The Burnout Trap Every Coach Falls Into

Most coaches are super smart people. They love what they do and they get amazing results for the clients which they work with. But one of the things which I've noticed is that these coaches are also running around like blue-arsed flies a lot of the time and not earning the income which they want to earn from their business. In this video, I'll be sharing 3 reasons why more clients won't grow your coaching business. And at the end of this video, I'll share a very simple framework around how to double your income as a coach with half the clients. So, reason number 1, I call it the sales cycle of doom. And this is where most coaches, when they're growing their practice, base their earnings potential on working 20, 30, or 40 hours per week. But what they don't take into consideration is all of the time which is spent doing marketing and sales and admin and accounts, sick leave, holidays, time spent driving children around the countryside, and various other things like that. So the reality is most coaches have a very limited amount of time doing the actual coaching work, which typically is what earns them the money. A lot of coaches when they're first starting out will be charging an hourly rate or a per-session rate, which naturally is limiting, and what this forces them to do is in order to earn more money, they feel they have to constantly be selling more sessions, and if a client wants to leave, heaven forbid, it means that this has a negative knock-on impact with their earnings potential. So as their coaching practice grows, they have less time to spend doing marketing and admin and sales and things like that, and they end up in this cycle whereby they're either busy coaching clients or they're busy trying to find clients. The sales cycle of doom: sell, deliver, sell, deliver, sell, deliver. And I don't know about you, but the definition of success for me is not going around in circles perpetually. The other challenge with this is that when their coaching practice is busy with clients and they're spending a lot of time coaching, there is this constant nagging feeling that they should be out there marketing and selling their coaching and building their personal brand and doing all of these different activities. But the challenge is they don't have time to do that because they're busy coaching. They also have this ongoing worry and concern that what happens if all of their clients leave all of a sudden and now all of their income is dried up in its entirety. As a coach, This may sound very familiar. You may be a coach just starting out, and this might be how you're feeling about your practice at the moment. But don't worry, all coaches start out like this in the beginning because this is kind of what we're taught at coaching school. And this is one of my biggest bugbears actually with a lot of the coaching certifications out there. They give you all of the necessary coaching skills, but they don't necessarily equip you with the relevant business skills, and you'll get your certification and a shove out the door with a nice message saying, right, now go and get clients. And when you start to look around and see what other coaches and therapists are doing, most of them are selling their time by the session. So this is totally normal, but there is a better way. So this first reason around the sales cycle of doom then leads me on to the, the second reason that most coaches struggle to earn the money which they want. So this is reason number 2: most coaches believe that they need to enroll as many clients as possible within their practice in order for it to be sustainable. The challenge with this though is when coaches are in this constant state of enrolling clients and they start to get a little bit desperate, maybe, you know, if clients don't come on board quickly enough, that any client or prospect that comes along who says that they're ready to start coaching, they'll take their money. And this can be really detrimental because ultimately these coaches end up taking on clients just for the money and not because necessarily they're dream clients to work with. However, these clients end up being a problem within our coaching practice. They're the ones that take up a majority of our time. Maybe they're spent complaining or making excuses, or they're in denial about their certain circumstances which they're in at the moment. Maybe they don't do the work, but the most important thing is that because we didn't qualify them, and now they're not best fit, we don't end up getting the desired results or outcomes that perhaps we promised them. So now there's a mismatch between the fact that we've kind of just taken this client on for the money, but now we're stuck with this problem. The challenge with that is what I call yellow car syndrome. It's one of those things that when you, let's say you go out and buy a fancy new yellow car because you think it's different and interesting. The challenge is you then start seeing yellow cars every which way you turn when you're out driving your yellow car. And it's the same in business. You get more of what you focus on. So if you bring problematic clients into your coaching practice, there tends to be this cascading effect where more and more problems start to arise. And so what you want to do is you want to assume a position of leadership throughout the process, maybe making sure that you're assessing and qualifying all of your prospective clients before they join your coaching practice and saying no to the ones who aren't best fit, even if this means turning away some revenue, turning away some money and saying no to that prospect. In the long run, what this leads to is spaces available in your coaching practice for dream clients. So when the best clients show up, you can charge your worth for a start, but also you can get started with them pretty much immediately and start getting great results. You have the spare capacity there to be able to work with those clients, and you're able to kind of put everything into making sure that they get the best possible service from you as a coach, which leads to getting better results. So it creates this really positive cycle of events. Your coaching practice. It's really important as well to assume that position of leadership and being really confident about putting no on the table. Refusing to help clients because they're not best fit is ultimately going to lead to you having a more successful practice. It's also worth remembering that there are thousands, tens of thousands of different types of coaches out there, and if you can't help that potential client, have a black book of other coaches that you can send those prospects to if you can't actually help them. Not only does that build good relationships with other coaches near you, and hopefully they'll also refer prospective clients back to your practice, but that means that you are only working with the best clients, which means you're going to get the best results and the best referrals on the back end of that. The final reason why most coaches get lulled into this game of enrolling as many clients as they possibly can do in their practice is purely because they just haven't done the numbers. They don't know the numbers in their business. In terms of what economically is going to make their coaching practice stack up. What this means is that when you're essentially going into running a practice without a plan and you're just enrolling clients, you go week to week essentially living hand to mouth, trying to sell as many sessions as you possibly can do. And then whatever activity happens there, there's this lag effect which happens. So you get to the end of the week or the end of the month and you review your finances and go, Oh, well, I don't appear to have made the money which I anticipated I would make as a coach. And you remember going back to what I said at the start about the number of hours that we have in our mind about, you know, how much coaching we can actually deliver. It's often far less than what we actually anticipate. So the typical coaching practice will only be doing maybe 10 to 15 hours worth of practical coaching week by week. The rest of the time is spent doing admin and marketing and all of these different things. So what we've got to do is we've got to figure out how to leverage those 10 to 15 hours in the most efficient way. And there's a really simple process around doing this. It's my secret formula, which I go through with every single coaching client which I work with in Fearless Business. It's called Goal-Focused Pricing, and it's a very simple formula. And it doesn't just work for coaching businesses. It works for all sorts of different types of business. So how the formula works is we start off with figuring out what our dream income is for, let's say, the next 12 months ahead. So, and I'm going to make the numbers nice and easy for myself whilst I'm doing this video. So let's say, for example, if you wanted to earn £100,000 a year as a coach, that's a great goal to have. And let's say, for example, at the moment, if on average a client does 20 sessions with you and you're currently charging £50 per hour. Now, okay, forgive me for what I said about hourly rates, but it's a good basis to start on. So At the moment, in order to work to get the average outcome or result for a client on average, and the keyword here is average, they're spending maybe £1,000 with you. So what we do is, and let's say that that's your coaching product, that's the package which you're selling, it's £1,000. We work together for 20 weeks and at the end of it you'll have experienced X, Y, or Z transformation. So we take the £100K goal and simply we divide it by the £1,000 that we're charging on average per client at the moment. Now that gives us our current capacity that we need to deliver on in order to achieve that financial outcome. And this quite often is where coaches, their eyes pop out of their head, because by that equation we would need 100 clients per year in order to have a successful, prosperous coaching practice that achieves our financial goal. Now I know from experience, having worked with hundreds of coaches over the last 8 years, that 100 clients in a year is a lot, a heck of a lot. And a more realistic number of clients to work with as a coach throughout a year is probably somewhere in the order of about 20, maybe 30 max. So what that tells us is that our coaching packages shouldn't be sold at £1,000. Probably they should be sold at maybe £5,000, 5 times the price. But remember, clients aren't paying for your time. They're actually paying for the outcome or result which you deliver as a result of your coaching. So Now, that's quite a big leap to get from, you know, £1,000 to £5,000 or dollars. That's 5 times the price for your current coaching programs in order to deliver those results. There's also a process which you have to go through in order to then start to shift your mindset from charging £1,000 to significantly more like that. But what this shows us is actually we don't need more clients in this instance. What we need is fewer clients, but fewer higher-paying clients, because that's gonna get us to our goal faster.