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You finally have a funnel and Facebook™ ads that are working.
Your funnel is converting. Your cost per lead looks healthy. You can see sales coming in from your Meta™ ads. On paper, it is doing what you wanted.
Yet the moment someone suggests increasing your budget, you freeze.
“I do not want to increase my expenses.”
“I cannot afford to spend more right now.”
If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. This is one of the most common blocks I see with coaches, course creators and online businesses who are ready to grow.
The problem is rarely the ads at this point. It is how you think about them.
In this post, I want to walk you through the mindset shift required to scale. You will see why ads that are working are not an expense, how to think about numbers like return on ad spend and how to scale in a way that feels measured rather than risky.
When your ads are working but you still refuse to scale
Recently, I have had several clients with very healthy numbers in their ad accounts.
We are talking about a return on ad spend of 2.5 or higher. That means for every $1 they put into ads, they are getting at least $2.50 back. Some are seeing returns of 4.5 or more.
The funnel is dialled in. The audience is right. We have refined the messaging, the booking pages, the email follow up and the targeting.
So the next logical question is, “How do we scale this”
And more often than you might think, the answer I hear is, “I do not want to increase my expenses.”
This is the mindset gap. Because once your ads are profitable, they are not just another bill. They are an investment with a proven return.
Imagine this on a simple level.
If I offered to give you $2.50 every time you handed me $1, would you only want to do that ten times Or would you look for a way to do it 100 or 1,000 times?
That is what scaling profitable ads really is. You are not throwing money at something random. You are putting more fuel into a system that is already working.
Case study 1 High ticket coaching funnel
One of my clients runs an evergreen webinar funnel into a high ticket coaching program.
People watch the training, then are invited to book a call if they want to explore working with her.
We have already done the work you would expect. We have improved her book a call page so more viewers take that next step and actually book. We have refined her ad copy. We have tweaked her email nurture. We have tightened up her messaging.
The result is a consistent return on ad spend of around 2.5. For every $1 she spends on ads, she makes about $2.50 back from that funnel. Month after month.
When she asked how to scale, my answer was straightforward.
“You are profitable. Let us increase your ad spend and bring in more of the right people.”
Her response was, “I do not want to increase my expenses.”
On a spreadsheet, the logic says yes. In her mind, ads still sat in the same category as electricity, software and rent. They were a cost to keep as low as possible, rather than a lever she could pull to increase revenue.
Case study 2 Low ticket offer feeding a higher ticket offer
Another client sells a $129 course for women in perimenopause. Many of those buyers later choose to work with her in a higher level coaching program.
We set up a simple Meta™ ads funnel focused on selling that low ticket offer. At first, we only tracked the front end sales from the $129 product.
Even with that conservative view, the ads were generating around a 4.5 return on ad spend. For every $100 she put into ads, she made about $450 from course sales.
Once we considered the higher ticket clients that came from those buyers, her true return was even stronger.
Despite that, she paused her ads.
She said she did not want the “extra expense” of advertising and went back to relying only on Instagram content. Her organic marketing does work, but it is limited by how much she can create, how often she can show up and what the algorithm decides to show her audience.
Her growth became tied to her time again.
The interesting part is that when she turned the ads off, she could clearly see the difference in sales and capacity. She has now come back and we are relaunching her campaigns, this time with a deeper appreciation for the role ads play in supporting her business and her time.
Why this thinking is so common
If you have been conditioned to think of marketing as a sunk cost, this fear is very normal.
Before online marketing, it was hard to track the impact of many types of advertising. You paid for a newspaper ad, radio slot or magazine feature and you hoped it helped. You could not see cost per lead or return per dollar in real time.
So it made sense to treat advertising like a box to tick and an expense to keep under control.
Online marketing and ads are different.
You can see:
- Cost per click
- Cost per lead
- How many sales came from your ads
- Your return on ad spend across a month or a funnel
Yet many business owners still carry old beliefs that “marketing is expensive” or that ad spend is a scary line item. They see ads as a necessary evil, not a scalable growth tool.
When ads are an expense and when they are an investment
This is not about blindly spending more. There are times when ads are an expense.
If your ads are not working, they are a cost. If your funnel is not converting, your messaging is off or you are attracting the wrong people, then more spend will only magnify the problem. In that situation, you need to fix the foundations before you think about scaling.
However, when your ads are working, even at a modest level, they become an investment.
If you know that for every $1 you spend, you get $1.50, $2.50 or $4.50 back, you have a predictable way to grow. The question becomes how you scale that in a way that feels safe and sustainable.
You do not need to jump from $50 a day to $500.
You can:
- Increase your budget slowly and watch the numbers
- Reinvest a portion of your profit back into ads
- Test small jumps and see how your funnel holds at each level
The key is to make decisions from data, not fear.
Questions to ask yourself before you scale
If you suspect mindset is holding you back, ask yourself:
- Am I making decisions based on emotion or based on the data in my account
- Do I know my true return on ad spend over a month, not just one day
- Am I capping my growth because I am scared to spend more, even though the numbers are positive
- Do I fully understand what my ads are bringing in, or am I guessing
If your funnel is proven, your ads are profitable and your numbers are clear, then scaling is not reckless. It is strategic.
And if you are not sure whether your funnel is ready to scale, that is where support helps. Inside Abundant Ads Academy I teach you how to read your ads data confidently, optimise your funnel and scale in a way that does not feel like a gamble.
Final thoughts
Scaling funnels with Facebook™ and Instagram™ ads is not just about tactics. It is about how you think.
If you treat ads as a fixed expense, you will always be tempted to keep spend low, even when your funnel is clearly working. If you treat ads as an investment with measurable returns, you give yourself permission to grow.
The shift is simple.
When your ads are not working, fix the strategy.
When your ads are working, stop treating them like a bill and start treating them like the growth lever they are.
Your future revenue will thank you for it.
I would love to hear your thoughts...