Welcome to the first email in the “Does the ‘Math’ math” series!

In this series, we’re looking under the hood about some of the common business advice we’re told and asking, “Does this add up for my business?”

First up… The promise of VIP Days

As context, VIP Days generally are a model in which you work with and/or for a client in a single-day model.

Popular types of VIP Days include both done-with-you and done-for-you services. Here are some examples:

• Podcast Launch
• Website Build
• Marketing Strategy
• System Audit and Build
• Strategy Intensive
• Day-Long Coaching Intensive

Generally, the flow of a service-based VIP Day is structured as follows:

• The client prepares all of the material you’ll need. So if you’re building a Website in a day, the client provides their branding assets/colors/ fonts, brand photos, their offers and pricing, social links and contact or cart links, and completes a questionnaire about their business in advance.
• You meet in the morning to define the objectives for the day and answer questions.
• If it’s a “done-for-you” VIP day offer, the provider goes away to do the work, with an async round of check-ins during the day.
• Deliverables are reviewed at the end of the day.

If your VIP day is live delivery of coaching or strategy, you’d be facilitating live sessions with your clients for the day, and potentially delivering any tangible materials or follow-up notes after the day is complete.

The promise for the client? The work is “done in a day”. There’s no extended timelines or back-and-forth or the potential for you to get stuck in indecision. You’re ready to go in a single day!

The promise for the business? You can compress the timeline of a project into a single day, making your workflow more predictable. Because you’re dedicating a full-day to a single project, you eliminate context switching, and because you’re managing the timeline to a single day, it’s easy to imagine a business model doing as much as 1 VIP day per week.

But let’s look at the math.

Audience Math

The biggest challenge with delivering single session VIP days is the audience math. In online business, we see about a 1-3% buying rate from your audience. Meaning if you have 100 people on your list, you may expect 1-3 purchasers of any given service. Let’s say that your audience is significantly more engaged, so we bring that rate to 5-10%. That means that you may enroll 5 or so people into a new VIP Day offering from your current list.

But if you want to sell just 1 VIP day per month the following year - 12 in total? You would need to grow your audience/network by at minimum 240 people per year, assuming a very high 10% buying rate and 50% email open rate or sales conversion rate. (If you’re on social media, because only a fraction of your audience sees your posts, you would probably need to grow by 1000+ followers per year to account for the reach difference).

Is your audience or network growing at that rate?

Energy Math

By definition, delivering a VIP day means doing a day of work. And you may not have the desire, capacity, or focus to work a full day on these types of deliverables. You may only be able to work in the mornings, or you may run out of energy through the day.

My strategy intensives are only half-day affairs where I have my clients block the rest of the day because of the energy expenditure for both of us.

Can you sustainably handle the VIP day offer without burning out and having a knock-on effect to your energy the rest of the week?

Transformation Math

To make the most of the VIP day - on both sides - your client must be prepared with clear objectives and/or any required preparation for you to do the deep dive work.

But maybe that’s not how you work or the stage in which you work with clients.

You might work in a way that requires integration. Setting down ideas for a night or a week to let them marinate for creativity.

Your clients might be at the more beginning stages of the work, where there’s more discussion needed, more strategy required before you can go off and create.

Or you may need to create more shared knowledge and rapport in advance, before hopping into a one-day deep dive session.

So knowing the math, how can you make the VIP Day structure work for you?

Recurring Intensives

Introduced to me via Hunter Niland Welling, recurring intensives may solve your audience math problem. If you work with clients on consistent deliverables, like marketing material development, graphic design, systems enhancements, or even financial management, recurring intensives are a great way to benefit from the deep focus of a VIP day without needing constant audience growth.

As a marketer or social media strategist, for example, you could collapse a month of marketing retainer work of 2-3 hours per week into a single, recurring, very potent day each month.

VIP Days as the strategy portion of a longer-term engagement

Instead of relying on VIP days for one-off engagements (again, the audience math problem), VIP days can be a way to deliver the upfront strategy or launch part of an ongoing project.

Working as a systems expert? Maybe your system rebuild VIP day is the first step, with ongoing maintenance as a recurring service.

Podcast Pitching company? You can have your VIP Pitch Day experience (coming up with topics, pitch script, a target pitch list) as a premium add-on to get started faster, with ongoing pitching support as the main package.

I start all of my engagements with a Strategy Intensive day, and build in the recurring intensive model as well with quarterly deep dives.

Move from a single-day to a different intensive model.

Maybe you don’t have a full single day to work or don’t want to deliver the work in a single day.

But how can you create the focus and intensity of that model without missing out on integration?

• Meet each morning for a week
• A two-week step-by-step process, with 2-3 pre-scheduled checkpoint meetings
• Two half-days
• Weekly meeting for a month

It’s up to you, but you can structure short-term engagements for focus without having to blow out your energy or short-change the integration period we need for our work.

So after reading this, how might you make the VIP model math work for you in your business?

P.S. - If you enjoy this series, please pass it along to a friend!

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Community and Reads

This week is three books I'm loving right now?

​On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good | Elise Loehnen: We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others' needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses--often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts--are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.

​Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing | Emily Lynn Paulson: A significant polemic on how MLMs operate, Hey, Hun expertly lays out their role in the cultural epidemic of isolation and the cult-like ideologies that course through their trainings, marketing, and one-on-one interactions.

​Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included) | Pooja Lakshmin: From women's mental health specialist and New York Times contributor Pooja Lakshmin, MD, comes a long-overdue reckoning with the contradictions of the wellness industry and a paradigm-shifting program for practicing real self-care that will empower, uplift, and maybe even start a revolution.

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