Transcript

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work

00:33
and the meanings we derive from work. Hello and welcome to Season Eight. This season is all about failure because of course I’m fun like that. And so naturally my very first episode for the season is going to be about where my last eight sales came from. So you might be scratching your head and thinking, well, what the hell? Like, how does this have to do with failure?

01:03
Excellent question. Well may you ask — the point of this, the method to the madness, is to show a little bit of behind-the-scenes on the nitty-gritty detail of revenue in the door, cash in the bank, you know, new clients, new sales.

01:22
Why? Because I think it’s really easy when you’re feeling a bit down in the dumps, feeling a bit discouraged by business. Maybe you’re feeling very discouraged. Maybe everybody you are speaking with at that moment is chanting the same song, which is everything’s hard, everything sucks, the world is ending, why don’t we quit? Or at least it’s making you feel like that. So it’s really useful in times like that, firstly, to have a counter-narrative.

01:53
And secondly, to understand a little bit of the nitty-gritty detail about why and how things came to be in other people’s businesses. Because when we’re feeling less than stellar, when we’re feeling less than fabulous, it can be easy to make up stories that keep us stuck, that justify our inertia, our inaction, our stress, depression, anxiety, whatever it is.

02:21
And once we get a little closer to somebody who is at arm’s length — which is what everybody is when we’re watching them through the internet, right? We don’t know them. We’re not speaking to them on the phone. We’re just looking at their stuff on the internet and drawing conclusions that are, oftentimes, most of the time, entirely false. So let’s get into it. I’m going to go through the last eight — Season Eight.

02:50
Get it. God, I’m clever. Season Eight, where my last eight sales came from. Now I’m not talking about recurring payment plans, because you may or may not be aware I’ve got two masterminds, Audacious and Momentum. Both of those masterminds have payment plans, so every month I have payments coming through from those two masterminds. This is not what I’m talking about.

03:18
Each of these eight sales was a standalone sale. They weren’t payment plans. And I’m not going to name the names, but I do have them written down in my notes because I did go back through my records. So the last one, the most recent one, was yesterday evening. It came through while I was sleeping, and it came through for my brand new masterclass, Binges to Buyers. This is happening June 24th. It’s going to be live.

03:45
And this particular person who purchased has been a long, long, long-standing client. Now I couldn’t go back through my ThriveCart records because she was purchasing from me long before I had ThriveCart. I could have gone through my Xero records, but I’m guessing it would be at least 10 years that this person has been a client on and off.

04:12
They haven’t been a continuous client and in the last few years they tend to buy small things from me rather than longer commitments, but they have certainly purchased my Hustle and Heart program and other longer-term offerings. Forgive me for using the word containers. Anyway, moving on. Sale number two came yesterday. This was a VIP Strategy Session — two days of my time, and it’s a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure.

04:43
It’s very much like all my one-to-one client work, led by the client’s goals, desires, needs, et cetera. I design the two days around that. Now this person is relatively new to my world. The first thing they purchased from me was in September 2025 — so less than a year ago. And they came to one of

05:07
my public courses, a face-to-face event I had in Sydney that I ran with two other collaborators. So they actually came through one of those collaborators — they’d been a past client of one of my collaborators. So in effect, I borrowed somebody else’s audience and managed to move that person into my world. This new client is no longer working with my collaborator — it’s been some time since they did — and they had

05:37
purchased something from me less than a month ago, and now they’ve purchased the VIP Strategy Session. The third sale was also within the last week — so within about five days. They purchased a place on my

06:06
first-ever business retreat that I’m running in September. This person is also inside my Momentum program. They’ve purchased a few different things from me over the years. I went back into ThriveCart and the very first thing they purchased from me was in 2021 — so five years ago. I confirmed with them recently that they’d found me through a Facebook group during 2021. During lockdown, they were on

06:36
various Facebook groups looking for advice and information on starting a business, and I had appeared — that’s how they’d found me. Or perhaps I’d been recommended. They can’t really remember, but we’re pretty sure we know which Facebook group it was. If you’re curious, it was Like-Minded Bitches Drinking Wine. Great name for a Facebook group. Fourth sale, also last week — same again — the first spot on my retreat.

07:05
They are also in my Momentum Mastermind. Now this person first purchased from me last year, so they’ve only been a client for roughly a year. And they’ve purchased several things in that time, including the Momentum Mastermind, which is a year-long commitment. That year inside the Momentum Mastermind hasn’t expired yet. They’ve turned out to be a fabulous client and
07:35
they originally found me through a word-of-mouth recommendation. They were starting their business for the second time and wanted help, so they reached out to somebody they knew and trusted and said, who should I speak with? Who can help me? And this particular person had come to the same event in September 2025 and had recommended me.

08:03
So this client became a client after September 2025. That was a word-of-mouth recommendation. They’ve purchased several things from September through to June, which brings us to the next sale — fifth sale. This person came and purchased the Momentum Mastermind, committing to a year-long adventure. Yay! And they first found me fairly recently. This was a

08:32
great experience as far as I’m concerned, because oftentimes people take a while to become a paying client. Some people take a really long time. I’ve had a few people who’ve purchased after receiving newsletters and emails from me for eight or even 10 years. I had somebody who came along to an event last year — the September event I was referring to —

09:00
who’d had 10 years in between purchasing things. They had come along to a face-to-face course I ran on the Gold Coast 10 years prior — 11 years now. Then they’d purchased the Hustle and Heart program fairly swiftly afterwards. And then it had been 10 years until they purchased the next thing. So I was thrilled to meet this person at a networking event recently and they became

09:29
my latest and greatest client. They came along to the Momentum Immersion in May 2026 and then fairly swiftly decided to commit and join the Momentum Mastermind. Sixth sale — again, Momentum Mastermind. This particular individual bought my Profit Planning and Confident Pricing on-demand course in 2023.

09:56
We’ve corresponded on and off over the years via email and social media, so I knew who they were. They’d come to a couple of free webinars and masterclasses I’d run over the years. And then more recently they had purchased the Life’s a Pitch mentoring — I think from memory that was May — and then pretty swiftly afterwards

10:22
they decided to come to the Momentum Immersion in Sydney and purchase the year-long Momentum Mastermind. The seventh and eighth of the sales I’ve made in the last little while both came through search, and both were corporates — or rather larger companies. One of them is an international, multinational — whatever you want to call it — company.

10:51
Now this was an interesting one, sale number seven, because this sale had come through search. They’d come, like I said, from a big international company, and I’d actually done some work with them before. Let me start again. This is the fourth piece of custom training I’ve done for this particular company. The first two pieces of custom training I had

11:21
done for the company were with a different marketing manager, and she had found me through search. So the second marketing manager gets in touch a few years later and says, we’d like to hire you for custom training — can we get a quote? And I said, oh, you got my name from your colleague, did you? And she said, no, I Googled the search term, which had something to do with small business marketing training. And my website had appeared. So that’s a funny story.

11:51
Because twice — two different people, same organisation, multiple years in between — my website had ranked for the desired search term. And this same marketing manager has now come back to me. The last bit of custom training I did for them, I think, was about 18 months to two years ago. And now I’m doing it again.

12:13
Number eight — the final sale in the last little while. Again, it came from a business: a large business, not a multinational, but certainly a national business operating in different states in Australia. Again, they came through search. This time it was the community manager — which might give you a hint as to the industry or sector — who Googled, and again my website ranked. Again, it’s a piece of custom training

12:42
that I’m going to be doing in, I think, July — possibly August. Can’t remember. So what can we learn from this? First things first. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about you. You might be thinking, this isn’t simple. You might be thinking, I want to know the single magical golden source that Brook’s leads just fall out of. I want to know that one

13:12
source of lead generation that Brook has so I can go and do the same thing. And I’m so sorry to disappoint you. I know, I know — we want things to be simple. We want things to be straightforward, black and white, and easy. But that is not how the world works. And when all of our eggs, all of our leads, come from one source,

13:42
this is a very risky position to be in. Case in point: in 2020, I had an influx of clients who were all pretty much suffering from the same issue, which was that the world had gone into lockdown. They had a single source of leads, most of which was face-to-face — old-fashioned things. In one instance, they had a face-to-face, bricks-and-mortar business. There were lots of

14:10
face-to-face, bricks-and-mortar businesses that I worked with in 2021. But in another instance, it was a business owner who’d done an amazing job turning speaking engagements into leads. So all of her leads came from face-to-face speaking engagements, which is all well and wonderful until the world goes into lockdown. Having a diversity of lead sources, where your leads come from,

14:40
is a really useful thing. Not only is it useful, it lowers your risk. Of those eight recent sales, seven of them were repeat clients — and you might’ve been noticing that, right? What I do and what I teach is an offerings ecosystem. This is not an ascension ladder that you might’ve heard of before. So this is counter

15:08
to the old-fashioned ascension model that a lot of us have been imbibing and following for many years in online business. The offerings ecosystem model is the idea that people are disobedient — I’m talking about myself here. They are messy. They are not necessarily paying attention. They are taking

15:32
influence from multiple sources. You are not the only smart person in their universe. There are multiple people influencing them, who they’re listening to for advice on the same topic that you cover. So the offerings ecosystem asks: how can we keep our clients close? How can we draw people closer to us? From the outer echelons where they may have just seen

15:59
a couple of our social posts, all the way through to the centre point where they’re active clients, buying everything we sell. You know, they can’t get enough of us. We’re stacking our offers. For example, people in Audacious Mastermind get access to Momentum Mastermind. They also get access to Ignite. They also get access to my complete suite of on-demand trainings and any other

16:28
live masterclass-style things that I’m running. So this is how the offerings ecosystem works. Now, a couple of other things I wanted to point out. Seven out of eight were repeat clients. They all came from a different variety of places: social media, a recommendation from a friend, a networking event, and search. I want to point out to you the compounding effect

16:58
of marketing. A lot of this comes directly from my Momentum Manifesto. And one of those things is that no effort is wasted. I feel like a lot of business owners really miss the joy of compounding efforts because they’re constantly changing tack. They start something, do it twice, leave it, drop it, start something else, do it three times, leave it.

17:26
They move on to the next thing. Do it once, do it twice, drop it, move on to the next thing, et cetera, et cetera. My Minimum Viable Marketing Plan — which is pretty old now, multiple years old — I’ve only updated it once, to increase the cadence of minimum viable emails, i.e. mass emails
sent per month. The whole thing is built on the premise of compounding effects.

17:53
The efforts that we put into marketing compound. And one of the things from our Momentum Manifesto is: if people don’t buy now, they will buy later. It is only a matter of time. And it’s not our job as business owners to boss them around and tell them to take the next step in the ascension ladder, because people don’t like being told what to do. I’m talking about myself here.
18:19
But when we are in motion, an object in motion stays in motion. And it makes sense, right? When I’m layering content, events, when I’m layering my offerings — one launch atop the next launch, atop the next launch, atop the next launch — there’s a gravitational pull. It’s easier for people to keep going with me, to keep working with me, to keep compounding the progress they’ve made, than to stop.

18:50
And another line from the Momentum Manifesto is that there’s a gravitational pull towards people in motion. People who are doing things, changing, contradicting themselves, sharing their thinking and the thinking behind their thinking. People who are going somewhere. These people are attractive — and, God damn it, I have been attractive lately. I am turning myself on.

19:19
Because there’s movement, right? There’s progress, there’s speed, and there’s something appealing about that. Now, this is not an overnight success. There is nothing in this episode that speaks to an overnight success. And there is also nothing — you might notice — that speaks to consistency, because I am not consistent and I dare say neither are you. Keep going. Keep going.

19:47
Keep going. Diversify your lead generation. Open up more conversations in more rooms with more people. And remember that every effort you make has a compounding effect, even if you don’t immediately see it. Real quick before you go — if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review?

20:16
Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.