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LEARNING OUTCOMES:
- Your WHY?
- Understand the idea of thoughts = actions
- Define Success
- Success comes from consistency
Introduction:
“….it’s not about the money!”
Most coaches I speak with tell me that coaching is a passion and they are drawn to it because they want to make a difference. However, if you are not making enough money to be financially sustainable, then it will be difficult to have a career as a coach. So, creating a financially sustainable coaching business ensures that you can continue to better the lives of others.
Many therapists I work with, have a challenge with creating an effective coaching model, or, long-term treatment program which is paid for upfront by the client. I don’t blame the therapist for thinking this way. We are not trained to become business savvy individuals! The therapy model of help is based on session by session billing. Becoming effective at delivering concise paperwork to insurance companies is imperative to receive payment for service. Receiving payment from the insurance company is not guaranteed. This is rather an uncomfortable and awkward topic for the average therapist.
I believe it comes down to confidence in oneself, understanding that there is another way for helping individuals, and knowing your value!
When I meet with a couple for the first time, and they don’t even know if they want a relationship or not with their spouse, they feel like they have no hope. They believe that relief from their problem is in the separation of the current painful relationship and starting new! They know they could be up for a divorce, which will cost them a $5000 +++ upfront lawyer fee minimum. The other expenses and loss of family are heavy. So after seeing me for around 12 weeks, they find themselves with a fresh understanding of their problem, and themselves. They have a whole bucket of new tools and resources. They understand what they need to do to make the relationship work. And 9 out of 10 couples, remember why they love each other so much and why they want to fight for their love. Great for them. Great feeling for me. I saved another family from destruction and saved them a bucket load of money.
So, what value would you place on what I just did for that couple and family? Am I worth more than $60 per hour x 12 Sessions = $720. That’s the value of an Ipad! So many coaches, therapists, and healers feel guilty for doing “talk” coaching. Success is rarely thought of in terms of dollars. The model of fee per hour is cemented into our mindset from the beginning of many training courses, especially at University Level.
What I would like to share with you is my system for creating a 6-Figure Coaching Business in your first year. I know this is possible because I have used the same system on all 450 small to medium-sized businesses I coached back in Sydney, Australia. The only way you will not have a 6-Figure Coaching Business is if you decide you do not want it. That’s right. Success or failure is 100% your decision. I can lead you down the garden path, but it is up to you to open the gate!
Perhaps you were saying that you do not want a six-figure coaching business. Let me just say that that is totally okay because maybe you’re also just adding the seven-step infidelity recovery program as a tool in your own business or therapy practice. I would still suggest that you walk through the following lessons to help you increase sales in your current practice.
In the previous version of this course, I offered complimentary coaching sessions to help guide your business model. The self-taught version of this course does not offer complimentary coaching sessions and you are welcome to purchase coaching sessions at a heavily discounted rate because you are a student.
Here is the six-figure coaching workbook and guide to assist you through the next 4 modules of this program. The six-figure coaching course was offered separately for many years, until just recently we decided it was more beneficial just a focus strictly on the infidelity recovery students. The course fee was $2997 and included 1 on 1 coaching, however, you also receive this care during this course.
How You Can Make Money
Coaching is a labor of love, and that’s the biggest obstacle we have to making money at it. I call it Florence Nightingale syndrome. Flo was a British nurse in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and was famous for her dedication and tireless work. She was so committed that she became known as “the lady with the lamp”, making rounds tirelessly well into the night. Florence Nightingale epitomizes the mindset of working for the joy of the result without regard to the personal toll it takes on us. In short, it’s the mindset that says “I love doing this so much I’d do it for free if I could.” But we have to eat, so we grudgingly take enough pay to keep us in survival mode for decades while we nobly give away our expertise to make a difference in the lives & businesses of others. The Florence Nightingale approach is a bad approach to coaching. An Irish friend of mine, John Heenen once told me years ago “Savannah, your problem is that you give from your root, when you should be giving from your fruit.” You get the picture. The bigger your root system is the more likely that you are going to be able to produce more fruit. Do you want to have a bigger impact in the world around you? Make more money, get a better life for yourself, model what you want your clients to become, and you’ll be in a position to cut a much bigger path with your life than by giving it all away. I teach my clients and other coaches to “make more money in less time”. It’s easy to make more money in more time – just work twice as much. The problem with this “making money” mindset is that you very quickly find out that you run out of time to make more money. We experience running out of money, but what we really run out of is time. I’ve got 168 hours every single week and no matter how hard I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to stretch that to 170. So the key isn’t working more or harder, it’s actually a little counter-intuitive. We need to stop focusing on making money and build a business that makes money when we’re not around. The most successful coaches, consultants, strategists, advisors and mentors don’t focus on personally making money, but on how to build a business that makes money while they’re on vacation. And you don’t always need employees to make that happen. So I’m saying don’t be Florence Nightingale and give it away and don’t focus on personally making money off your own 168 hours. Figure out how to build a successful practice that has multiple streams of income that don’t all depend on you being there to bring in the bacon.
How much money does the average coach make?
I’ve heard anecdotally that 90% plus of all coaches never make more than US$50,000 per year even once in their lives. I don’t know if that is true, but I can tell you I personally don’t know more than a handful that do. And I don’t believe it’s because they aren’t competent. According to Forbes.com, the salary of a life coach is above six figures for just 10-20% of coaches. I think the percentage is lower. And the median salary for life coaches is only US$30,000-$40,000 per year, which means there are a lot of coaches out there who are making a lot less than $30K. Why? It’s usually either because they are in semi-retirement, or are treating it like a hobby and “playing office”. Or in some cases they simply don’t have the background to build an actual business out of their passion for making a difference. They’re great with people and great with developing an action plan to help someone else grow, but as the old saying goes, “the plumber’s house always leaks”. Many therapists and psychologist earn higher than coaches. According to the website Indeed.com who lists salaries from around the USA, the average counselor makes $41,000 per year, and psychologist $61,400 per year. Then they have to pay student loans back – and I know that is a time consuming and expensive process! So we dedicate our lives to helping others improve their life. What about us? Do we deserve a new car? A vacation every year? Help our kids or charity or whatever? The Executive Summary of Coaching Survey reported that over 60% of executive coaches had fewer than 10 clients at the time of the survey, probably indicative of the norm. And the average number of repeat meetings was 11-20, averaging one hour in length. According to this survey, typical fees were $200/hr US, $230 AUS ($165US), and $190 Euro ($225 US). Stay with me while we do some simple math here. If we assume liberally that the coach is meeting twice a month with every client, their monthly income works out as:10 clients x 2 hours/month x US$200/hour = $4,000/month = US$48,000 / yearThis is right in line with the anecdotal notion that “nobody makes more than $50k per year” in the coaching business. So it’s no surprise that the same survey also showed that only a little over 50% of coaches made more than half their income coaching – the rest came from something else. So… How can you avoid getting the typical salary of a coach that will make you have to sell your furniture to pay your rent? He who aims at nothing hits it every time. We want our clients to know where they are going. We need the same clarity. It’s even more important to know where you are going than how you will get there. Otherwise we’re just hoping for success, not really intending to have it. We get what we intend, not what we hope for. I remind my clients that almost every day, and it applies to us as well. If you are “hoping” to make a lot of money coaching, you’re never going to. But if you have made a decision to do so, you will be aggressively moving in that direction – intentionality is everything. And it won’t happen by dreaming and hoping, but by intentionally taking the risk to grow your business to a healthy six figures. As Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s was famous for saying “If you don’t want to take a risk, get the hell out of business.” This may be a trapeze moment for you. Are you willing to let go of the one you’ve been holding on to for years so you can get to the next one? It’s the only way you’ll get to the next one. So burn the ships, blow up your bridges, throw the parachute out the window, let go of that trapeze, and let’s figure this thing out. Whatever income level you’re at, you’re probably reading this book because you’d like to make more. But I hope you also have a bigger reason for being in this or any business because making money is not an empowering vision. So why are you doing this? What’s the end game? If you don’t know where this is taking you, how can you possibly plan to grow your business by x% this year? For what purpose? We would never plan a vacation like we plan our businesses. Having an annual growth goal with no end game in mind is like randomly throwing things in your car over an extended period of time with no idea of where you’re going on vacation or when you would get there. Some skis here, a bathing suit there, maybe a tuxedo, hiking boots, a safari suit – how dumb would that be? It’s even dumber to do it with our lives and our business. My End GameMy life vision is to “Live well by doing good”. I am an Aquarian, and Aquarians love to make a change in society! It’s also the vision for my business, that I could live well by doing good and help everyone I work with to move in that direction as well. My business mission is “Save the Fabric of Society, One Relationship at a Time.”I’ll describe my business as “mature” when I am no longer the producer and it continues to make money while I’m on vacation. It’s not that I will stop producing when my business is mature, but I will be able to choose when and how I produce because the business will be generating the income I need to live and enjoy life. To that end, I have a very specific end game that is really just the beginning of decades of enjoying my business.CelebrationMy coaching business in Sydney started with the idea, that I could take some of the systems and procedures I learned from my years working at IBM and as COO at ACNielsen, and help small to medium sized enterprises become more effective and efficient. The result would be more money in their pocket and more time to enjoy life. My idea workedMy referral network was mainly accountants and lawyers. They would hear the problems of their clients, but did not have a service to help them on the front end. I did. I grew my team to 20 Full Time “Business Engineers”. I taught my team how to take a clients business from breaking even to financial freedom. The clients loved what we did. The accountants and lawyers gave us more referrals. But why did I give my business secrets and systems away to my “Business Engineers”?One of the most important considerations you need to make right now, is “What is my exit strategy”? You are probably thinking that you don’t even have a business set up right now to worry about it ending! Or if you are a therapist you would be thinking that you invested close to 100k in education, so you are now a therapist for life! This is NOT smart thinking. You need to begin with the end in mind if you want a business and not a career or job.In the “7 Step Infidelity Recovery Program”, I teach my students to look at their coaching practice as an Insurance Business, where your clients will be clients for life. The clients are addicted to your services because your services give them security (fear of loss), and make them feel better (hope of gain). The product that my coaches offer is a procedualised service that the client can complete, and get consistent results. The client may love their coach, but they also want the service. So now it is possible for the coach to have an assistant, and eventually have someone else take over their practice.I know clearly what Business Maturity looks like for me. On the 31st January 2015, I have decided I want someone else managing the business and I will only be involved in delivering the content to certain audiences and individuals that I choose, while most of it is delivered by others in the organization. At 9:30am that morning we’ll have a champagne toast and turn the office over to the staff to run going forward. As of the first draft of this in November of 2009 I didn’t have any staff, but that didn’t stand in my way of keeping January 31, 2015 clearly in my sights because I’m committed to getting there and the journey isn’t nearly as difficult as making the decision that I’m going to do it. As of a later draft in May 2010 I had two staff people and was about to hire two more. We’ll have plenty to celebrate on January 31st, 2015 and plenty of people to celebrate it with.Why 9.30am on January 31, 2015? First, because as soon as I put that metric on it, a clock started ticking in my head. It gave a sense of urgency to something that could have seemed a few years off. Second, I have to leave at 10am to pack – last minute packing is more fun – because we leave at 2pm for the airport to catch our 6:10pm flight to France for three weeks of celebration. I live in Las Vegas, NV, USA and France is the dream vacation for my family & myself. This vacation is a ceremonial celebration of the maturity of our business, and we fully expect it to continue to make money while we’re on vacation.Are we done with the business that day?I do not delight in running the day-to-day machinations of a business. My joy is in creative problem solving, working with clients to get them to the next level, and creating new ways to help them get there. So when we return from Italy, I plan to continue in content development and delivery, but on a more limited basis, as I choose. Choice is the key indicator that you have wealth. To me, riches is money, wealth is the ability to choose what to do with my time. If I can choose to continue in the business instead of needing to in order to pay this month’s bills, I am wealthy.I also doubt I’ll slow down much because I enjoy what I do, but whatever I am doing will be by choice, not because I’m the main producer and need to do so in order to make money.I’ll have others running the day to day. We are still growing rapidly, and as our business grows, we need to make sure we have the people in place to service our online offerings as well as our conference and workshop clients, and our local individual clients. The business will have others who will carry much of this work, and I will be involved as it fits my strengths. Clarity about Maturity, not about the journey.To arrive at my Business Maturity Date, I had to do some serious thinking about what mix of products and services we would be delivering at business maturity and how much revenue and profit each of those products and services would bring to the business.It is very clear to me what Maturity means to my business on January 31, 2015 at 9.30am. Does that mean I have all the details figured out for the journey to get there? Quite the contrary, I’m guessing I’ll look back and laugh at some of the projections, some of the things we thought would be big, and some that were central to the mix that I had not yet thought of. I’m not concerned about it, because I have the right question: “How do I build a Mature Business, and when do I want to be there?” As a coach, you know that asking the right question is 90% of the answer. The other 10% is being manic about making sure you’re getting it answered, which means I’m constantly improving on the answer as I go.MordoIn the third movie based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy which was filmed in New Zealand, Frodo comes up over a hill and for the first time sees Mordor as a distant but very distinct objective. She knows exactly what the end game is – she must get to the volcano of Mordor and drop the ring into the fire. There is no confusion about what the final result must be.But as she’s looking out over a vast expanse of land in front of him, what is not clear is the path to Mordor. She sees many hills, valleys, and mountains between him and her objective, and hasn’t a clue which ones she should take and which to avoid. Does that stop him? No. Why? Because she knows exactly where she needs to be at the end of it all, and she can plan the next few steps, and that’s enough. The freedom and benefits of dropping the ring into the volcano far outweighed the need to know exactly what the trip would look like getting there.Most of us don’t approach life like Frodo approached her trip to Mordor. Unfortunately we are more interested in fully understanding the process than we are in even knowing the objective. We’ll even fully give up knowing the end game as long as we don’t get any surprises in our trip to nowhere. I can tell you with conviction that the key is not figuring out the whole process in advance, but figuring out what Business Maturity looks like for you and exactly when you want to be there. If you know where you are going, you will figure out the process because the end game is so clear.Once we have a clear idea of where our coaching business is taking us, only then can we figure out how we’re going to get there. Get clarity on that, which will give you hope that you can get there, and that will allow you to take the risks needed to make it happen. In the final analysis this is all I have to offer my clients – clarity, hope and risk. And if I live out these three myself I’m more likely to have success getting them to as well.Congratulations for dropping the trapeze and blowing up your bridges – let’s get to Mordor! Living in a World of AbundanceThe first thing to do in deciding how to be financially successful, whatever that means to you as a coach, is to understand how to live that way. This sounds fuzzy, but it’s very grounded in becoming a successful business owner and coach. You will have to be both to be financially successful as a coach.I believe that we either live in a world of abundance or a world of scarcity and whichever one we choose affects every decision we make.What does this have to do with making a lot of money as a coach? Too many things to share here. But the short story is that I’ve found that my best strategic alliances, or what I call gate-openers, are people who appear to be the most competitive with me. And if I see them as competition I will never gain from that relationship. If there is only so much to go around, I need to get mine before they get theirs. But if I live in a world of abundance, I’m more interested in seeing how I can make them successful before I worry about my own dinner plate.This is much different than being Florence Nightingale. The Flo mindset gives it all away with no expectation of ever getting anything back. I couldn’t possibly continue to “Live well by doing good” if I took that tack with my sails. I fully expect to get it back, just not necessarily from that person at that time. So the first key to making the money you desire as a coach is to put other people’s needs and interests first, and see how you can make your so-called “competitors” successful. I would encourage you to stop seeing life as a win-win scenario and remove yourself from that equation. Instead become the person that connects others so they can win-win and watch what happens. I’m not a Life CoachI personally don’t use the word life coach to describe what I do for a couple reasons. One, from the stats above, you can see there are a lot of hobbyists, semi-retirees, and people creating a “lifestyle business” in coaching and I don’t’ need to have my potential clients wading through their misperceptions of what a coach is to get to me.My view of the word coach is irrelevant. If my clients might stumble over it, I’m using something else. So I describe myself as a Relationship Coach, Relationship Interventionist (a name given to me by my L.A Business Partner, Dr. Joe Whitcomb), Infidelity Coach (it makes people ask the question “did I hear that right?”, or mentor – anything but life coach (or consultant), because these words don’t conjure up pre-conceived notions for my client to work through. I believe I make more money because I separate myself from the thundering herd this way. I’ve got no data on this, just basic marketing sense that tells me that if everyone else is doing it and it’s confusing to my potential clients, I probably shouldn’t. Second – I spent 20 years building over 13 different businesses in Bookkeeping, Business Coaching, Day Spas, Beauty Salons, Hair Salons, Laser Hair Removal Clinic, Hair & Beauty College, Promotions & Event Management, Mechanical Repair Workshop, Night Clubs, Mineral Makeup, IT Consulting, Counseling Centre, Import & Export Business, and the Infidelity Recovery Institute (I don’t know if I forgot a few, before I realized I didn’t have any fun once the business was up and running (I’m a slow learner). Having made hundreds of mistakes on the way to success, making and losing large sums of money. Did I mention that I raised 3 children during this time as well? (Pat on my back – my greatest achievement).So I don’t see myself as a life coach, but as a business owner helping other business owners – we’re all in this together moving in the same direction. I’m experiencing all the same issues and concerns that every one of my clients and students experience. It seems a few of my coaching friends see themselves more as the “guru” of their clients than as someone on the same journey. I think you’ll make more money if you get on the train with your clients and become one of them. Experience everything they are and live it out alongside them as you both journey to Mordor.
Lesson: Summary Checklist
- Decide and commit to being a financially successful coach
- State your Life Vision (check-in that your coaching business is congruent with this)
- State your Business Mission (check-in that this is congruent with your life’s purpose & vision)
- Be clear about exactly what Business Maturity looks like for you
- Set yourself a deadline for Business Maturity