Raising Your Business: For Moms Growing Their Business and Raising Their Family

102. How to Launch Your First Leveraged Offer in 2026 (The Mom-Friendly Way)

• Yael Bendahan

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What if I told you that you could launch your first leveraged offer, make over $11K, and still show up for your kids' Christmas parties without breaking a sweat?

My client Katherine did exactly that—and she did it in December while being fully present for her five kids. No complicated challenge funnels. No showing up on camera every single day. Just a simple, stripped-back launch process that actually works for moms with actual lives.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on the exact three-phase process Katherine used to launch her first course while maintaining her family traditions, making hot dinners most nights, and keeping her sanity intact. If you've been sitting on a course idea, group program, or any kind of leveraged offer but feel too overwhelmed to launch it, this one's for you.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why you need a leveraged offer (even if your one-to-one business is doing fantastically well)
  • The three-phase low-key launch process that works for busy moms
  • How Katherine made over $11K across two launches with less than 220 people on her launch list
  • Why you should NEVER create your entire program before validating it
  • How to launch without sacrificing family time or your sanity
  • The power of email-based launches (no daily lives required!)
  • How to turn your beta launch into an evergreen funnel


Resources Mentioned:

LINKS
📈The CEO MOMS Growth Matrix - feeling stuck or plateaued at your current revenue? Snag your custom roadmap for sustainable growth from $0 to multi-6-figures in this FREE training! >>> yaelbendahan.com/matrix

🔥Join my FREE 3-Day Program, LEVERAGE - the process that’s creating multi 6 figure years working nap times and being a full time mama of 6. Claim your spot here >>> https://yaelbendahan.com/leveragepod

💰Offers in Your Pocket - 11 Offers You Can Pull Out of Your Pocket and Sell This Week! Only $9 - yaelbendahan.com/pocketoffers

💃 Apply for the CEO Mom Mastermind if you're ready to scale sustainably to $15-20K+ months. Read more about the mastermind here OR go straight to the application here.
Want to chat about the mastermind before you join? DM me on Instagram - instagram.com/theyaelbendahan

And she set very strict time boundaries with herself, and those boundaries were only possible because we simplified the launch. If she had tried to do this big live challenge with multiple live streams, daily, there's no way, okay, she would've had to sacrifice her family time. She should would've been stressed, she would've been resentful. But because it was email based, I think she posted three posts on Instagram and that was it. She could work on her own schedule, right when she had capacity, get feedback asynchronously through Slack. And that's what I want for you. Welcome to the Raising Your Business Podcast. I'm your host, Al Behan, founder of CEO Mom Academy, mom of Six and Lifelong Reading addict. This podcast is here to empower moms to run their businesses and lives like the powerhouse CEO. They are. I want you to believe that you can have the business success you desire. And be present with your family and to give you my best tips and strategies for how to make that happen. I'll be sharing the honest reality of balancing business and motherhood biz models that work for you. Marketing simplicity, and the mindset of A CEO, mom. Now let's dive in. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Raising Your Business. I am so excited about today's episode, as I always say. And, I have not posted a podcast for a couple weeks'cause I've been sick. I've just been sick and not feeling well and my, you can tell if my voice is not still a hundred percent, but I really wanted to record this and so I am okay because this is important for you to know and it's important for you to to understand, especially in this. Really this kind of I don't like calling everyone saying a trust recession. It is kinda a trust recession. But the thing is that it's a it's a time where you need to build trust in different ways, at different levels more than ever. And I am about to tell you how my client,, launched her first leverage offer this past year in December, like a year, almost a year ago. And yes, this December, this. The month where everyone's oh no, it's the holidays. Can I launch anything? I don't know. I'm so busy. I'll just wait till January. She made over 11 K across two launches in a few months with a tiny email list working, I don't know, I think three days a week at most while still showing up for her kids' classroom, Christmas parties, making hot dinners most nights and reading holiday books with her five kids. And I want you to know this right from the jump. This was not some complicated challenge funnel or a massive live launch. This was the most strip back, low-key launch process that I've ever coached someone through. And if there's one thing that I know is one of my superpowers, it's helping my clients simplify things down yet, still make just as much money. That is, that's what I help them do because we are moms. We don't have time for complicated. And if you've been sitting on a course idea or a group program idea, or maybe digital products or templates, any kind of leveraged offer that you've been too scared or too overwhelmed to launch, this episode is literally for you. But before we dive into the exact three phase process, I need to tell you about something that I'm doing that I'm honestly really excited about. So look, we are in the thick of black Friday season right now, and everybody's inbox is flooded with five days of deals like this is, seems to be the trendy thing to do over the past few years. Five days of deals, different offer every day, mega bundle sales for 50 courses for$97. And honestly, it is overwhelming. Okay? And here's what I know about these big bundle sales. You buy 50 courses for 40 for$97, right? You or whatever it is. You get excited, you download everything and then you implement exactly zero of them. Because to be honest, black Friday sales do play on fomo and there is a certain aspect to that and I have benefited from Black Friday sales in the past. I've done offer parties with multiple offers and it has been really fun. Okay. But this year I had a lot going on personally, and it's just, honestly, I just did not have the time or the mental. Space and I think you don't either. Okay. So instead of doing some massive sale where I throw a bunch of random offers at you, although all my offers are fantastic, I know that very often buying things during Black Friday is not exactly make ensure that you implement. So instead of doing some massive sale where I throw a bunch of random offers at you, although my offers are all fantastic and they're all great, and I might do that in the pa in the future, I might do like a, a sitewide sale here, 40% off everything or whatever. But I decided to do one thing this year. Okay. One focus workshop that's going to walk you through the exact process that Katherine used to launch her first leverage offer and make 11 k. And this is also similar to how I helped my client Katie launch her membership. This is all. About taking your one-to-one offer and then expanding it into a leveraged offer that you can sell without having to deliver subsequently, or you deliver it once and then that's it. And this workshop is called Built to Scale, CEO Mom Edition. It's happening live on Monday, December 8th at 1:30 PM Eastern. And here's the thing, this is$47. This is probably the cheapest thing you're gonna buy during this entire Black Friday season. Like genuinely. Yeah. These amazing bundle deals or courses that are 1 9 7 2 9 7, and will you implement maybe not. Depends how many of these courses you actually buy, but this is one focus workshop where I'm gonna be walking you through my proven scale system, the exact framework that I use in my mastermind clients, top of them, bill leveraged offers that work with their mom life and not, doesn't burn them out or overwhelm them. And you're gonna see Katherine's launch breakdown, the content strategy, the nurture emails, the whole. Three phase process we're about to talk about in this episode, but in way more detail with actual examples that you can swipe. Plus, you are gonna be getting my 2026 planning visual map and my scalable offer suite worksheet, so you can map out your offer suite for next year. So if you are serious about scaling beyond one to one in 2026, this is honestly the best$47 you are going to spend. So head to the link in the show notes to grab your seat and let's get into the good stuff. So I need to give you some context about Katherine because her story is probably. Similar to your story, Katherine is a brand stylist, okay? She helps brand photographers style their photo shoots. She's an mom of five and she's been running a successful one-to-one styling business for years, getting clients primarily through referrals from photographers. And here's the thing, she is good, like really good. Her clients love her. Her photographers love her. She's fully booked most of the time, but she hit this point where something had to shift. Here's what's happening. Photographers would refer their clients to Katherine, but a lot of these clients couldn't necessarily afford to hire a stylist. So the photographers were stuck because They wanted to help their clients look good for their shoots, but they didn't necessarily have the expertise themselves. And Katherine's wait, what if I could teach the photographers how to style their clients? Brilliant idea, right? Because you could help way more people. She could create an income stream that did not require her to be on Zoom calls or physically present on set and solve a real problem for her existing network. But here's where it gets real. Katherine is a dreamer. And I say this with so much love because I am the same way. She has endless ideas and she had mapped at this entire personal styling course, she had outlines for multiple programs. She had a challenge idea with live streams like the whole nine yards and daily tasks and homework. And she was feeling completely frozen. She had joined my mastermind back at the beginning of 2024, and we spent months just clarifying, getting her focus, helping her see which idea actually made sense for her current audience in her current capacity, because she currently has five kids at home. Not homeschooling, but five kids. It's a lot. They have strong family traditions around the holidays, she volunteers in their kids' classrooms, they take a lot of family trips and she didn't wanna sacrifice any of that to launch a course. So when we got to October and she's okay, I think I'm ready to launch this course. I'm gonna do a big challenge three days live, maybe five days. We'll do live trainings every day. And I was like, okay, stop. Katherine, it is going to be December. You're busy, your audience is busy. What if we stripped this back by 80%. And I can literally feel her sigh of relief through Slack. Because here's what I've learned after doing this for years, I've been in business for eight years, okay? And I've launched my own stuff while pregnant, while postpartum, while juggling four kids, five kids, six kids. Complicated alone. Strategies are not for moms with actual lives, okay? We needed something low key. We needed something that could be done alongside her regular life, something that would work even if her kids were home on Christmas break. Something that did not require her to be on a live every single day. So I walked her through what I now call my three phrase. Three phrase, three phase, low key launch process. And it worked so well that Katherine launched twice, once in December as a beta, and then officially again, officially in the middle of Q2. She made over 5K the first time with a beta price and another six K the second time. Her audience did not grow significantly in between, which we're working on right now. So the total here, if you've done the math, is over$11,000 from a brand new offer. While still bringing in high ticket service clients with a tiny audience, working part-time hours, while being a fully present mom. And that's what I'm gonna teach you today. Okay, so before we get into the how, I need to talk about the why because some of you listening are probably service providers or maybe one-to-one coaches who are like, I'm fine, I left my one-to-one clients. It's all good. I can fit them into my schedule. It's okay. And look, I'm not here to tell you that you have to create a course or group program or a membership or digital product shop if you genuinely love what you're doing. But I am a mom of six. I've been through so many different iterations of motherhood and motherhood. And business. Okay. Babies who don't sleep toddlers who are talented, and brilliant and know how to get into every single thing in the house. School aged kids who need help with homework or their social stuff. Teenagers who need emotional support or deeper conversations, just wanna talk to you at 11 o'clock at night. And I'm telling you that there will come a point in your times where your kids or your life, or your relationship or your family requires more attention or. You just need to take time off or life just happens. Okay? These could be good things like a new baby. This could be difficult. Things like family members who are sick and you need to take care of them, right? And you wanna be able to get paid without having to deliver one-to-one services. I remember my friend Ally and I used to call this the OAO Crap moment right?'cause your client pays the invoice. Oh, yeah. Money. Especially if you sell high ticket, which is awesome. And then immediately it's oh, crap, now I have to do all the work. And if you love what you do. That's fantastic. But if your life is overwhelming, if you're in a heavy season, you may not feel like you'll be able to deliver at your best, or you might feel really overwhelmed. So that is reason number one. You need a buffer. You need an income stream that does not require your immediate presence. Reason number two, I think it's an amazing idea to launch some sort of leverage offer, whether again, it's templates or whether it's a group program, or whether it's a course or membership. Not everyone can afford your highest ticket offer, and that's okay, but you can still serve them. Okay? You can create a more accessible option that will give them value, even if they're not ready to invest in. Your premium service, right? And they may invest in your premium service in the future, but at least you have something that can nurture them along the way. And here's the thing that happened with Katherine that I see happen a lot. Okay? After she went through the process of creating her course, after mapping out her framework, really articulating her expertise, she raised her one-to-one rates because going through that process helped her see just how valuable her work actually was, right? How much her expertise contributed to her client's success. So she raised her rates after I've been telling her to raise her rates for months, by the way. Okay. But then she finally did it because she was finally like so bought in to how valuable her service was, and people paid them without hesitation. And the people who couldn't afford it, they can still buy her course. Okay? So now she has options, a premium offer for the clients who want that high touch support and a more accessible offer for people who need our expertise but aren't quite ready for that higher ticket investment. And right now with everything going on economically right, with the way consumer behavior might be shifting, and there's a lot of AI and information out there, people want options. Okay? Not everyone's ready to invest in high ticket. But they still wanna work with you. They want your expertise, your experience, right? Because AI cannot replicate your experience. So you wanna give them away to learn from you, to benefit from your expertise, even when they can't afford your top tier service. Okay, so I can talk about this forever, but let's move on to the actual process. So here's the framework we use with Katherine. Three phases, super simple, no challenge required, no complicated funnels, and this is really what I use whenever like I'm launching something new. Because it, it makes the most sense. Okay? And this is what I use with my clients as well. So the first phase is private invites. This is the behind the scenes phase. Before you go public with anything, you're gonna reach out to people who you know, would probably be interested. I've done this when I when I launched my first mastermind after my first group program in March, 2020, right before I had my baby daughter, I sent out private invites to the people in that group program, inviting them to a one year mastermind and. Three women joined out of the group program and we worked together for another year after that, and it was amazing. It was amazing. And we're still really good friends. Okay. Until this day. So before you go public with anything, again, you're gonna reach out to the people who you know would probably be interested. So maybe they've expressed interest in this kind of offer before. Maybe they've asked you questions that this offer solves. Maybe they're just in your world and you have a gut feeling they'd be perfect for it. And Katherine had it an email list of photographers and people that she'd met at events, people who'd been on her email list, people who'd expressed interest in learning how to style their clients better. So she didn't do some big formal private invite email blast necessarily, although. You definitely could, and that's what I do. But she just started nurturing them for a few weeks before the launch, getting them used to seeing her in their inbox, warming'em up to the idea. And then when she opened up the wait list, these people were ready. What I love about this phase is you can get two to four sales before you even launch publicly. She actually reached out personally to a few people and they got like a really good deal on this offer. Okay, so she walked into her wait list launch already, like I think two or three people who were already like on the books. And it takes pressure off because you're already making sales before the official launch even starts, and it makes you just really feel validated and excited to continue. Then the next phase is going to be your beta launch. And this is where things kinda get real, but it's still low key. And this is the kind of launch we did in December. So Katherine's beta launch was basically two week, I think it was like two to three weeks start to finish. Okay? So week one and a half, you're gonna promote the wait list, get people raising their hands saying, yes, I'm interested in this. And she got a very nice amount of people on her wait list. And she did this through her regular literature emails. And then she had specific emails just to get people onto the wait list. Okay. So first it was just a mention, just, I'm creating this thing. If you want first access special bonuses, click here to get on the wait list immediately. And then she opened the doors to the wait list first. So they got special founding member bonuses, early word pricing, all the good stuff. And then the next day she opened it to her full list. Now, here's the key to making a beta launch work. Although honestly, I think it's really the key to making any launch work. You need a launch story, okay? This is not just a sales tactic. This is what's gonna keep people engaged. This is what's gonna keep people invested. This is what makes'em actually open your emails instead of just deleting them. And Katherine's launch story was her origin story, right? Why she created this offer, the gap she saw on the market. The photographers kept coming to her saying, my clients can't afford a stylist, but I don't know how to help them. And that story threaded through every single email, and it kept people invested and it made them care. And she had spoken to so many photographers and she had work on so many photographers that she was able to pinpoint exactly the kind of things they thought, exactly what they worried about, the kind of stuff they said. Her open rates during this launch were, I think 40 to 60%. Okay. And that's amazing. Sometimes some of them were even more, actually, and you know what made this work for Katherine specifically? It was all email based. Okay. No lives, no showing up on camera every day. No complicated challenge schedule. Okay? She could write emails ahead of time. She got them reviewed by me and she scheduled them. That was it. Okay. And I actually have a little screenshot, like she was like, okay, here are my emails, and what would you recommend here? What would you recommend there? That thread has 45 messages back and forth between me and her as we reviewed the emails one by one. Okay. And this meant that she could write her emails in advance, schedule them out. And then still show up for kids' Christmas parties, still make dinner still, do her, their advent calendar traditions that they do every year. She felt like she did not fall short in her mom life at all, like not at all. And then phase three is the official launch, and this is where you're gonna take everything you learn from your beta launch and do it better. So Katherine took all the feedback from her first round of students. She refined the course, she timed her messaging. She knew exactly what objections to address because she heard them in real time. And she actually delivered this course in Q1 of the next year. So she sold them in December. I think she gave them like one, one lesson or one or two lessons to watch right away. And then. She delivered the offer in Q1, throughout Q1. Dripping out the course every week for I think about eight weeks, or eight or nine weeks or whatever. And then she relaunched again in Q2, this time with more confidence, a better positioning a higher price point, and a masterclass. And she made another six K. And this was very carefully strategically crafted to be the foundation of an evergreen funnel because she had the masterclass. She had the emails for that and then she had the follow up emails and everything, and the masterclass was so good. I think she converted. I think she converted like 50% of the masterclass participants. Of people who came there live and and so she saw that it was a really, it was a good conversion rate and now we're working on turning it evergreen so that she can sell it on autopilot while she's working with her one-to-one clients. And she can create pathways when people come onto her list to segment them into whether they make sense for her one-to-one services or if it makes sense to send straight into the course funnel. That is the full cycle. Okay. Validate with your beta refine launch officially, and then automate and after that. You wanna launch again once, twice a year? Go for it. I think you should. Okay. I think that an evergreen, like a, like a hybrid evergreen and launch model really works the best.'cause the launch collects up all the people who've been checking out your your course throughout the year. And it collects all those warm leads that, maybe weren't quite ready when they join your list, but maybe like now you're gonna offer a special bonus or discount that pushes them over the edge. But then you want people to be able to buy it throughout the year as well. Okay. That is the process. It, to me, it feels very basic. But then when I was telling it to my coach, she goes, this is not basic at all. So I was like, okay. And it's not just about the overall framework, but obviously it's about the details, right? What to say at different parts in the launch, how to brainstorm all the content for your launch so that is the full cycle, okay? Validate with your beta launch, get the wait list going. Launch the wait list, launch to your full list, refine, deliver, then relaunch again officially, and then you can automate and. I need to say this out loud for people in the back, okay? Do not create your entire course before you validate it. I cannot tell you how many times I see people spending months creating this massive course, building out all the modules, designing all the workbooks, and they launch it and crickets, right? Or worse, they realize their audience doesn't actually want what they created. Here's what we did with Katherine. We did not make her create the whole course before launching.'cause she didn't have the time. It was December. She was busy. We mapped out the framework, we mapped out the curriculum, right? She knew what the models were all going to cover. We created the sales messaging and then we sold it as a beta, right? So the whole message was, this course is being created, co-created with you. You're gonna get the modules as they're released. You can able to give feedback in real time in exchange for being a founding member. You're giving, you're getting a heavily discounted price. So this did. Two things. It got her paid before she'd done all the work, which is so motivating, okay, let me tell you, if someone's already paid you for something, and it let her create the course for her actual students because she could see what questions they had, what they were struggling with, what they needed more support on. The final course is so much better because of this approach, and it was way less overwhelming for Katherine because she wasn't trying to create this massive thing while also managing her family's December. And honestly, the people who bought it probably wouldn't have been able to consume it in December anyway, so she created it in real time, module by module, week by week. With her students. So if you're sitting on a course idea or membership idea or templates, and you are waiting until it gets perfect. Before you launch it, stop it. Okay? Map out the framework, get clear on the transformation. Write your sales page and sell before you build it. Okay? I promise this is the way all. Now, one last thing I wanna talk about before we wrap up. Because this is what Katherine said was almost more important to her than the actual revenue. She launched in December. Her cart opened on a Friday night. Okay, so the night her family does pizza and a movie night together, and she told me she wrote that final cart closing email right before the movie started, poured herself a glass of wine, close your laptop, and told herself, you are not allowed to check your email for the next hour and a half. You're watching this movie with your kids. That is all that matters. And she did it. She also had cart. Clothes land on a Friday night or Sunday night, I can't remember which. Another family movie night. And throughout the launch, she was still showing up for her classroom. Christmas parties again, making hot dinners most nights, not takeout, which nothing against takeout. But when you have five kids from experience, it can get very expensive. Reading books to their kids every evening, keeping their family Advent traditions intact. And she set very strict time boundaries with herself, and those boundaries were only possible because we simplified the launch. If she had tried to do this big live challenge with multiple live streams, daily, there's no way, okay, she would've had to sacrifice her family time. She should would've been stressed, she would've been resentful. But because it was email based, I think she posted three posts on Instagram and that was it. She could work on her own schedule, right when she had capacity, get feedback asynchronously through Slack. And that's what I want for you. I don't want you to think that launching leveraged offer means you have to sacrifice presents with your kids, right? That you have to work 12 hour days for two weeks straight. You don't,? You just need a simpler process. So let's recap what we covered today. Number one, you need a leveraged offer, okay? Not just for the revenue, but for the flexibility for the ability to get paid, even when life gets busy. And life feels heavy, and for the opportunity to serve people who can't afford your premium services yet. Number two, my free phase, low key launch process. The private invites, the beta launch, the official launch. You don't need a complicated challenge or a massive live event, although you can do that later on if you'd like to. You just need a clear process and a compelling launch story. Number three, do not create your entire offer before validating it. Sell it first. Create it with your students. Co-create it. The final product will be better and you'll be way less overwhelmed. And number four, you can launch without sacrificing your family time, but only if you simplify the process. Focusing on email based launches, clear boundaries, maybe repurposing your content to social, if you want to add social to your launch, roster. But. That is what you need in order to have a launch that enables you to live life. She made 11 K across two launches, less than 300 people on her full email list, working part-time hours. In fact, the second time she launched her car closed on a day that she was flying with her family to France. That was how hands off and low key it was. Okay, if she can do it while being fully president for her five kids during the holiday season, you can do it too. Okay? So if you're listening to this and you're like, yes, I wanna launch my first leveraged offer in 2026, I wanna do it this simple way. I want the step-by-step process. I'm doing a workshop on December 8th called Built to Scale, where I'm walking through Katherine's full launch breakdown, and we're gonna be talking about. The exact audience led offer creation process that we use, the three part sales stack, the content that actually converted with examples, how she's turning this into an evergreen funnel and my full scale system framework that I've created out of two full years of doing this hardcore with my private clients. And you're also gonna be getting my 2026 planning map, visual map, and your scalable offer suite worksheet so you can map out your offers for next year. It is$47. The workshop is live on December 8th at 1:30 PM Eastern. But there will be a replay if you can't make it live because. Life happens and we're moms and we're busy and listen. During this whole Black Friday chaos, this is probably the cheapest thing you're gonna invest in, okay? And it's the only thing, it's going to give you a clear step-by-step path to implementation. Alright? This is not 50 courses you're never gonna open. It is one focused workshop with a proven process that you can actually use. So head to the link in the description to grab your seat. And if you wanna hear more of Katherine's story from her own mouth, her full journey, the mindset shifts, all of it, I'm dropping that full interview in the show notes as well. If this episode resonated with you and you're excited about launching Leverage offer in 2026, screenshot it. Share it on Instagram. Tag me at@theyaelbendahan and let me know. And I want you to remember, you do not need double your hours or a huge audience to scale, okay? You just need a simpler system and you can grow from there. So I'll see you next week, and I cannot wait to see you at the workshop. I can't thank you enough for listening to raising your business. I hope this episode has inspired you to take another step towards building a business and life that you love, and growing your income in a way that works for you and your family. If you enjoy this episode, please take a second to rate and review and let's connect that on Instagram screenshot and share it on Instagram Stories so we can get the word out to more mom business owners like you. Tag me at the El Behan and share your biggest breakthrough from today. See you next week.