Sigrun Gudjonsdottir helps women create their businesses and quickly achieve several million euros in revenue. I’m asking her to share the core of her method, as well as how she manages to sell in English to people for whom it isn’t their first language.
(Literal) Text Transcription of the video : Sigrun Gudjonsdottir – How to scale your business ?
Olivier Roland : Another clap before we dive into your amazing journey. How would you describe what you do today and what you are?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I help online entrepreneurs scale from zero to seven figures in the shortest amount of time possible. The people I’ve helped, many of them have been able to scale to a million dollars within four years. I’ve been doing this for the last 10 years and I’ve made over 18 million US dollars myself.
Olivier Roland : Wow, amazing! And you also like teach other things besides scaling?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yeah, it’s basically the full portfolio of building a business. I used to be a CEO for 10 years before I became an online entrepreneur, so I know how to hire people, how to set up the right systems, and accounting. It’s not what you will find maybe officially on my website, but once people work with me, I look at the overall business setup as well.
Olivier Roland : Awesome. So, how did you start your journey? So, you’re about in… Yes, you spent your childhood and teenage years there?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes, and then I left. At 20 years old, I moved to Germany. I wanted to become an architect.
Olivier Roland : Wow! And so, let’s do a short story. How did you go from, “Okay, I want to become an architect,” to, “Oh, now I want to become an entrepreneur”?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes, I was almost finished with my architecture study in Germany when the internet came out, and we got access to computers, and we were able to send emails. I created virtual reality and I found that way more fascinating than doing architecture, and therefore I just finished my degree and then I switched over to computer science.
Olivier Roland : Okay.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yeah, and one thing led to another. I moved back to Iceland, and suddenly I was a CEO of a software company. And that’s what I did for 10 years in Iceland. Actually, the last couple of years, I was in Switzerland. I met my husband in London and moved to Switzerland, but then I got sick. I was sick from sitting at the desk 9 or 10 hours a day, working really hard, not really flexible working hours, and I was told to stop working. I was sick for seven months, and it made me think, “Can I go back to work for someone else where I cannot control my time and maybe get sick again?” So I decided I had to do something about it. I don’t wish this on anybody. I don’t wish anyone to become sick, but I do think there’s a moment in life for all of us who want to be entrepreneurs where it says, “This is it. Now I’m not going back.”
I lost my job because I was sick, went to the unemployment office, and they said, “You’re unemployable.”
Olivier Roland : Why?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Because I had too many degrees. I studied architecture, computer science, business. I had been a CEO very young. I was not in a box. You know, I didn’t have a clear CV, and therefore they suggested that I start my own business. And I thought, “What a great idea!” I was thinking the same thing.
Olivier Roland : Okay, yeah. But you were a CEO of a software company before, right? So it was almost being an entrepreneur, except you didn’t create the business, but you did manage the business day to day, correct? You had to set up a strategy, so you had almost everything already needed for the experience, right?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes
Olivier Roland : Except doing the thing. Okay, so you were like, “Okay, so that’s a good idea.” And you started the company.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I started, but I spent about 18 months thinking about what this idea could be. I was hoping that if I would go for a walk, a beautiful path like behind us, or I would take a shower or, I don’t know, go on holiday, I would magically find it out. But I can assure you, the perfect business idea does not fall from the sky. I was waiting for it, and it did not happen. At some point, I got so frustrated with myself that I eventually just started. It’s better to start with some idea, even if it’s not perfect, than to keep on waiting for the perfect idea, which will never come.
Olivier Roland : Absolutely. And so, what did you create ?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : So first, I created a course on how to find your true passion and the right business idea. I did a lot of different things. Probably the first nine months I was doing what I call spaghetti marketing, which is you try all these different things, you have no strategy. I thought, “Oh, you were a CEO for 10 years. I thought I didn’t need any help. I thought I could do it all on my own.” I watched some free webinars, some free challenges, and I thought, “Oh, I see what they’re doing. I can do this.” No. After nine months of spaghetti marketing, I finally hired a coach, and that’s when I invested $5,000, which was a huge amount of money 10 years ago, and still is today. But I was like, “I need help.” And I was able to turn that around into $55,000 in 90 days. So I think,
Olivier Roland : Wow. So $5,000 of investment, $55k of revenue or income. In one month ?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : In 90 days.
Olivier Roland : 90 days. So it’s pretty good. Yeah. So, but where were you sitting?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, I wanted to learn how to launch. I love launching. You know, most of my money I’ve made with launches in the last 10 years. But the first launch, you know, I had to learn it like everybody else. And so…
Olivier Roland : Wait, we’re speaking about a launch like from the Product Launch Formula, which is basically a methodology to sell a product. It’s like one week of pre-launch and one week of launch, and the goal is to make people excited about the product and also to give a lot of value.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : It’s a marketing campaign, and you make people excited. And then when you open doors, they want to buy, and then you close doors so there’s a sense of urgency to join a program. And I wanted to learn this because I had seen people do it, and I knew I would like it. And so I hired the coach for this. But my launch failed.
Olivier Roland : But what were you selling?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I was selling a course on how to set up all your launch tech. So, because I had not launched myself yet, the only thing I could actually sell was, “I can sell you all the systems behind it,” but not actually the strategy yet. Even though I knew how to build companies, seven and eight-figure companies, I could not translate that into a product ye t. Okay, but I had missed the crucial step. I had not figured out who was my ideal client, and I had not figured out or asked if people really wanted this program. So one person bought.
Olivier Roland : I was surprised.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : It was $997, and 600 people were on the webinar.
Olivier Roland : Wow, that’s a lot. How did you manage to have so many people so fast?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I had been doing really well. I’d been doing weekly webinars for months but without selling anything.
Olivier Roland : Without selling anything? Ah, so just to share content.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Just to share content. Not something I would do today, and I don’t recommend that strategy, but I had built an email list of eager buyers, except they didn’t want to buy that thing that I wanted to sell them. What I did was I sent out an email, told people what I’d been doing the last nine months, you know, this spaghetti marketing. But of course, I described it in a way like I was growing my email list, I was making progress, and most of my audience, for them, I was two steps ahead, so they were in awe. And when I offered them a free online business strategy session, 90 people booked, and that’s how I made the $55k. In 90 days
Olivier Roland : Okay, but so it was free, but you were selling…What ?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I sold them was one-on-one coaching.
Olivier Roland : Okay, oh wow, so it must have been a lot of work.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes,
Olivier Roland : But you gathered a lot of experience, right?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : A lot of experience, a lot of information. It was not my plan to do one-on-one, and I don’t recommend people do it for too long, but this was gold. In hindsight, it was the best thing that happened to me. I failed launch, and then of course now I knew how to launch, do the pre-work, you know, figure out your ideal client, figure out what they want, and sell them what they want to buy.
Olivier Roland : So already you have quite a few interesting insights. First, you had to be put in an uncomfortable position to think about creating a new company. Because when you were a CEO, I mean, you were in the daily life. So you were dreaming of being an entrepreneur
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : For a long time. Even at the very beginning of being a CEO, you thought about, “Oh, what if this was my company?”
Olivier Roland : Right? So you need to be put in a position. And maybe, I mean, for some people, if you’re in too much of a comfortable position, it’s like what I call in French, “des chaussures en béton”—shoes of concrete—they are comfortable but very heavy, and you need a kind of kick in the butt to be able to break out of these concrete shoes. So that’s what happened to you.
Then, you did a common mistake which was to overthink the project. I mean, another common mistake is to rush. So I think it’s better, I mean, it depends, but if you rush too much, you can also hit a wall, right? But I mean, at some point, you realized you were wasting time. You were not getting anywhere, no. And so you decided to do something, start with something.
And third, a very interesting insight is like your first launch was a failure, and it didn’t matter. It was actually very interesting. So it’s the same thing, guys—don’t wait until you have a perfect plan because who cares about the perfect plan anyway? You can have the best plan in the world, you’re never going to follow it completely when you, you know, the [ __ ] hit the fan, as they say in English, right? Absolutely. Like no battle plan survives the war or the battle, you know, it’s like it’s not possible. You need to adapt. And fourth, coaching. I always tell you guys, coaching is absolutely not the end goal because the goal is to stop exchanging your time for your money but to start it amazing because you can—an amazing experience. You really understand very well what are the problems of your customers, and I mean, they are paying you. So it’s not like you’re not in a virtual reality; people are paying you so you can help solve their problems. And it gives you such a—it’s like doing market research and being paid for it.
Right? So okay, so the launch was a flop, but the coaching was a success. Yeah. So what did you do next?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, I was able to go to almost six figures in 12 months despite wasting nine months on, you know, spaghetti marketing. And I got a little bit like, you know, I found the ambition and I had the drive, like, “This is going to work.” I saw it was going to work. So then my next step was group coaching because when I went into all of this, I knew I didn’t want to sell my time.
So selling my time was just like a step to get to the next step, and the next thing was group coaching. And I did a couple of mistakes there. I would do like a 21-day challenge, and then I made one or two posts or two or three emails, and people didn’t buy because there wasn’t this launch strategy and deadline. And so after doing a couple of these mistakes, I realized what I was doing. I was able to sell out a group coaching program. It was in July. I was traveling in Iceland on my summer holiday with my stepsons. And in the evening, again, I was a bit frustrated with myself—I think that’s a common theme—and I wrote the sales page for a group coaching program, which I had seen that people wanted.
By this time, I had a Facebook group so I could also listen in to what were people’s pain points. So you don’t always need to do a survey; you can also just watch what people are saying. And the program sold out. And from there, I went all in on group coaching programs. So I doubled my revenue three years in a row and started to scale down the one-on-one. And then we came to year four.
Olivier Roland : Would you share the approximate numbers of the first…
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yeah, so the first year was $72,000. The second year was $164,000. The third year was $340,000. So I felt like I had real momentum. And then something grabbed me in the year four. This is the year I’m going to make a million dollars. I was going to triple my revenue. I did not know how, but I made a flip chart in my office like, “This is what I’m going to sell,” and I wrote an email to my whole list telling them that this was the year I was going to do it. And I got a lot of positive feedback. It was like I was taking people on this journey with me. I was not going to do it alone; I was going to do it with them. So I had big plans. I was going to do my first live event, I was going to start my podcast, you know, I had things going. But by August, I checked my numbers—and I do check my numbers regularly—but then I had a wakeup call that I was only at $340,000. And I said, “How am I in four months going to make $660,000? This sounds impossible.” But then I took my notebook and I started to write down all the programs I could still sell. I had a launch coming up, I had a live event coming up, I had a few things going for me that I knew I could turn into revenue. I also had a retreat the coming year. Maybe I can pre-sell some spots. I started to be very creative. And that’s the cool thing. When you have an aspirational goal, you get way more creative. If the goal is smaller, you don’t get as creative. And I worked definitely very hard those four months, and it was so exciting. The last days before the end of the year, I was literally coming up with new products just to try to make more money.
Olivier Roland : Awesome!
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : And five minutes before midnight, I made a million dollars.
Olivier Roland : Before midnight, the 31st of December?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes!
Olivier Roland : Woo, amazing! That’s impressive—the power of vision and execution. Really cool. So, fourth year: $1 million. Yeah, okay. So, what did you do then? First, how did you celebrate?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, I had bought a perfume that’s called the Million Dollar Perfume.
Olivier Roland : Oh, really?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : It still exists. Yes, and I had it in the box, and I opened it up live in front of my audience.
Olivier Roland : Oh, okay. Oh, you shared it with your audience? I did. $1 million.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes, and I opened up the box with the perfume. It was actually a perfume for men.
Okay, but it doesn’t matter. It was about the symbolic nature of the perfume. And that was one thing. But then I had always wanted a nice bag, and I knew the price for the bag was like $22,000, and I thought it was ridiculous to buy such an expensive bag. But after this amazing year, in January and February, I was in Beverly Hills, and I went to Rodeo Drive, just like in the movie. I walked into the Prada store and said, “Do you have a red bag?” So, I bought a red Prada bag as a gift to myself.
Olivier Roland : Okay. And before we talk about the next years, something very interesting you didn’t mention: in what language do you do your programs?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Everything is in English.
Olivier Roland : Okay. And to whom do you sell mostly?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I thought when I started my business that my audience would be native English speakers like those from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But it turns out, because I am not English—I am from Iceland—people like to do business with me from other countries. So, my biggest audience is actually from Germany. Many are from Poland, the Czech Republic, all over Europe, really.
Yes, I also have people from Iceland, but I never focus specifically on Iceland. It’s a small country. Yeah, but so most of my audience is Central Europe, to my surprise, which is incredible.
Olivier Roland : Yeah. So, how do they discover you?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, I use Facebook ads heavily.
Olivier Roland : Okay, so at the start, you were doing Facebook ads for the whole of Europe and the US and Canada?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes
Olivier Roland : And basically, I analyzed the numbers and just decided to only stick with what was making sense.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yeah, ultimately, after you’ve made the first sales, you can focus on the countries that actually respond the best. So, in the beginning, my email list was half US and half Europe, but who was buying? Europe.
Olivier Roland : Oh, okay.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : So they were more valuable to me, and therefore it was better for me to spend ads on people in Europe.
Olivier Roland : So, it’s amazing. You’re selling in English to people who don’t speak English as their first language.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes.
Olivier Roland : I mean, I hope it’s starting to break a few of your limiting beliefs, guys, because it’s impressive. And English is not your first language either. I mean, your first language is Icelandic.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Icelandic, and then I learned German and then English.
Olivier Roland : Yeah, and so…Oh, yeah. And you could—I mean, because most of your customers are in Germany, right? You could do your courses in German.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I could, but I don’t, and I never speak to them in German.
Olivier Roland : Why?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Because I wanted this business to be in English, and I like to serve a certain audience that is internationally minded. So even if they are not native English speakers, they have traveled abroad or they like to learn from an English-speaking coach. They are open-minded, and I didn’t want to just go to Germany or just go to Iceland. I felt that would be limiting for myself.
Olivier Roland : Yeah, you’re right. And I mean, especially Iceland, there are like 350,000 Icelanders.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : 380,000.
Olivier Roland : Yes. So, imagine. Iceland is the size of a medium-sized city in Europe.
Yeah, it’s really a small population. It’s hard to have a real business there, especially in the internet business. You cannot scale it. Yeah, right. So you need to do it in another language. Okay, so fourth year: $1 million. So the goal of the second year was to reach $2 million?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I thought about it, but I realized the bigger the number gets, it slows down a bit the growth. I was able to go to $1.5 million in my fifth year, and then it went to $2 million and then $2.5 million, I think. And then I had a little dip in 2022—like $100,000 or $200,000 less. But last year it was $3 million. So, overall, it’s been now $18 million US.
Olivier Roland : Wow, amazing. What a journey, right?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes, it’s unbelievable. I would not have imagined this 10 years ago. My only goal then was to replace my previous salary. Like, if I would earn six figures, I felt like I would be on top of the world. That was my only goal. And I think once you achieve that goal, then you realize, “Oh, more is possible.” But you don’t have to have the big goal yet. I don’t think you have to start a business and say, “I have to get it to seven figures.” No, just start with a smaller goal and then make your goals bigger later on.
Olivier Roland : So, just so the people can have an idea: to make $1 million of revenue, what is the budget for ads you need, more or less?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Ah, very good question. So, when I’m doing a launch, a marketing campaign, I calculate about 10% of my expected revenue for the launch. But if I look at my overall revenue, because I have a lot of repeat clients, I’m very good at moving people from one program to the next one. My overall ad budget over the year is about 5%
Olivier Roland : Which is very, very low. Yeah, so for $1 million, basically, you spend $50,000 in ads? Yeah, okay. And do you sell your products in dollars?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : I used to
Olivier Roland : But most of your customers are European.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Yes, but I didn’t know that. I started off in dollars thinking I would be selling to the whole world, and only recently I changed to euros. But I am based in Switzerland; my business is based in Switzerland.
Olivier Roland : So, you need to convert everything.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : So, it doesn’t matter if I’m charging dollars or euros; at the end of the day, I need to convert for Swiss francs.
Olivier Roland : Yes. And now, one of your specialties is helping people scale their business, and mostly women—you have mostly women entrepreneurs, but anyone can use the tips to scale, right? It doesn’t matter.
So, first, what would be your advice for people who are watching? I mean, they are still here, so they’re interested, right? Yeah. Who want to create a business—maybe they have an idea, but maybe they are afraid to start, or they don’t know exactly what to do next. What would be your first advice?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, the first thing is to figure out what you approximately like doing, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to start somewhere. So you’ve got to define who your ideal client is—who would you like to work with and what kind of problems do these people have? So instead of just always focusing on what you like doing, ultimately, someone needs to be paying you, and you need to find people that are willing to pay for that thing. So, it’s creating a special overview where you bring all these things together. And, of course, I can share more about that when we meet in Paris.
Olivier Roland : Oh, great. And, okay, and you will have a whole talk about how to scale your business from zero—how to start and how to make it reach at least 1 million euros or more. But, okay, give us a few tips.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : So, the first thing is really understanding that you are selling to a human being, and this person has problems, they have fears, they’ve tried things that didn’t work out. There’s something that they want to achieve; they have visions, they have goals. And seeing how you could help them—that’s the very start for everyone. And this is unfortunately a step that many skip. I did it too. I skipped it. I went into my first launch thinking I could just sell something, and I had not spent the time on really figuring out who I wanted to work with and what I wanted to sell them. And you don’t need to know this exactly, but it’s important to just start. It’s a little bit like doing a thesis at university; you have a hypothesis: you say, “I think this is my client. I think this is the problem I want to solve.” But then you take the next steps to figure out what exactly that is.
At the event, we’ll do a small workshop to help you define your avatar—your ideal customer. Because, I mean, everything in life is better when you serve your ideal customers. You’re happier, more productive, more motivated, and you make more money. And I mean, everyone is happy. So, it’s really the goal. There’s a book in French; so no [] in the company or something like that. Like, if you find [] in your own place or in your customers, you just fire them immediately. That’s the goal. I’m not saying you should do that all the time, especially not when you’re starting, but that’s a good…Okay, what else?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, the next step is, of course, once we have understood the problem, we want to come up with a program. And of course, I don’t want people to sell their time. We may start there; we may… you know, the minimum, I would say, is three clients. It would be great if you work with three clients just to test your hypothesis, to see if someone is willing to pay for something and you can help them. But you want to quickly go to scalable programs and have a customer journey. And this is how I’m able to have such a low ad budget—because I can sell people again and again different programs and bring them to the next stage. So, I want to go through during my talk on how you actually create those programs, make them irresistible for your clients, and how you make sure you can sell them the next thing and the next thing. Because this is called lifetime value: the higher the lifetime value is, the easier it is to run your business. It’s… I think they say it’s 27 times easier to sell to an existing client than to find a new one. I mean, I don’t know the exact number, but for sure it’s zero.
Olivier Roland : Yeah, as long as your product makes sense for them.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Right, of course.
Olivier Roland : So, yeah, having a catalog of products is very important. Yes, can’t wait to learn more about that. It will be very interesting. Yeah, so any other tips you can share with the audience or with us?
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Well, it’s not enough to have the ideal client and know their problem and create all these programs. You’ve got to sell them. And there’s where the secret sauce of launching comes in. And launches don’t need to be huge. You’ve probably heard about someone doing a million-dollar launch or $2 million launch, but a launch can also be selling something for, you know, €10,000 or €20,000, but you’re selling to a lot of people in a short amount of time. And there are lots of tools and tricks to it, especially now, this year, where things have changed a bit. And so, therefore, I want to share a few secret tips on how you can sell your products more easily, faster, and with more fun.
Olivier Roland : Thank you, Sig, for sharing these. And looking forward to seeing you on stage in Paris.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir : Thank you for having me here today, and I’ll see you in Paris.
