Update: My Plan To Double Clientele & Hit $50k/Month

Pat Stedman

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Published: February 18th, 2023

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Pat Stedman

Founder, Pat Stedman Dating and Relationship Coaching

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Pat Stedman Datin...

patstedman.com

from New York, NY, USA

started January 2015

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

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Want more updates on Pat Stedman Dating and Relationship Coaching ? Check out these stories:

1. How I Started A $30K/Month Dating And Relationship Coaching Business (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Pat Stedman Dating and Relationship Coaching . If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 4 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hello! My name is Pat Stedman, and I’m a Dating and Relationship Coach for Men. I was first interviewed by Starter Story a little over 2 years ago, in December 2020.

I have two main products for sale - my 1-1 personal coaching and my 18-hour Masterclass Course. My customers are men of all ages, but predominantly between the ages of 20-50, who are having trouble attracting or keeping women or having problems in their serious relationships. I’ve been called “The Coach for All Seasons” because I truly help men through their entire lifecycle of relationships with women.

If you want more information, I go into the 5 Archetypes of men I work with in more detail here.

pat-stedman-dating-and-relationship-coaching

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

We want to take the business to $50k per month and double my clientele.

Truth be told, the company’s revenue has declined since we last spoke. 2021 was more or less the same as 2020 - we hit just shy of 300k in revenue vs. just over 310k - but 2022 is likely to be a big drop to around 210k.

I can make excuses as to why this happened. And some of them are, to be fair, legitimate. My Twitter account was shadowbanned, siloed, and essentially “follower locked” in January 2021, which led to significantly less engagement and social traction. After growing exponentially in the prior years, my follower count was suddenly more or less flat.

And then there was the crypto market crash and broader macro uncertainty this past spring, which took away discretionary spending from many otherwise interested guys… and spooked the rest. 2022 started off strong, but Q2 and Q3 were brutal. Unfortunately, dating and relationship coaching is not something most men prioritize when they have economic worries.

Yet the blame ultimately lies with me. The truth is I needed to be more proactive about expanding my business and was rigid in the face of change. I was used to a less competitive business space on Twitter (there were maybe 2-3 other prominent dating and relationship coaches in my corner in 2020; now, there are easily 20-30 with hundreds waiting in the wings).

Frankly, I was comfortable. And so when the censorship on Twitter occurred, I was complacent about seeking to expand elsewhere, even as I was losing my competitive advantage on the platform.

Finally, even as the space evolved with different “best practices” for generating engagement, I was reluctant to adopt them. Some of this was arrogance, some aesthetics - I didn’t want to run with debatably cheap “algorithm hacking” tactics that felt off-brand. Yet by not adapting at all, I wasn’t getting the attention I needed to grow.

I knew I needed a strategic overhaul. The result was hiring Will Bartlett as a business manager and consultant to first revamp my website and take care of numerous optimization issues in my funnels (and a million other things), and then Ben Moore to produce clips for me on TikTok and Youtube.

The results have been spectacular so far - Youtube is getting close to 2k, and TikTok is already at 17k after only 4 months. We also got lucky. Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the censorship has dramatically dropped on the platform, and coupled with our new strategy, my account has already grown by 4000 followers since October to nearly 36k. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the prior 21 months combined.

This is why the mid-year lull was ultimately a good thing for my company: it forced me to take a good hard look in the mirror, get out of my way and start delegating. The fruits of all of this are already beginning to show; sales were up dramatically in Q4, and as we start 2023, we’ve already crossed $40k… and January isn’t even over.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

I’ve found the balance of managing client work with consistent content creation with family to be a challenge.

For instance, I’ve wanted to write a book for a year now, yet between writing emails to my list, producing videos, the 20-25 hours per week of client calls, managing two children under 2, and watering my relationship with my wife… I’ve found myself struggling to fit it all in. This has led to the paradox of neglecting my relationship for the sake of my relationship coaching business!

This isn’t good for anybody to do, but there are cascade effects for somebody who does my work; if your marriage isn’t firing on all cylinders, you begin to feel like a hypocrite helping others deal with theirs.

To navigate this new dynamic with young children, I began working with some older relationship coaches over the summer who had “been there” and could point out things I was messing up or missing.

This sort of “continuing education” has been invaluable and has helped my personal life and my coaching. Finally, on a more practical level, I’ve been prioritizing better: focusing more on the most ROI-intensive work and either delegating or ignoring the rest. This has made a huge impact, but there are still more ways to go.

Don’t try to do it all alone. What got you to level 1 won’t get you to level 2, and you will need help as you climb the latter.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Humility. I know I’m excellent at what I do, but my ego got in my way and stopped me from asking for help when I needed it. My business manager told me I should consider many things I didn’t do a while ago. But I was stubborn. If I had listened then, I would have been making the growth I’m making now, perhaps a year ago.

I was so proud of myself for accomplishing what I have I began to act like I had it all figured out. And I don’t. Some coaches have 10x, even 100x the impact as me. I may not agree with everything they do and their approach, but I can still learn a lot from them. Focus is probably the biggest one: I can see now that these individuals intentionally built their practices. It shows; they are consistent with their content, do what works repeatedly, and scale well.

Also, it seems obvious, but testimonials. I had a ton of these, but I didn’t use them much in my emails or on Twitter. This was beyond stupid. The increase in sales these past couple of months might be mostly attributed to the fact that we finally have started showing them.

But it’s not just about seeing room for improvement in marketing, sales, and systems. Even in the domain of relationship expertise, there are levels I haven’t gotten to yet.

You’re not supposed to admit that as a coach, but I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. We’re all works in progress. Moreover, if I felt like I understood everything there was about intimacy, I would probably be bored with my job and move on to something else.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

This year we intend to grow BIG. I expect to break 50k on Twitter by the end of the year, but this is derivative; our real objective is reaching new men and expanding revenue.

We want to take the business to $50k per month and double my clientele. This is more than doable, but so that I don’t burn myself out, some things will have to change once we start to get there.

The first is expanding the masterclass. Right now, it’s 18 hours, and it’s the “encyclopedia” of my core material, used in tandem with all coaching clients. But it’s overdue for an update - the last one was in 2020. In addition to adding another 6-12 hours of material, I also want to provide it with more structure, so it feels more like a course rather than a collection of videos.

This will then become the backbone of a lower-end coaching package, which will have just a few hours 1-1 with me (and no 3-hour deep dive call, which right now all clients generally get). I’ve become so efficient at sussing out guys’ problems at this point, I feel confident that this combination will give them 80/20 of what they need for an accessible price.

Because the reality is I will have to raise my prices and adjust the packages. I am currently taking on 4 new clients a month. At the number of calls each client gets, this simply isn’t sustainable - I will be spending 40+ hours a week on calls.

Getting rid of the deep dive and focusing more on pre-made masterclass videos with a handful of focused calls for the lower end, while raising the price substantially for a more involved higher-end is the only way I’ll be able to serve 120 or so new clients a year.

As for 5 years from now… I couldn’t tell you. Let’s hit these goals first and then we’ll focus on 7 figures and beyond! But I expect we will have to change up even more in the coaching structure for that to happen.

Given the personalized nature of my work, I’m hesitant to do any group coaching… though I’m sure that’s probably another assumption I’ll have to let go of if I want to get to the next level. And I don’t know right now if it’s what I even want. After 1 million in revenue as a single proprietorship, I might be content to stop trying to expand and move on to other projects instead.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

The Masculine in Relationship by G.S. Youngblood. It’s a concise and practical book that crystallizes exactly what women are looking for in their boyfriends/husbands. Cuts out the fat and doesn’t get bogged down in theory.

I also got a lot out of the work of Dovid Feldman and Adam Lane Smith on navigating different needs and attachment patterns in relationships. Goes against the grain of a lot of the tropes the “red pill” community usually discusses, which provides a useful balance. The big takeaway is most relationships fall apart because of poor communication, not so much due to imbalanced power dynamics - although this exists

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Don’t try to do it all alone. What got you to level 1 won’t get you to level 2, and you will need help as you climb the latter. VERY few individuals who are good at their craft are also good at growing it. It’s worth paying someone 2k a month to help you if they help you bring in an additional 20k.

And let go of your preconceptions. What I’ve observed among the most successful is that they lack self-limitations. They don’t insist upon bending a goal around some assumptions that are often incompatible with it. They set the goal and let the conditions change as they need to. They are simultaneously focused and flexible.

Let go in general. Most of what you do as a business owner doesn’t need you to do it. I need to write, record, and coach. I don’t need to do anything else. Reminding myself of that, and leaving it to other people to manage editing, graphics, funnels, etc. has been an absolute game-changer.

I hate most of that stuff, and I’m at best OK. So why waste the time and energy putting it together? These may seem like “small” tasks, but they add up and weigh you and the business down - you stop executing under the mental burden. It’s one thing to bootstrap when you’re starting and have low cash flow, but once you are at 10k a month, you should start looking to delegate. You will grow faster.