Ellie Scarf walks through a revenue breakdown exercise for coaches planning 2025. Take your annual goal, say $120,000, and map multiple ways to hit it by mixing one-on-one coaching, team coaching, workshops, strategy days, and retainers. The mix you choose shapes your year.
Questions this episode answers
December 8, 2024.
Five spaces.
Starting in January (year implied 2025).
$120,000.
www.elliscarf.com CCA (as spoken in transcript).
Chapters
Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm Ellie Scarf and I'm really pleased to join you today. Now, before we dive in, I just wanted to let you know that we have five spaces for new members who would like to join the Corporate to Coach accelerator starting in January. So if you want to start or grow your executive coaching business and you want to focus on Getting your next 10 high paying corporate clients with only 5 hours of marketing a week in the next 12 months, then it might just be for you. So to get in at this stage page, you'll need to book a call with me. We'll have a chat. So you can do that through the link in the show notes or on the website at www.elliscarf.com CCA and that is also in the show notes and I just encourage you to check it out and book in and, and you and I can then have a chat about whether this is a good time for you to join and whether, you know, whether it'll help you to meet your goals for 2025. So today it's a bit of a shorter episode and I really wanted to share one powerful tip from, from the strategic planning workshops that I ran last week with my corporate to coach accelerator members. So it's just one tool. It was, it was part of the whole planning workshop. But I think it is really enlightening and it's one of the, the things that people seem to, to share the most positive feedback or that they have the most interesting reflections on. And so by way of context, when you are doing your business planning for 2025, there are a number of strategic pillars that you need to consider and that is everything from who your target clients will be. You know, what you want to do with your offer, are you adding products, are you removing things, what services do you want to focus on through to pricing, strategy and more that there's a lot now about I want to say. Three episodes ago I recorded a whole podcast on the eight pillars that I think you should consider in your strategic planning. So go back and check that out if that's something you're interested in. So today I want to share just the one activity, as I mentioned, and it's one that always elicits aha moments. So I'm going to tell you first what the activity is and then I'm going to give you a few prompts to help you break it down. So the activity is, I call it revenue breakdown, but it is to take some time to go from your revenue goal for 2025. Now, yes, that means you need a revenue goal for 2025, and then to identify all of the different ways that you could achieve that revenue goal, given your individual mix of offers being the products and the services that you sell and your pricing. So, for example, if you set your annual goal at $120,000 for the year, what are all of the different ways that you could get to that figure given what you offer, right? Given the services you have, and don't get hooked up on that $120,000 goal. We have people in the accelerator who have goals anywhere between breaking even, you know, cost plus 20% through to, you know, $300,000 plus plus. So it doesn't matter what the number is. What I want you to do is come up with at least a few different pathways to achieve your goal. Now, if there are any other positive psychology nerds out there like me, you'll know that pathways thinking, that is, identifying different ways to achieve your goal is correlated with higher goal achievement. So there is method to my madness. But let's have a think about that goal of $120,000. How could you make that goal? And I'm sort of thinking about the average coach, executive coach, who has a one on one coaching offer, who might have a team coaching offer, probably runs a training workshop or two, may do some consulting, may run a strategy day, but of course, you will have your own blend. This is just an example. So you could hit your goal by having 12 new clients who each pay $10,000 for the coaching engagements that they bring you in for. Alternatively, you could have two $60,000 retainers that cover coaching and consulting in an area that you have a lot of credibility in. Or you might have 12 $5,000 coaching engagements and you also run 10 $6,000 training workshops. You could run 12 $3,000 training workshops plus five $6,000 strategy days and nine $6,000 coaching engagements. Or you might stay focused and run six $20,000 team coaching packages in, you know, really all inclusive packages and so on. You get it. Of course, as you can see, it really depends on your very unique blend of pricing and offers. Right? So whereas one person might charge $10,000 for a six month coaching engagement, in a standard corporate environment, another person might charge $30,000 and another person might charge 5. Now, we talk a lot about pricing inside the accelerator, so I'm not going to dive into that here, and you've probably heard some of my podcasts about that topic, but it will. Your pricing will come up when you move into Reflection. So once you've broken it down and you've come up with a few pathways, I think someone in the workshop last week came up with six, six different options. And I love that because the more you do, the more clearly you start to paint a picture of how you're going to hit your revenue. So keep going, take your time, as many as you like. But once you've done it, I want you to do some reflection on a few things. So firstly, what did it feel like? Was that easy to do? Or did doing it. Did doing it feel a little uncomfortable? Did it make it feel much more real in a good way? Or did it make it feel more real in. In a scary way? Or in a way that that revealed to you where you might need to do some work? And that could be mindset, it could be offer development, it could be money mindset. All of those things might make this a scary process, but it's definitely something that is worth working through. I also want you to think about what did this process say to you about your pricing? So did you realise that you are going to need to increase your prices to make it feasible to hit your goals? And then also did you realise that you might need a different mix of offers that will allow you to bring in income injections that, that don't run over multi months? Right. So for example, you're selling your coaching services is great, but you might also want to add a, you know, like a whole day session, facilitating strategy days or running team development workshops or consulting or training because they allow us to bring in chunks of revenue that one offs. So rather than extending over multiple months, did you also notice that when you went through any of these offers that you realize how much you would need to do of that offer and it made you deflate? Right. Sometimes going through this process actually helps us to realize how much we don't want to do something in particular. Now, this is not related to the podcast topic, but if you can hear, I'm not sure how good Zoom is at filtering out this. I've got the ice cream truck driving past outside. So if you're seeing hearing a bit of green sleeves, that is why it's not my new background music. So whatever comes up when you're going through that reflection, I would encourage you to journal it out. Right. Write it down. If you are not a journaler, then send me an email with your thoughts about your breakdown. You can send that to ellieucentorg.com and if you send it through to me, I'll reply with any ideas or suggestions that I might have to to help you with your revenue breakdown. So I hope that this is an interesting process for you and I really encourage you to take the time, like maybe only 15 minutes to go through that and I would really love to hear how it goes. So please shoot me an email or a message on any of platforms that you follow me on. If you do find value in this episode or my other episodes, I would be really grateful if you would subscribe to the to the show and if you would give the podcast a review on whatever platform you listen on. Now I know it's a bit it's sometimes a bit of a pain to do that, but I've decided that I'm going to start reviewing podcasts because now I'm on the other side of it. I know how important it is and in terms of who gets shown your podcast in search. So I'd be really grateful if you would do that for me. Or please share it with anyone you think might find it useful. My podcast is definitely my favorite way to share valuable and free content and ideas and so I really appreciate any help you could offer in sharing it around. So thank you, have a great week and I will see you again next week.
