Episode 238: What it Takes to Go From 6 to 7 Figures with Sigrun

By Sarah Walton | July 23, 2024

Click here to watch the video version of this podcast episode

If you own an online business and you don't think seven figures is realistic -- you are going to love this episode. Our guest, Sigrun, is Europe's number one online business mentor.

What I love about Sigrun is her honesty, her accessibility, and how much she's willing to share: all the mistakes and all the internal mindset pieces. You know when you think, “I am too dumb to do this. I can't do this.” She had them, too.

Sigrun Gudjonsdottir is an award-winning business coach, bestselling author, international speaker and host of the Sigrun Show podcast (I’ve been a guest!). She is on a mission to accelerate gender equality through female entrepreneurship and helps women start and scale their online businesses to 7 figures with her tough love and no-nonsense-approach to business and life.

Sigrun has been featured in Forbes, Time and numerous leading media publications in Europe. In 2022, she was accepted into the Hall of Fame of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award in Switzerland and in 2021 she won five German Stevie Awards; as the Hero of the year, Entrepreneur of the year, Solo entrepreneur of the year, Manager of the year, and Sales Achievement of the year. Her latest book is available on Amazon and is called Kickstart Your Online Business - Create an Online Course and Start to Make Sales.

From IT CEO to coaching a 7-figure business

Sigrun had what she thought was her dream job as CEO of an IT company, where she went from running a 15-person company to 74 employees. Changes with that board led to Sigrun taking leave and traveling, where she met her now husband.

She found herself in Switzerland starting from scratch to build her reputation and career. Sigrun developed repetitive strain injury and took time off to heal. After seven months, she knew it was time to start her own business.

Sigrun started designing her lifestyle focusing on her must-haves, which included a home office and the ability to split her time 50/50 between Iceland and Switzerland. She knew she was going to work on an online business and after signing up for an online course with a friend, realized she could coach.

“What the woman was doing, you know, not discrediting her in any way, but joining this course it was a wake-up call. Like, okay, I can do this,” says Sigrun.

She started offering courses to friends and offered some freebie help in Facebook Groups. But Sigrun realized her problem was offering free advice on topics she didn’t want to be known for, like how to grow organic reach in Facebook.

“I realized that my problem, my alchemist journey of not figuring out what I want, was a very common problem,” says Sigrun.

From there, she came up with the idea of a Passion-athon – a free bootcamp where you find your true passion and the right business idea in seven days. She gave herself a week to promote it and built the modules based on the exercises she had done to find her own passion.

Looking back, Sigrun says it was silly to offer something for free with no next steps or offers. She did get amazing testimonials though. She opted to put a one-hour coaching offer on her website a few weeks later and struggled with how to price it. Eventually, she settled on $180 an hour based on what she knew some consultants were charging.

“I was obviously not clear on what I was doing. I was all over the place and even and I need to say this to anyone who is having like doubts if they've got what it takes,” says Sigrun. “I had ten years’ experience as CEO and I had an MBA from top like we're talking about a top ten business school in the world, and I had no clue what I was doing.”

It’s been 10 years and Sigrun has made more than USD$18 million. Despite her experiences running a company, she did what she calls spaghetti marketing … throwing it against a wall and hoping it would stick.

She says she had no strategy or proper plan. She hadn’t grasped the flow of being visible, attracting customers, and making them stop and take notice of your offer. Sigrun says her first nine months were frustrating.

She realized she needed help and paid $5,000 to sign up for a program that helped her launch. She made the money back in three months.

Watch: 3 Lessons I Learned From My 8-figure Coach

7 figure mindset shift

Sigrun had ambition to replace her previous income. She knew making six figures of revenue was not the same as being paid a six-figure salary. She worked to double her business every year from $72,000 to $164,000 and then $340,000.

She attributes her jump in year three to her husband losing his job. Suddenly, she was the breadwinner for her family. She didn’t want her husband to have to go back to work. She set a goal to make a million dollars. By August, she’d only made a third.

“I wrote down all my progress and everything I could sell, even next year because I was running retreats at the time,” says Sigrun. “I saw it was theoretically possible.”

Knowing it was possible in theory, Sigrun dove in. She launched her podcast in August of 2018. She did her first live event in September. She sold out her Masterminds for the following year. She sold out her group coaching program.

“I started to make a habit of writing down, okay, this is what I need to make still and can I still do it? And every time I convinced myself,” says Sigrun. “It was all about convincing myself that it's still possible.”

Sigrun says her decision to push through those final months to scale to seven figures was about proving she could do it for herself as well as her commitment to her community.

“That's the great thing about public commitment, I suggest everyone do it,” says Sigrun. “I have made a couple of public commitments that I've failed on. And people forget that you made them. It's more us thinking, oh, ‘I told everyone I would do this.’”

Sigrun says hitting that first million was exhilarating. Now, she has a $3-million-a-year business. Even bringing in that much money, Sigrun says she still felt like she was on the outside looking in when it came to some purchases. It wasn’t until after the pandemic that she allowed herself to enjoy that profit on a personal level.