dozens of eight and nine figure entrepreneurs are making this shift in their business in 2025 and you should pay attention we're moving into a new era of online business one in which tactics from 15 years ago when I got started aren't working quite as well and I think that's a good thing and in today's episode I'm going to open up about this beautiful Trend and stay to the end where I show you how to apply it to the five key drivers of your business all right friend this is a special episode of The Graham Cochran
show because it's the three 100th episode of the show which is kind of insane so I don't know if you watch on YouTube or you're listening on Apple podcast or Spotify but I've been doing this video podcast for 300 episodes if you followed this brand I kicked it off with traditional YouTube videos in the early days you know shorter 10 15 minute videos and then so many of you were asking for a podcast and you know me I'm like I'm not going to add a podcast to what I'm doing so I decided to test out
the idea of a long form video podcast to put on both platforms and I've been doing that since I think 2019 uh and so if you're interested all sort of meta on sort of my take on why I've enjoyed long form content and why I do it let me know I'm happy to make an episode on that so leave a comment below or just message me on Instagram but we're 300 episodes in so I'm just celebrating that and uh I thought it'd be a fun episode to do about sort of forecasting 2025 and what I'm
seeing and again I'm I'm a week removed now from from KHL kajabi hero live which is a great event again you should go to if you're a kajabi user uh great to meet other users and the team and see what's coming up but they bring in great speakers and what I love two things I love about this event one is the speakers they bring in are legit it they're all tacticians so it's not just inspirational talks or motivational talks it's here's what's working right they're very tactical and they're very generous speakers they're taking you behind
the scenes of their actual business showing you graphs showing you numbers showing you what's actually working and there's just very few conferences that are like that so I love that I did the same for my talk uh I showed literally my entire uh system for generating multiple millions of dollars as an affiliate uh for kajabi and how I've done affiliate promotions in the past and how I pick products and people to partner with so I just pulled back the curtain on my my marketing campaign and everyone else did the same as as me what was
amazing is how many of these speakers that were on the stage um were saying the same thing there were some incredible speakers and most of the speakers if not all of them that were on the main stage have done eight or nine figures online okay so I've probably done 15 million is online um there was multiple 8 figure entrepreneurs that have done eight figures total there's a couple that were doing eight figures a year now and then there was Brendan the man himself that's done over $100 million total in his business uh one of his
businesses he's done it in multiple businesses so you've got people like Brendon brushard you got people like Natalie Ellis and Justin Welsh and Nicole Burke and and even my friend ant Hodes who's been in the marketing space for years in the agency space helping business owners and now he's out in front as a as a teacher and educator himself all were sharing what's working and all saying the same thing do you want to know what the trend is Simplicity Simplicity it was shocking like if I looked at what everyone was saying everyone was talking about
different things some people were talking about social media some people are talking about funnels some people are talking about launching some people are talking about content some people were talking about how to grow your email list I was talking about affiliate marketing didn't matter the theme that I noted every night I came back to my hotel room was like well look at how each one of these people was basically saying hey I'm making a shift in my business when I hear the word shift or I've been making some changes from eight nine figure entrepreneurs I
like rais my hand and and I C I cut my ears and I say what are they shifting like I want to know what not just anyone says on the internet but people that are making a lot of money have big audiences and impact and there's a lot of money on the table and these are established entrepreneurs that have been in the game long time I want to know what they're thinking and overwhelming the strategy that I'm seeing the theme that I'm seeing is there is a shift towards Simplicity and they were all mentioning it
I'm going to share some examples there was a shift to simpler offers or off offer Suites simple uh simpler funnels simpler content strategies for growing your your list simple simpler marketing strateg y so just so you know I've been on this simple game for a long long time and I'll get into it in a minute but this is like music to my ears because I'm Mr Simplicity I feel like it's one of my superpowers with my private clients that spend a lot of money and a lot of time with me a lot of the times
they're bringing things to me and we're sifting through all the options and I'm helping them simplify simplify simplify and do what works best for them and I'm going to lead off with a great quote from my friend Rory Vaden at brandbuilders group his line is that dilute Ed Focus creates diluted results diluted Focus creates diluted results so most people are doing all the things they've got a million content strategies they got a million offers to sell they got a bunch of different funnels they're changing their funnel every other week they have a million different marketing
strategies and conversion events and ways they're trying to sell their offer and so while they're doing all the things they're getting subpar results in all those areas where I think the the real Masters at their craft the ones that are making bigcoin are doing one or two things really well and they're focused on those one or two things and they're getting disproportionate results and that was definitely true for the people on the stage so let's talk about them like Natalie she runs boss babe uh and it's an incredible brand and she was opening up in
both the VIP session and her main session on the stage how she had a major turning point in her personal life after having her daughter giving birth to her daughter and she realized that her business as successful as it was on the outside huge brand um wasn't serving her life and her partner business partner who co-founder of the company they had two different Visions for how to move forward in the business and so she decided to buy out her partner so that she could implement the vision she had for the business which was simpler fewer
but better right fewer but better um I really love the book essentialism by Greg MCU um maau mckuin MCU Greg Macau uh such a good book because his hope premises fewer but better things uh fewer is better and so what she decided to do was she looked at all her offers and she had a ton of courses and multiple memberships and communities she just tossed almost all of it and is focusing primarily on her membership there's one other offer but it's like primarily her membership and then there's a few cohorts she does a couple times
a year and that's it that's it and she's going all in and what's beautiful about the way she described it because then she took us by in the hood of her her membership site and how she's scaling and how she's getting more annual signups versus monthly signups it's really really smart what I could tell was oh Natalie is freed up now to focus on her membership and so she's made her membership better and she's able to charge more for it and get better results for her clients why not because she wasn't smart enough to do
that before but because she has the mental bandwidth to focus on making her core offer the best it possibly could be what would be possible for you if you just focused on one or two core offers like Natalie think about that uh Nicole Burke was such a gem of a person she is in the gardening space I think her Instagram account is gardenary and she's blown up funny story she was at the very first kajabi event in 2019 where I was at I was one of only six or seven million dooll kajabi Heroes meaning we've
made over a million dollars on the platform that was five years ago uh now on to this this year they brought up 51 people that won the million dollar award which is awesome just to see and there's more but those were just those that were there on the platform um so fun to see how many more millionaires are on the kajabi platform but back then I was one of seven and Nicole was actually at that event I didn't know her back then but she'd only made $50,000 on kajabi at that point now she's done multiple
seven figures uh and she's blown up and what was fascinating about her strategy and her talk was she was sharing how she does it with social media it's like she's selling courses through Instagram but it's so simple she just found one marketing strategy that worked for her which she just does a real a day I think she does mult day now but there's no editing there's no uh b-roll it's just like random video clips of her and her garden with strategic text overlays or voiceovers she'll reuse videos from the past she just even if it's
5 seconds she just posts something every day and she's pushing to a lead magnet to a conversion event and she found something that she thought was working and she doubled and tripled down on that one thing to sell her course and it it's so beautiful because she's like yeah I should probably be doing affiliate I should probably be doing some other things I was talking to her backstage briefly and I'm like Nicole but you're doing something that's working incredibly well and you're generating millions of dollars and you've grown your brand so much so that you're
on the stage with with me and Brendan brushard and Natalie Ellis and Justin Welsh and all these incredible people so Simplicity is working for her in her marketing strategy she's she's oh and she was talking about YouTube she's like I know I need to be on YouTube Graham I tried it but I just wanted to focus on Instagram and I said hey I am going to tell you to be on YouTube until I'm blew in the face I tell everybody to be on YouTube but really what you did that was better than YouTube is you
found one strategy that actually is working for you and you just obsessed over it and you got better at it CU she had the mental bandwidth to get really really good at that and it's really worked for her business so do you have a marketing strategy are you doing multiple things you're on every platform and you're using every type of technique long form short form Tik Tok Instagram LinkedIn Facebook what if would happen what would it look like if you simplified your marketing strategy your legion strategy and just picked one one strategy to go all
in on in 2025 what would that look like how much better would you feel how much more results would you get on that platform on that strategy if you just did one so that's what Nicole did and then of course Brendan uh who's done multiple hundreds of millions of dollars online I've heard him speak a couple times now three times now and uh you know you got you get to see themes and what people share at that type of event he's obviously speaking to people building online businesses so he's trying to help them and I
shared with you last week um his simple three-part strategy of one launch one funnel one group uh but the thing he said this time that he said last year that just again blows my mind is he's he's got two main Evergreen funnels for I think two different types of people and just so you know these funnels are like 12 months long like they're mega long um meaning imagine you jump on his email list and now you're getting emails maybe it's every week maybe it's every other week I don't know for the next year or two
you think they're coming from him but you're in a pre-recorded funnel and it's filled with value ad emails and then there's different promotions to different offers and things all Evergreen how brilliant is that anyway I talked about my 45-day funnel that was doing 50k a month on autopilot in yes last week's episode so check that out um but he mentioned his two funnels he said I've been running the same two funnels for a decade and I'm just like over there looking around drinking my 12th cup of coffee slow clapping that that's that's gets me excited
right when I hear people that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars say hey I've got two really good funnels and I've been running them virtually unchanged for a decade I'm like you're the master and all of all of these newbies are excited and they're soaking up all this knowledge they're going to run out and build tons of funnels or change their funnel next month oh didn't convert as much as I want so I'm going to change this I'm going to change that homeboy just running the same darn thing for 10 years it's awesome don't
fix what's not broken but find something and get really good at it and then do it for a long time now I'm an interesting example where I've been practicing and preaching this forever um and one way I've been doing this cuz I've been online for 15 years now I started my first company the recording revolution in October of 2009 I just lost my second job in 10 months my first daughter Khloe was a brand new baby we just bought her first house we were on food stamps it was the middle of a global recession it
was a scary time and I started posting content and trying to build an audience online which originally was for a freelance business which I kept but ended up realizing that the content business had way more potential and it was way more fun and could reach more people and that's what I leaned into talk about focusing and not being diluted I I stopped doing both and focused primarily on the content business and it it took off but I've been a content creator every week posting content every week for 15 years okay and for the first four
years it was three times a week and then I tested two times a week and then one time a week and income still went up so here's the thing when it comes to content marketing I ignored ads I ignored a bunch of other tactics that were really big back in the day and maybe are still big I've never been on Tik Tok I've ignored LinkedIn I've ignored most social media I've focused primarily on blogging and youtubing for 15 years do you think I'm reaping the rewards from that Focus you better believe I am in two
businesses like I said I've generated over 15 millions of dollar 15 Millions million dollars online in those 15 years I didn't make nearly that much in the first couple of years it's really the last six or seven that it's really shot op right so my I y'all some of you are faster than me my business curve is like but then then you reap these disproportionate rewards where it's this hockey stick curve because I've functionally done one thing and one thing well content marketing Evergreen searchable content marketing blog posts that get tons of SEO traffic YouTube
videos that get ton of YouTube traffic because again YouTube is not a social media platform it is a search engine Say it With Me YouTube is not a social media platform it is a search engine and that is a powerful search Eng to take part to take advantage of and I've been on it for 15 years um and even this brand I had to start fresh in 2018 so I've only been on YouTube for the gram Cochran brand for six years generated Millions of dollars in this brand so it's like it it works it works
it works so all that to say I've been so simple and I have at times felt like should I be trying these other things but I just really believe if I can focus on one or two things and do them well I will reap the rewards and I'll have more peace in my life in business and so that's one way I've been doing it and so what's interesting I started to notice that this was interesting to people almost 10 years ago uh I got my first piece of press uh in 2015 so coming up on
10 years now uh in Business Insider I was in a mastermind and one of my friends in The Mastermind she had just been interviewed on Business Insider and there was a columnist uh who was I think her name was Libby and Libby was doing columns on people doing alternative interesting work so my friend Sarah was like Hey Libby you should interview my friend Graham he's like made all this money teaching musicians how to record music I think it' make for a cool article she put me in touch I agreed to do the interview I I
was on like getting off of a flight in LA and I was in the I remember where I was in baggage claim grab my bag sat down jumped on the phone call she asked me some questions for like 30 minutes and that was it and then I did this event I was doing out in LA and then I was flying back home 3 days later when I touched back down in Tampa now 3 days after the interview my phone started blowing up because turns out Libby had done the interview written the article and in two
3 Days Later had posted on Business Insider and the title was something like 32-year-old very classic internet article 32-year-old musician makes $75,000 a month and it went viral for 10 years ago on news feeds so Yahoo which I don't know if it still is but it it was a huge Newsfeed company picked it up and put it on their homepage for a while Yahoo finance and yahoo.com and then somebody posted it on my Facebook uh I'm never real on Facebook they're like oh my gosh gr just saw you in this article and the way my
settings were on Facebook back then I reverse engineered this if someone else posted on my Facebook it showed up on under my feed to all my Facebook friends so then now all of a sudden like 5,000 of my Facebook friends saw this article of me on Yahoo and then they started to comment reshare I landed in Tampa turned my phone back on and all of a sudden I had like hundreds of texts and messages and like even like my mother-in-law is like you make how much money I'm like what what happened in the 5 hours
I was in the air from LA to Tampa and I realized that this article had dropped and it had gone viral and it blew up I tell you this to tell you that this is something that kind of changed my life in the sense that I mean it was weird and had to navigate some interesting conversations um I don't know if my wife was very comfortable with people knowing how much we made back then but I started to get emails from strangers asking me how I did what I did they said hey I'm not a
musician I I don't really care about your YouTube channel whatever but I really am interested in how you do what you do like how are you making 75k a month teaching musicians about recording like what what's the business model and they all wanted some glamorous answer and you could probably imagine what I told him I was like well it's four four things I do I create free content that's searchable and then I offer people a really delicious tasty free gift called the lead magnet that gets them on my email list where then I follow up
with a funnel that I've pre-written of some emails that makes them an offer of a digital product which is a course typically and then I rinse and repeat and people were like that's it you don't you don't do like these fancy webinars you don't do these trip wire products you don't have like you don't do Live Events you don't you're not charging $3,000 for your offers and you can still make that kind of money I'm like yeah yeah and yeah and I started to notice the surprise in people's eyes and then I started getting invited
on podcasts as a business person or a successful entrepreneur and um it's a different world for me because I'd only been on like music related podcast so now that was the first time business people were interested in what I was doing and I started coaching people behind the scenes for a couple years and then eventually launched my brand in 2018 January of 2018 to kind of go public with it um but during that season I learned everybody was saying the same thing about me your business is so simple your business is so simple and I
was like well how else are people doing it and that's when I started to like open up my eyes because I really live in a silo and I to this day still do I really don't pay attention to what anyone else is doing I really don't care because what they're doing doesn't really affect me I I do what I want to do and need to do for my business in my family but I was very late to the party of like how people were doing things with these big launches and running a bunch of ads
and all this complexity and I was like I don't want any of that that doesn't sound like it's going to make my life more peaceful even if it does make me some more money I don't think it's going to help me with my other value which is peace and time so that was an eye opener for me and I love I love how it was summed up with one of my clients jacqu who's got a great uh a great brand the online course guy great podcast as well when I was running my Mastermind a couple
years ago he was in it and uh I remember in one hot seat one call he said Graham I've been trying to study your business model and I've drawn it up on a little canva thing or whatever um and I want to show it to you because I just don't I think I'm missing something there's no way it could be this simple can it and he showed it to me and he drawn this little graph and I'm like looking at it I'm like yeah yeah that's exactly what I do and he was like that's so
stupid and I don't know if he meant it like that but he's like that's so stupidly simple he like just he's like I can't believe it I was like bro like if it's not that simple like I'm not going to do it so I'm all about Simplicity and at the end of the day for I've built a seven figureure business off of Three core offers like the Graham Cochran brand up until a year ago um year and a half ago was basically Three core offers a course a membership and a high ticket Mastermind okay and
it's simple and it's made me millions of dollars also I'm kind of real talk doing this right now I've shut down my Mastermind I've shut down my membership I'm making some changes to my offers and I'm simplifying my offers and also simplifying my messaging and and focusing on a few new offers I'm also moving to a simpler content strategy and lead capture strategy you're not going to see it right now in real time cuz real talk it's what is it the end of October early November um 2024 I'm still behind closed doors making some changes
but you'll see them soon and as they come out I will be sharing and as I always do what's working in my business is going to be right here on the show right so that you know what's working real time and I'm I'm teasing these things out with my private clients right now so they have a little bit of a head start of knowing what I'm up to but the idea here is I'm practicing what I've been preaching for over 10 years now and practicing what I've been doing for 15 years now and the biggest
names in the business are doing the same thing now before we go I want to just put this back on you I me at the top of this episode there's five key drivers of business I don't know if you know what these are but every entrepreneur should know what they are so I'm going to read them to you now write them down think about them and what I want you to do is think about which of these five key drivers of business you need to simplify next you might need to simplify all five I review
all five somewhat regularly at least annually like how am I doing in these areas um but I think this might be helpful for you a simple thing to think about like how do I grow my business well there's only only five ways to grow your business five areas of potential grow growth I'm going to share them with you now but we want to simplify each one of them you ready so key driver number one for business is lead generation you need more leads every business brick or mortar online doesn't matter we need more leads okay
so how could you simplify your lead generation do you need to simplify your lead generation are you doing a million different things to get new leads so lead generation is key driver number one number two is lead nurture because you get a lead what do you do how do you warm that lead up to the point where they would buy something for me this looks like my email list a lot of times where I'm sending weekly content emails value ad emails uh if it's a new subscriber they're usually going through an email funnel that's new
that's giving them even more value getting them to know what I'm about what I believe in as uh brandan brashard says brilliantly at KHL you're enrolling them into your mission right you're not just teaching stuff you're enrolling people into your your worldview your belief system about that topic so that you're like hey this is where I'm going here's how I'm helping people in the world come be a part of this Mission um so that's lead nurture how are you nurturing your your leads right now do you nurture them or do they just opt in and
then every once in a while you just pull the slot machine and ask for money right like if you're not getting great conversions it might be that your lead nurture needs to improve and how could you simplify your lead nurture so the third key dri of business is conversion that's the actual sale what mechanism are you using or mechanisms are you using to convert are you using uh a webinar are you using a challenge are you using just a simple video sales page or video sales letter vssl as we call it um what are you
using for conversion are you selling on the phone are you selling at inperson events are you selling in DMS these are all conversion strategies and all have their place for certain businesses and all can work which conversion strategy is working best for you and and can you and do you want to simplify your conversion I just got off of a a call with one of my my high-end clients and he was considering a new conversion strategy for his business because he's been doing the same one for a long time and it's not really performing that
well and it's not that he wants to add a bunch of stuff but he was really considering growing his business by focusing on a new conversion strategy and so specifically we're going to think about moving him to a new webinar that might be a good fit for him especially as his prices have increased webinars really convert well for high ticket items uh and if you're good on camera you're a good educator you have a little bit of Charisma webinars can be a great fit for you so how how are you doing on the conversion side
of things are you using a bunch of mechanisms to convert do you want to pick one simplify focus on that's the third key driver business number four is fulfillment so typically if we're selling a digital course or membership fulfillment is automated it's like emails saying hey thanks for buying here's your thing but what does fulfillment look like for you if you're not fulfilling the offer well people are going to going to move on or refund and so couple things I just think about here is like could you simplify your onboarding process and make it better
are you using an onboarding process like an email sequence uh sending them to a thank you video once they've bought like showing them how to get the best use out of the product do you have a customer service person that could follow up with people after 30 days of being in a product if it's a more High ticket product you could automate that as well inside kajabi or your email client to to Ping somebody 10 days in 15 days in 30 days in depending on what makes sense for your offer with an email or two
just checking in on on them and seeing what they're loving about the product what they need help with how could you support them more that could be automated and always time to go out but fulfill the product or the offer and give them a great customer service experience are you doing a lot of different things have you ever considered fulfillment and what that looks like how you're servicing the client even if it's hands off and digital that's an area you could focus on with Simplicity and then Fifth and final key driver of business is Ascension
or retention depending on your business model or depending on the offer so you might have an offer that you want to move them up to higher ticket offer or up your product Suite or it might be over to a companion offer that might be a good set fit for them if if you like this you might also like this or our best students get both you've been in this program for a while have you considered this program like for me it might be hey automatic income Academy was a great program for you to launch your
online business a lot of my best students also have YouTube income accelerator which helps them leverage YouTube to grow sales not just become a YouTuber or get more views but how do you get sales from YouTube and put them together so that could be not a sending up but kind of a sending over or if you have a subscription model then retention is what you want to focus on uh like Natalie Ellis was saying she's got a big membership with thousands of members if you have a leaky bucket it doesn't matter how many new leads
how much new water you put in that bucket it's still going to drain out the bottom so you got to fix the leak in your bucket how can you reduce the churn which is our technical term for the percentage of people that cancel versus uh people in the membership each month and so focusing on retention lifetime value how can you you've worked hard to get a customer how can you keep a customer customer for longer and for Life ideally so those are the five I don't know if you know this but any business if I'm
going to look at your business I'm going to look at those five areas right what are you doing for Legion what are you doing for lead nurture what does your conversion mechanism look like your fulfillment and what's your plan or strategy for Ascension or retention it's just little things to know you could grow your business by narrowing in on one or two or three or all five of those but how could you simplify all five of those that's the question I want to leave you with today because at the end of the day Simplicity wins
for a lot of reasons simpler for your customers makes it easier for them to say yes to you because it's not complex simpler for you is easier for you to manage and it's easier in your customer service team if you have one simpler for you means more empty mental space which is a good thing so you can be creative and have tenacity and focus on the things that really move the needle versus being caught up at a bunch of busy work keeping up with all your offers and all your emails and all your funnels and
all your launches and all your conversion events and things like that and I just think it's telling when the biggest and the best in the world are rethinking their business back in the day when we started this when I started in 2009 complexity worked everyone had these complex business models and I just didn't know how to do it so I honestly started with simple because that's all I knew how to do and then it made me a millionaire and I was like why change it and it's funny to see bigger Brands basically moving closer to
what I've been doing and preaching for 15 years um it's obviously validating for me but I wanted to to bring it up for you because I saw that theme across the board simplify simplify simplify so if you're on YouTube the comment below is which of those key drivers 5 key drivers of business do you need to focus on and how are you going to simplify an area of your business you might need to simplify all of it but just pick one what's the one you're going to simplify moving forward I'd love to know and if
you're listening to the podcast version of this think about it pause this think out loud say out loud where do I need to simplify my business right now got a couple of months before the end of the year over the next 90 days what do I want to focus on just pick one area to simplify and focus on you're going to reap a ton of rewards probably more sales but if nothing else more peace of mind and more brain space and energy then put your creativity to better use which is growing your business and serving
more people all right and finally thank you if you've listened to these episodes watch these videos for the last few years reaching 300 episodes on a podcast is not an easy feat and uh I'm super proud of this show I'm proud of whether you watch or listen I don't care it's it's the same to me I'm honored to have your time time um thank you for all we have over 400 fstar reviews on Apple podcast which is insane we're a top .5% ranked podcast globally um partially because of that and so just super proud of
that and it's only because you're listening and watching so thank you so much as always love to hear uh what you want out of future shows and episodes I definitely take it into consideration and hope you have an amazing rest of your week keep it simple friend talk soon
