One of the biggest reasons people become coaches is for the flexibility of the lifestyle it can bring: work as many or as few hours you want, work with as many or as few clients as you desire, fire any client any time, coach from your deck or the beach, charge any fees you want, and many other freedoms being a coach can bring into your life.

The reality, however, is very different. Most coaches don’t get to choose the clients they want and find themselves working way too hard for little money. Why does it happen? In working with coaches for almost nine years I discovered that there are three biggest reasons this happens:

1. Building a practice instead of a business, which results in chasing clients and offering them free sessions, instead of creating valuable resources that attracts coaching clients.
2. Using traditional methods to get coaching clients: networking, referrals, and speaking to local groups.
3. Focusing on building a local coaching practice, which creates a lot of movement and busyness, but produces poor (or slow) results.

I talk a lot about the first two reasons – think “business” not “practice”, and half of you problems will be solved overnight.

The third reason is something that keeps many coaches not only struggling financially, but also creating a job they hate. Imagine being rejected 90% of the time – that’s what it’s like trying to build a local coaching practice for many coaches. Here’s why.

When you are focused on building a local coaching practice…

• You network, speak, and volunteer locally, which is extremely time consuming and can easily take up 20+ of non-billable hours a week. Just getting invited for lunch, where someone basically gets free coaching from you, may cost you 10-20 additional hours a month!

• You try to explain and sell coaching, and we already know that coaching doesn’t sell – it simply has no value by itself, and needs to be a by-product of some kind of specialized knowledge. So you get rejected, feeling loss of confidence and a growing fear of failure.

• You are competing with all the coaches in your local area, unless you differentiate yourself by specialty, industry, or approach, and I’ve seen how competitive coaches get – sparks can fly in the room when two coaches are trying to get business! You may also be compared based on your fees: “Hey, this coach charges only $75 an hour, why would I pay you $125 an hour?” a local prospect will say.

• You may have some clients or prospects stopping by your house to drop off a payment, ask a question, catch up, or just to say hello.  Some might not mind being a local celebrity, but this may cause you to lose your privacy if that’s important to you.

So how do you create the kind of coaching business, where prospects find YOU, and are ready to hire you without questioning your credibility, skills, or fees? And, a business that doesn’t take 20+ hours a week to market?

Enter online coaching business! When you are building an online coaching business, you can use a “pull” strategy, which I define as creating an environment that attracts ideal coaching clients to you like to a magnet. Cliché? Perhaps. But that’s exactly what happens when you use the principles of building a virtual coaching practice:

• Specialized knowledge (focus on a specific topic, problem, or industry and become known for it)
• Creating value (articles, teleseminars, books, special reports, tools, and other valuable resources)
• Leveraged visibility (1 hour of your work equals 10 hours in offline world using leverage online)

Does this make sense? I hope it does. That’s exactly how I built my own coaching business without any previous entrepreneurial experience and a strong aversion to selling. All I do is specialize, create value, and leverage – coaching clients find me online and already know what I can do for them. A great place to be!

If you are thinking right now, but I already write articles, do teleseminars, and share valuable resources with my niche market – why am I still struggling? Perhaps it’s how you do it. I’ve seen many coaching articles very unfocused, just rambling along, and no call to action.

I’ve also watched many coaches walk away from a teleseminar empty-handed, and many teleseminars have under 50 people on them. It takes a very simple formula to fill your teleseminar with hundreds of people and walk away with new clients at the end.

There are many other strategies you can use to build your coaching business online, but don’t get overwhelmed – there are only 3 proven to work naturally and easily for coaches: article distribution, hosting teleseminars, and creating content (blog/newsletter/e-course). The reason they’re a natural fit for coaches is because you can use all three of these to teach your stuff, connect with people, and position yourself as THE coach to work with. (Learn more about getting coaching clients online using these 3 strategies correctly here.)

The only other strategy I highly recommend to get coaching clients online is joint ventures and strategic alliances. This strategy alone added dozens of new coaching clients to my business in a matter of one month.

Building a local coaching practice can make you a celebrity.  But building an online coaching business can create a series of lifetime income streams for you. You choose.

Beach House Coaching Retreat with Milana

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room…

There is a right coaching business model for everyone – you DON’T have to do what everyone else is doing!

If you don’t like one-on-one coaching, then do group coaching. Don’t like year-long coaching programs? Then offer 90-day programs. The key is in what unlocks your personal brilliance AND what creates the best results for your clients.

What’s personal brilliance?

It’s a combination of your skills, talents, environment, medium, and delivery method that is right smack in the middle of your “sweet spot” – there’s something you do in a way you do it that creates the best possible outcome for your clients.

For example, I noticed that I generate the best value for people during interviews. Questions trigger great ideas and strategies that simply can’t be created in any other environment for me.

Another way my personal brilliance comes alive is during a mastermind group meeting, when I hear several entrepreneurs interact and bounce ideas off each other, I come up with ideas of my own – usually “million-dollar” ideas! Just like Napoleon Hill suggested, two minds create a third one.

So what do you do once you know your personal brilliance?

You create more of such situations and experiences in your business, for both, you and your clients, to benefit!

Here is just a sample list of ideas for how you can offer coaching to clients:

1. 1-on-1 coaching
2. Group Coaching
3. 90-day Program
4. Six-month Program
5. Full-year Program
6. 3-Day Coaching Retreat
7. Coaching “Gym” (Laser Coaching)
8. Coaching Club
9. Virtual Strategy Day With You
10. In-Person Strategy Day With You
11. Mastermind Group Coaching
12. In-Your-Home Coaching
13. On-Site Coaching
14. Business Team Coaching
15. Whole Family Coaching Experience
16. Field trip Coaching
17. Coaching Cruise
18. Training Event Followed By Coaching
19. Multi-Coach Coaching (you plus another coach, expert, mentor, or client)
20. Q&A Based Coaching

You can also combine coaching with your other talents and passions. For example:

• Kendall Summerhawk is an expert in horse whispering and uses horses in coaching her clients.

• Phil Dyer loves international travel, so he takes his clients to a villa in Italy for a coaching retreat.

• Coaches with a passion for adventure could create a hiking, climbing, kayaking, or another kind of experience for their coaching clients.

I no longer offer long-term coaching in a traditional way. I do, however, offer a two-day business strategy intensive coaching, which allows me to quickly get to the bottom of the clients’ challenges, business models, product lines, marketing strategies, and help them enhance all of the above in a matter of just two days.

I also offer “One Day With Milana” coaching, where a client flies out to my location and we spend a full day together dissecting his or her business and crafting a plan to go to the next level.

I recently discovered that I absolutely LOVE offering retreats (but only from a beach house!) – the most intimate, deep, fun, and meaningful relationships I’ve ever created and enjoyed with my clients!

I know many coaches who are brilliant at 12-month coaching programs, because they love seeing their clients unravel and succeed over a period of time, supporting them every step of the way. I also know at least two people who invite clients into their homes for a weekend and coach them through everything they know.

The choice is yours – what  unlocks the best of you?

Because your clients deserve the best, don’t try to force someone else’s business model on you. Pick what works for you and your clients will love it!

Is coaching the first thing people cut in difficult economic times?

Many people believe so.

I’ve experienced a slowdown at least once in my business. It happened in March, 2003, when the U.S. entered Iraq. Everyone was glued to their TVs 24/7, and my business almost came to a stop.

I can’t say that I handled it very well. It was really scary. I started thinking about plan “B” – going back to teaching piano or even getting a job again. I applied, my application was rejected. Thank God!

I continued to run my business and in about two months,
it picked up again.

Since that year, I learned a lot about business. I studied how small companies survive and even prosper during a recession.

I was especially interested in how coaching is affected by an economic slowdown. Since it belongs at the very top of the Hierarchy of Needs, it is not considered a necessity in most people’s lives.

Can coaches survive the recession?

Absolutely YES! But not all will. Only the ones who follow these tips and strategies will withstand the difficult times we’re experiencing today:

1. Remember that coaching is a global business. You don’t have to rely on local business only. Create a web presence to reach clients all over the world.

2. Specialize “vertically” – by target audience, not just by your coaching specialty. This will allow you to be more unique and have a higher perceived value in your prospects’ eyes.

3. Know your customers. Understand how these economic times are affecting their lives. Revise your coaching programs to address their pain. Prospects are much more willing to postpone their purchases today, unless they see a clear benefit in their current situation. Survey and interview your customers, reach out to them personally.

4. Increase your marketing efforts. Most coaches will cut down on this thinking it’s no use anyway. Historically, companies that survived the recession never stopped marketing. They created unique promotions, programs, and events to increase visibility and lead generation. Many of them say that they experienced maximum growth during these times.

5. Diversify your coaching product mix. Create programs and products with different price points. Diversify your in`come sources. Don’t rely on clients only. Develop workshops and continuity programs, and take your expertise to a second niche market.

6. Focus on relationships. This is a great time to fill your coaching programs through joint ventures and affiliates. Ask your current and past clients for referrals.

7. Offer “second glass” as per Mark Joyner’s “Great Formula.” Think about what else you could offer your customers if they already bought a product from you in the past.

8. Remain passionate don’t get discouraged by what you hear about economy. You create your own economy! When Michael Gerber went nearly broke, he kept on going. Everyone around him was waiting for 2 years to see when he files for bankruptcy, but he survived and thrived. In his own words, “I just never quit. It was never an option.”

9. Get a coach! Yes, it is crucial that you have a cheerleader in your life right now. Most people around you will keep complaining about recession, and this will do only one thing for you – make you feel depressed and powerless. A coach can support you in continuing building your dream business.

Tips and Tools: If you’d like assistance in creating a winning coaching web presence in the shortest amount of time,  creating coaching programs that diversify your product mix, or any of the other strategies to grow your coaching practice, you might consider my new program Coaching Millions System – Phase One: Build Fast

Get a bunch of coaches in a crowded conference room at one of my Coaching Super Summits, and there’s always one who will ask this question: “Can Information Products Replace Coaching?”

What do you think? Can self-help books and tapes replace the real interaction with a coach?

Writing in response to my New Coaching Manifesto, perhaps Ronnie from Israel submitted the most controversial and insightful comments. Ronnie writes:

“E-zines, cds, teleclasses, ebooks, group coaching calls, books and more books on the same topics…Who has the time to buy and read all this stuff anyway? And how many books on the same topic with a very small angle shift does our world really need anyway? Are we writing books just to say,” I have a book so interview me on the radio?” Sure, we all want to expand but there is no escaping the essence and the deep-seated importance of the one- on-one coaching that can change a person’s life and make a difference. Is that not the reason that most of us came to coaching in the first place?”

Ronnie, I appreciate what you’re saying. I had similar concerns a few years ago. What I discovered on my journey to building a coaching business, however, is that product development is not about stopping to coach individuals. The purpose of developing information products is three- fold:

·  Creating credibility on a certain subject

·  Leveraging yourself by creating different ways of getting the benefit of your expertise

·  Grow a company that doesn’t rely on your presence

This means you need to think like a business person. Otherwise, what are you building? Will it last? Will you be happy trading time for dollars 10 years from now? Or can you “bottle” your expertise and allow it to live on -helping people – for years and years, even after you stop coaching personally? Ronnie raises more interesting questions:

“I think the real challenge is how to do this in such a way that you don’t keep rehashing the same thing as everyone else. The business that runs without us, is it really worthy of that? A business that has our true value, expertise and “essence” and does not become a pile of autocontracted, virtual assisted, teleclassed, laser-coached and people who have “trained” with us for a weekend and so on…I think coaching is one of those professions that are really from the “heart” and really quite “personal”. That is where the value is created. It is really quite different than most other types of consultancy, if you ask me. So we have our work cut out for us to be creative, be economical but not at the expense of what our value is really all about…”

Wow, I am so glad you bring up these issues, Ronnie!

First of all, let’s talk about creating rehashed products. The key is in YOU and how you make it unique. Remember the “X” factor? It also applies to your personal story, background, emotions, and how other people relate to you. Someone might hear about the law of attraction a thousand times, but when they hear it from YOU, they’ll say, “Wow, I never heard it put it this way, she’s really good.” So, personality in business is important, and capturing it in products and in process is very important.

It’s not one or the other . . .

I am not saying that you should stop coaching and start creating products, not at all! Whatl I am suggesting is that “capturing” your coaching process in a product allows you to offer it to people who:

a) Can’t afford coaching

b) Aren’t ready to hire a coach

c) Don’t fit your ideal client profile

It gives you a choice in your business, and it gives your customers a choice of how to work with you. Would I love to be coached by Toni Robbins, Brian Tracy, or Donald Trump personally? Absolutely! Do they have the time to coach everyone who comes along? Not humanly possible! That’s why they developed programs and products that allow them to transfer their “magic” through other people and methods. Their businesses can function without them. Donny Deutsch, on the other hand, is irreplaceable. That’s because the brilliance of his business is in his interviewing style and the unique personality he brings to “The Big Idea” show. (Although, I am sure that all his TV appearances will become a lifetime video archive for entrepreneurs for years to come.)

Another view . . .

Here’s one coach who sees product creation differently. Annette Reissfelder from Germany writes:

“I love and thrive on the live interaction with highly motivated clients who have great ambitions. BUT: I can (and will) produce “products” to attract media interest, so that I am being invited to the right type of conferences, getting interviewed by the right people and magazines, or being asked to contribute to business dailies.”

Aaaahhhh…Music to my ears.

Bottom line is that the need for individual coaching will never disappear (heck, I just hired two coaches myself!), but it should be the LAST thing you offer to people! Leading with coaching as your primary service simply devalues it in the prospects’ eyes. Make people “jump through “hoops” to get to you personally. Only then will you get an ambitious, committed, passionate, and driven client who will succeed with you by her side…while building a rewarding and profitable business.

I don’t see any other way to think about it. Do you?

The distinction between coaching and other fields seems unavoidable. We try to “defend” what coaching is and, oh no-no, it is NOT consulting, NOT therapy, NOT mentoring, NOT training, NOT teaching!

Unfortunately (or very fortunately for some!) the market doesn’t care.

People don’t care if you help them transform their lives using coaching, consulting, therapy, mentoring, training, or teaching. They just want to reach their goals and overcome their problems faster!

Barbara Saunders writes:

“The radical critique of the “professionalization” of coaching is long overdue. I believe sports coaching and voice coaching and acting coaching are better models for life and business coaching than professional counseling. In those fields, licenses and certificates are not the norm; the test is knowing how to help people do a particular thing.”

In other words, the results speak louder than any training or certification in the world. And that’s exactly what clients want, regardless of how you help them achieve it. Coaching is simply a tool you have at your disposal, but tools don’t sell – results do.

Pascale Cotton from Switzerland writes in to the blog:

“I think that what [many successful people] provide under the label of “coaching” belongs more to the areas of counseling, mentoring, consulting or individual training, not “real” coaching. But what is “real” coaching?”

Exactly! What is real coaching? And most importantly, who is to say what it is? Quoting the ICF, “Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.” Very true, yes? We live to inspire others to transform their lives. Couldn’t that be said about motivational speakers, book authors, group leaders, and college professors? In addition, “coaching” does not equal “coach.” A coach may offer coaching, plus a variety of other services and products. In other words, a coach is in the business of transforming people’s lives by helping them solve problems and achieve goals.

So who is to say what coaching is? YOU are!

The one thing that unites both, beginners and veteran entrepreneurs is OVERWHELM - not enough time to implement all ideas; too many great opportunities and constant feeling of missing out on them.

I find this absolutely fascinating! No matter where you are in your business, overwhelm can easily take over your business and life.

I found several very powerful ways to get things done and drive my business forward without experiencing the overwhelm most entrepreneurs complain of.

Here they are:

Single-minded focus on my biggest most important projects. These are the projects that make the biggest impact on my bottom line.

Having a system and a criteria for saying “no” to projects, people, and ideas. You can’t do it all and if you try to, you’ll end up getting poor results.

Using a “filter” when receiving product offers. Not everything is right for me and my business. I always keep my business goals and natural abilities in mind when investing into a product or signing up with a mentor.

Make a deliberate decision to exclude certain marketing tactics and vehicles for the sake of focus.  There are thousands of ways to attract prospects and convert them into clients, choose top 5-7 and focus your promotional strategy around them.

Work from a plan! Start with a 12-month timeline then fill in the blank; then transfer your action plan into your calendar – this has tripled my productivity and saved a ton of time!

Focus on doing less, but doing it better. Unless your goal is to constantly keep yourself busy, doing less actually produces much higher results.

Have you ever thought why so many coaches are struggling?I think about it every day…In fact, I created a series of educational videos to help you build your business this year. Here is What I share In Part One:- The key difference between how I started my coaching business and how 98% of coaches start theirs, and how this allowed me to grow it much faster than any other coach I know,

- Why I can generate revenue any time I want, and why many coaches still can’t figure out how to make their first sale;

- The biggest reason coaches do not succeed in business, and the 5 specific strategies you can use right now to get your coaching business pushed forward this year.

The video was very uniquely created with my good friend, the absolute wizard of audio and video, Rob Schultz, so you don’t want to miss it. He certainly made me feel like I was on NBC!

To learn about how to make these 5 tips a reality in your business, take a look at my Coaching Millions Quick Start Program.

>> Keys to Coaching Millions Part II

In Part 2 I discuss quality of a mailing list, what makes a coaching business weak, and what “next level” means in coaching business.

Is this what you’re thinking RIGHT NOW?

“I don’t want to listen to more CDs or read more books, I just want to finally start making money in my coaching business.”

OR

“I already know everything about business, why am I still not a six-figure coach?”

The truth is, it’s not about listening to more CDs or reading more books. It’s about investing some focused time into implementing the strategies you learned.

For more specific strategies, take a look at my Coaching Millions Get Clients Fast Marketing System. Click on the rotating product images on the right below the email sign-up for more info.

>> Keys to Coaching Millions – Part III

Back in 2001 I was struggling. Then I got tired of trying to find clients and did something that completely turned my coaching business around.

In this video, 3rd in the series titled “Keys to Coaching Millions,” you’ll find out what I did. Click below to watch.

>> Keys to Coaching Millions – Part IV

In today’s video segment of “Keys to Coaching Millions” I am revealing two important factors of success as a coach:

- How not just to build a coaching business, but how to build an empire that allows you to be seen as the “mover & shaker” in your niche. And, what this kind of positioning can really do for your coaching business.

- Why you should stop worrying about getting clients, and what you should focus on instead to get clients come to YOU.

Enjoy today’s episode by watching the video above.

Keys to Coaching Millions – Part 5