and for you. Also you're providing an experience, something of value to them, which can be higher-ticket. So if it is a one-off client, you don't need to have 12 of them in a month.

If your pricing is properly done and the service is properly delivered, you might only need four clients a month. So I love to go with a theme of - we really talk about serving fewer clients, but making more money. So my business is not based on -  I was going to say a store name, but I'm not going to do that today.

My business is not based on the volume method. Like not everyone wants to come to my store.

Lindsay: [00:12:19] You’re not Walmart. 

Shayla: [00:12:22] [laughs]. I wasn't going to say it. I'm like, I don't know who your sponsors are. But, you know, not everyone can come to my store. I'm very boutique-like. And a lot of people are afraid to have a very niche business that is boutique because there's always this fear that I'm going to leave someone out. If you build your machine in a way that it attracts that ideal person that you're really wanting to look for, the thing that you'll also have in place is an amazing referral process because if your clients are served at an amazing level and it's high-ticket, They know who you're looking for.

They're not going to send their aunt, cousin and friend. They're going to send the person that knows how to come to you and work with you. So for example, I had one of my clients, we did amazing work together and she's like, I know the perfect person for you, but I know they need to have their stuff together before they come and start working with you.

I'm like, really? I'm glad you know that. But what happened is that the customer avatar or the customer profile that I had was so clean that they don't bring me what I call BS. I know I don't serve at that level. So my clients are also building their businesses to scale at that level, too. They're not attracting everyone.

They're attracting the right one. And that does take work to refine who that right person is. There are lots of programs that say, oh, well, we'll help you determine your avatar, but they're very surface level. They're like, oh, you're serving people that are 30 to 40 years old that are women that love to be on Facebook.

That tells me nothing. Right? So it's really understanding and knowing and doing the deeper dive and the deeper dive is the homework that a lot of people don't want to do because it does take time. It does take some research. It does take, you know, some ebb and flow. But if you're willing to put that work in and refine how you're offering to that person and serving them also in a way that, you know, intuitively works with them, not what ‘X’ program told you to do to serve them. It's going to make a difference in the business. 

Lindsay: [00:14:23] I think that's all important to note that these programs are all fine and dandy, but if we're not tuning in to who we can really help... don't think of it as niching down or narrowing your audience. Think of getting closer to the people who need you so you can serve them.

Think of it that way. R Why do you think people are so afraid to niche down? 

Shayla: [00:14:45] The biggest thing I hear is, ‘I'm afraid of leaving someone out.’ So especially when you're elevating your business, think about me. When I first started in the coaching industry, I worked with women entrepreneurs, aspiring women entrepreneurs that wanted to start their business. I was working with a broad group of women. Okay? I did the easy pass. I said, I'm working with everyone, right? As I refined my business, I really got clearer on, okay, now my person is -  they have an existing business. They're more family oriented. They're wanting to do these things that started chopping my list down.

And it even looked like getting rid of my email list or cleaning up the email list, which was scary. You have an email list of thousands of people and you realize, you know what, only a good thousand of those really need to be on this list and letting the list know we're no longer available to serve you.

 However, here are some resources. People are like, are you crazy? I'm like, well that list wasn't making me the money. So I'm not missing anything. But then getting even narrower down to I'm working with six-figure service-based women entrepreneurs that are ready to scale to $500,000 or more in their business.

These are consultants, coaches, experts, and things of that nature. That list was like, okay, ‘X’ list goes in half, but I could have a list and the whole overall email list that I have is huge. But I can have a list, a core list, a segmented list of just six-figure women entrepreneurs. And I can understand if I'm only talking to them, the message is only going to hit them the way it needs to hit them.

If I sent that to everyone else on my list it wouldn't land. It wouldn't land. So this is where we were in a case of we call it, are you talking above the people that you really need to talk to or are you talking below the people that you really want to talk to. If I was speaking to the segmented lists of six-figure women entrepreneurs saying, are you struggling figuring out who your prime client is?

Are you struggling trying to get your first product? They can't relate to that. They're like, no, she's not talking to me. They're not going to buy. So the messaging and the segmentation has to be on point to make sure that we're getting the people that we really want to talk to.

Lindsay: [00:17:01] When you talk to your ladies who are over $500,000, what kind of pain points do they have at that, at that level?

Shayla: [00:17:09] So once you're at $500,000 and that's where we're getting people to $500k and above. When I find that my clients are hitting that number we're looking at, do we need to look at expanding the team? You don't need a huge team. But there are probably some areas of support where you need a team. So you're looking at the back end, your team.

We're making sure that you are working with your accounting, making sure your numbers are really in order, taxes, the ugly part, and making sure you're prepared for the taxes -  the boring part. The boring part can get you in trouble. That's the problem, right? And we're also looking at you know we talked about building a scalable business, but then now we're looking at what if you wanted to exit this business? The way you've built it to this point?

If someone wants to step in and maybe you get it to a million dollars or a couple of million, can someone step in? Do you have all the processes in place? Or have you built it like I did with the birthing business - totally around yourself? So we started looking beyond ‘oh, we know how to make money.’

We know how to get clients. Do we know how to scale even more? Could this be sellable? Could you exit if you want it to exit? Those are things we don't really think about until It's time to think about it and it's too late. 

Lindsay: [00:18:26] Yeah. Wow. That's another thing that no one talks about is what do you do when you're not into your business anymore and you want to sell it, or I brought this up to my husband one day.

I said, we're not at the time in history where all these entrepreneurs are retiring or quitting or whatever you want to say. And I said, what does an entrepreneur do when they hit the age where they want to retire? What do you do with your business that you built? 

Shayla: [00:18:54] WAnd a lot of entrepreneurs won’t retire.

They’ve exhausted what they want to do with that business and they want to do something different. They want to branch off. They want to literally, when we talk about having other streams of income, not connected with that business. They want to be able to put the energy into, I want to start up this other thing.

You know, do you sell it, do you bring in some other people to provide the service? Do you bring on other coaches or consultants? Do you do certifications? So that the method still flows or what? You get to decide. Are you bringing your family on too? Right, how does it really need to look?

Lindsay: [00:19:30] And yeah, I think the entrepreneur spirit is never going to really say, all right, I'm done. Exactly. Oh my gosh. This is such a good conversation. Can you tell everyone how they can find out more about how to work with you? What are your options? 

Shayla: [00:19:48] Sure. So the easiest way to find me is just Googling my name, Shayla Boyd-Gill or you can go on social media. Everything's under Shayla Boyd-Gill with the exception of Instagram is @shayla.boydgill.

The website is www.shaylaboydgill.com. So you can find me through all of the platforms plus my website. 

Lindsay: [00:20:08] Awesome. We're going to put all of Shayla's links in the show notes so you guys can go find out how you can get some mentorship from her, look into her. I know she has a freebie. I'm just looking at her website right now, sold-out discovery calls cheat sheet. I know coaches would love that. Tell us about that cheat sheet. 

Shayla: [00:20:24] Yeah it's just a great reminder cheat-sheet of the different ways that you can get discovery calls booked. People will say, well, I need to do more sales calls. I'm like, no, you  need to get your calendar filled with the right people. And so that cheat sheet offers you different ways you can find the right people and different ways you can promote the fact that you do discovery calls. 

Shayla: [00:20:47] The goal is not to, when I say sold out discovery calls, it's not to have your calendar full of calls with people that are window shopping. I want you to have your core days that you're going to do discovery calls or your core times, and be able to fill those with the right conversations.

Lindsay: [00:21:05] I love that. Go download that you guys, it sounds perfect for everyone who is listening. So I'm glad I spotted that. We'll put that link in the show notes as well. Shayla, thank you so much for being on the show. We'll have to stay connected and I appreciate your time. 

Shayla: [00:21:18] Thank you so much.

Lindsay: [00:21:22] Before you go, I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group for coaches. Simply type ‘Dream Client Community.com’ in your browser, request access, and we will happily let you in. We have amazing coaches in there just like you who are starting and scaling their business and we would love to see you there.