In this VIP Case Study, we feature Dr. Manjunath M.S. – a successful entrepreneur, Psychologist, honorary doctorate recipient, bestselling author, and leading memory and mind performance coach in India.
Dr. Manjunath has been our agency’s client for the past few years, and his coaching business has grown significantly since we started working together. Today, he is a millionaire, but how did it all start for him?
What strategies did he use to scale his coaching business to 7-figures annually? What can we learn from his unique experience?
We asked Dr. Manjunath a series of questions about how he grew his digital coaching business from zero to millions of dollars in revenue, and we share his insightful responses to each of our questions in the following sections of this exclusive VIP Case Study.
We’ll also provide you with exclusive insight into the YouTube ad campaigns we manage for Dr. Manjunath, just in case you run similar campaigns and want to scale them up.
Enjoy this exclusive content and use the insights and ideas provided in this case study to scale your business to the next level.
– Team Vavoza
Question 1: How did you earn your initial full-time income as an entrepreneur?
I started my entrepreneurship journey more than six years back.
Initially, I used to coach children, especially teenagers. I went to different schools and colleges and trained students on various speed reading, memory enhancement, mind strategy, and best studying skills.
That is where I started my journey as an entrepreneur and made my first earnings.
From there, during COVID, I started doing online sessions. And then, I moved from student coaching to professional coaching.
I realized working professionals also need a lot of coaching in terms of learning and reading, and that’s when I started book reading, book recommendations, speed reading, and speed memory memorization coaching for professionals and business owners.
That was the start of my journey. My first earnings came from coaching students in schools, and then I moved to coaching professionals.
– Dr. Manjunath
Question 2: What marketing strategies took your company to six and seven figures?
Six Figures
As I started online coaching, especially on speed reading and memory for professionals and business owners, I started focusing on three different areas:
- The first one was a WhatsApp model or WhatsApp coaching. I would normally bring all my customers into a WhatsApp group, and there, I trained them on what exactly they needed to learn.
- The second one was I adapted something called community-based / connection-based learning. I connected people in small groups and asked them to practice, support each other, and learn together, and that model worked brilliantly!
- The third one was something I would strongly recommend: value-added service. I adapted a model where when I received 1,000 Rupees from my customer, I started giving them 2,000 Rupees worth of value in return, and that helped me really deeply.
These are the three areas I focused on initially, and because of these strategies, I took my business journey to a six-figure annual income as an entrepreneur.
Seven Figures
When I started my online journey, I focused on organic campaigns. Then, I started my Facebook, and I ran Facebook ads for a long time – and I used to do good business.
At a later point in time, I adopted Google and YouTube ads. That’s where I got help from Vlad and Vavoza with various YouTube strategies. After I started running YouTube ads, I scaled up my business in a big way.
With the combination of Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and also organic campaigns, I reached the millionaire earning level. Apart from that, it was what I mentioned previously: giving more value to the customer, engaging them, using connection-based learning, and putting them into community-based learning.
These strategies helped me to scale up my business.
(Once again, thank you, Vlad, for supporting me in Google Ads. It was a brilliant exercise, and because of that, I reached millionaire status.)
– Dr. Manjunath
Question 3: What strategies did you focus on in 2023, and what are you focusing on in 2024?
In 2023, I focused mainly on high-ticket selling stabilization. So, initially, I used to do different level programs: level 1, level 2, level 3, and ultra high-ticket.
Then I discovered a beautiful strategy – a high-ticket selling process. I decided to close all my different levels and focus on high-ticket selling, and it worked really well.
So, in 2023 I focused deeply on how I could stabilize my high-ticket selling process to scale up and how I could give more value to my customers so that they would be more happy – they are paying a very high price, and I need to give them double the value.
Based on that, I built a different system, curriculum, and community learning process, and this helped me to stabilize my high-ticket selling process.
In 2024, I wanted to focus on the autopilot mode.
Right now, my involvement is more in my high-ticket “Diamond Club.” I used to coach at each and every level. Now, I need to bring in teams, automation, and various coaching methodologies so that I can focus more on content creation and sharing knowledge with customers.
So, my focus in 2024 is adding more automation, bringing more tools, and, by default, giving more value to customers so that I can scale up my business to the next level.
– Dr. Manjunath
Question 4: What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started as an entrepreneur?
Coaching or training is one of the most brilliant exercises. If you have a passion for becoming a coach, you can just enter and start coaching. It works brilliantly!
There are three magical benefits you will get as a coach:
- You will be able to connect with a lot of people on this journey through networking. It is a brilliant exercise.
- It’s a good business model. You will be able to build and scale up your business really well. It is a beautiful process altogether, and the industry is expected to get much bigger than what it is today.
- You will get a lot of blessings that you will never, ever get in any other field. When you give value to your customers, once they are happy with your service or product – the way they bless, you won’t get that anywhere else.
So, these are the magical advantages you will receive as soon as you start your coaching and training business. But you should have a real passion for coaching.
Initially, you cannot expect a huge business turnover, but when you do it consistently, within a few years, you will stabilize. And once you stabilize, there is no looking back. I often talk about this: when you open your coaching and training business, never close the shop – keep your shop open consistently.
That is my strong recommendation. Be consistent and give more value to your customers – adapt both strategies. And be part of the journey; enjoy the journey. There is no failure. Let me repeat: there is no failure in coaching, training, and giving value.
– Dr. Manjunath
Bonus: Our Advertising Strategy For Dr. Manjunath
Hey, it’s Vlad from Vavoza with some exclusive insight.
In this bonus section, I will share some technical knowledge with those of you who are ready for advanced advertising strategies. (If it’s too complex to follow, please skip this section.)
Our agency has been managing and scaling Dr. Manjunath’s YouTube ad campaigns for the past few years, and we have figured out the ultimate formula for managing his campaigns and maintaining a stable performance.
Would you like to know the strategy we are using for him?
Before I explain the advertising strategy, you may want to know how Dr. Manjunath’s sales funnel is set up. There are two primary components to it:
- Front-end: With paid YouTube ads, we target people who are interested in speed reading and memory improvement and have them pay around $5 (converted from INR to USD) to register for Dr. Manjunath’s live 6-day workshop.
In this workshop, he educates them on how to improve their reading speed, memorization, brain capacity, and so forth. - Back-end: After delivering on the promised value in his live workshop, Dr. Manjunath offers attendees the opportunity to join his Diamond-level membership, priced at around $1,200.
We optimize our ad campaigns to attract people who are likely to sign up for the paid workshop and buy the $1,200 upsell.
Dr. Manjunath does two 6-day workshops monthly, so we advertise each workshop for two weeks to get as many registrations as possible within a $17 cost-per-lead (CPL) – that’s the number we determined we must stay within to generate a 300% or higher return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) from the $5 registrations + $1,200 upsells combined.
Paid sales funnels tend to be difficult to advertise efficiently; the CPL can get 10X higher than the price of the workshop, which can crush your ROAS.
However, there is a way to keep the CPL around 3X the price of the workshop on average, which is really good for this type of funnel at mid-to-high scale.
To generate $5 workshop sign-ups (paid leads) efficiently, we implement what we call “The Controlled Fluctuation Strategy.”
So, we deliberately throttle Dr. Manjunath’s paid YouTube ad campaigns’ spend during a certain period and then speed up the campaigns at the right time to maximize lead volume at our desired CPL.
Here is a hypothetical scenario to help you understand this strategy in action:
- Let’s say today is Monday, September 2, and the next 6-day workshop starts on Sunday, September 15, two weeks from today.
Instead of letting the ad campaigns spend the maximum amount daily at a high CPL, we will start with low target CPA (cost-per-action) bids of around $13 and gradually increase our bids, spending, and lead volume as we approach the workshop start date on September 15.
Most of the spending and lead flow for this workshop will happen from September 12 to 15, about three days before the workshop start date. By then, our target CPA bids will be set to $17, and we will set them to $19 on September 14 (the last day before the workshop starts) to maximize lead flow.
Want to know the best part?
If our bids are set to a target CPA of $19 on September 14 (one day before the workshop), the actual CPL will typically be around $13 for that day, and our high bids will allow us to maximize lead flow without actually increasing the average CPL.
Why? Because people don’t like to wait for what they pay for, and they are much more likely to register for a paid workshop if it starts the next day rather than in two weeks.
When Sunday the 15th comes and the timer on the registration page starts counting down to the next workshop, we will lower our Target CPA bids by about 25% to force the campaigns to go into a “CPL correction” mode.
This will cause the YouTube ad platform’s algorithm to attempt to generate leads more efficiently, resulting in the campaigns crashing or spending significantly less money from Sunday onwards.
We want the campaigns to “crash” or stop spending money on the workshop start date, or whenever the countdown timer on the registration page is reset. This is very important to ensure we are in control of what happens in the following workshop’s advertising period.
If we do not crash the campaigns, the CPL will immediately spike once the timer on the registration page is set to count down to the next workshop date.
The suddenly high CPL ultimately causes an uncontrolled crash, but only after the campaigns spend a significant amount of money at a much higher CPL than our target CPA bids (of course…).
An uncontrolled crash can prevent us from generating the same high volume of leads at the same CPL for the next workshop.
It can take a month or longer to retrain the algorithm to generate the same volume of leads at our desired CPL, especially when only two workshops are happening per month, so it’s crucial to crash the campaigns deliberately (before they crash on their own).
- Pro Tip: To decrease the average CPL and increase the lead volume for the entire promotional period, we started using a countdown timer that shows when the “registration ends” rather than when the next workshop begins.
A shorter countdown period typically results in a lower CPL, which allows us to generate a higher volume of leads.
That’s our advertising strategy for Dr. Manjunath; however, keep in mind that we run his campaigns exclusively in India, so the numbers I shared may not be applicable or attainable for you if you run the exact same campaign in the US, for instance.
For the US market, I recommend multiplying all of Dr. Manjunath’s numbers by five. So, instead of a $5 workshop, you would have a $25 workshop with a target of $75 CPL. And instead of a $1,200 upsell, you would have a $6K upsell.
– Vlad Strizheus
Closing Remarks
Dr. Manjunath’s journey offers a powerful lesson: you cannot go wrong with acquiring a valuable skillset and then using your knowledge to help others achieve the results they want or need.
That’s what coaching is all about, and when done correctly, it results in massive success!
Would you like to know something fascinating about the marketing campaign we manage for Dr. Manjunath?
His strategy is quite simple relative to some of our other clients, but his campaign is among the most stable and effective ones.
Why is that?
If you read any of our other VIP Case Studies, you’ll notice a recurring trend among all the successful entrepreneurs we have featured (including Dr. Manjunath): they like to keep everything simple and prioritize serving their customers and communities above all else.
That is the ultimate key to long-term success.
That being said, we hope Dr. Manjunath’s story inspired you and that you will use his unique insights and experience to scale your business to the next level.
If you enjoyed this VIP Case Study, please give us five stars on Trustpilot.
Stay tuned to Vavoza Insider Plus for more valuable marketing insights and resources.
– Team Vavoza
