Why Coaches Panic When They're Fully Booked (And What to Do Instead)

One of the most common questions I get asked by coaches and consultants in our programme is what to do when your coaching practice or consulting business is full up and you can't take any more clients on. Having capacity issues can never really be seen as a bad thing because it does create an awful lot of opportunities, but in the moment it can be incredibly stressful and to know how to manage your clients? Well, we've uncovered 3 different ways that you can manage your capacity and scale your coaching or consultancy business so that you don't experience the same problems in the future. One of the things we've noticed is that when people are operating on their own as a coach or consultant, typically the one thing which gets filled up or they reach their capacity first and foremost is time. So a lot of the coaches, consultants that we typically tend to work with are incredibly good at what they do. They get amazing results for their clients. They love the job which they do. But, and being incredibly intelligent people, they are still selling their time at an hourly or day rate. So what that means is we see them rushing around like busy fools to satisfy maybe 4 or 5 days' worth of, if you added the hours up, of coaching or consulting time. The rest of the month, the other 15 days, is taken up by things like sales and marketing and networking and doing their books and just day-to-day admin. And maybe managing their team if they've got a small team of PAs or VAs, virtual assistants, on board. So very quickly, when you're working on a limited capacity and only able to deliver 5 days, 4 or 5 days worth of actual work, you know, when as soon as you get to 15 to 20 clients, your books are typically full, and that means you can't take any more clients on. So there are 3 different ways that you can manage that capacity better and start to scale your coaching or consultancy business. The first way is to look at your pricing. We've all heard about supply and demand. A simple price increase is one way to ensure that you manage and control demand for your product or service, so that effectively, or the basic principle is that the more expensive something is, the fewer people are going to buy it, but overall, you should still be able to make the same, if not slightly more money. And I know that most of the coaches and consultants that I work with would rather have half the clients but double the income, and that is perfectly feasible. The simple way to manage capacity when you get to 16 to 20 clients and you're starting to realise, oh gosh, it's a bit tight, we're struggling, we don't have the space to take on any more clients, is to do something called capacity-based pricing. So for example, if you've worked out that the most number of clients you can have in your coaching or consultancy business is 20 clients, and I've rounded these numbers up just to make it easy, What you need to do is when you hit 16 clients, you want to increase your prices. And I don't just mean by 10 or 20%, but potentially you could go with quite a dramatic price increase. You could 2x, 3x. I've seen clients 5x or even 10x their prices when they start to hit and max out their capacity. The simple thought process of doubling or trebling your prices when you start to hit your max capacity is that actually at that point you've got nothing to lose. You've got 16 clients on your books, so that means you've got good positive cash flow coming through your business. And so if somebody says yes at 2 or 3 times the price, well, you're in a win-win situation. Yes, they've taken up a bit of extra capacity, but they're paying for the benefit of being able to work with you when you are super busy. From this point forward, every new client is then enrolled at that new rate. And like I said, if you double or treble your prices, that means you can afford to have far fewer clients and overall, you could actually start to reduce your capacity, but still make the same amount of money, if not more. The second way to scale a coaching or consulting business is to bring in a set of associate coaches or consultants who can help you to deliver your work. One of the biggest benefits of enrolling associate coaches or consultants into your practice is that they will probably, if you've doubled or trebled your prices, be charging like a typical hourly or day rate, which is what maybe you started out charging when you opened up your coaching practice. And so what that means is that you can charge out at your rates, but hire people in at a much lower rate, so it means that there's extra profitability in there for your business. Now, the key thing is making sure that the coaches and consultants that you bring in are trained up in your culture, your vision, your mission, and your core values, so that they also deliver the same quality of, of work to the same ability that you would deliver it to your clients, 'cause what you don't want is to bring in associates who are producing a lower quality of output and getting inferior results to you within your own programme, because that's just gonna make you look bad. One of the downsides to this though, so whilst you can make additional profit by selling out other people's time, the downside is that you've now got a small team of associates to manage and train and bring up to speed with your systems and your processes and your way of working. What this means is that they will take up an extra bit of your capacity in terms of management, but for every hour that it takes up in terms of managing and training training your associates, it could mean that actually they're taking 5 to 10 hours' worth, equivalent of coaching consulting time off your hands. So that's 1 hour saved for every 10 hours that your associate delivers. All the while, you're making profit on every hour which they deliver work to your client base. The 3rd and final way to scale a coaching practice or a consultancy business is to build out a group program. Now, there's one thing which stops coaches from building out group programs, and that is typically their ego. They feel that they are tied to the result which they get for their clients, and therefore, if you go into a group program, for whatever reason, it's going to water down the results which your coaching or consultancy clients get. These kind of coaches who are driven by their own ego believe that the results rely heavily on them and only them being heavily involved in the coaching process. But as we know, this isn't true, because their superpower is actually in the intellectual property which they've created deliver their coaching program. It's the tools that you've got in your toolkit which you deliver to your clients and them being able to implement it, which is actually where the real result happens. So you might be a great coach or consultant and be able to come up with fantastic ideas, but the implementation is gonna come down to your clients getting stuck in and doing some of that work for themselves. One of the major benefits of having a group program means that your capacity is effectively limitless. Where you may only be able to take on an extra 1 or 2 clients a month, all of a sudden you can enrol multiple clients each and every month onto your programme. It means that you can deliver structured coaching sessions to a group of people at the same time, and we all know about Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich and the mastermind effect. Having multiple people around as ideas are kind of simmering and bubbling away and being brought to the surface is really helpful to everybody else from an accountability perspective. So, the questions which one people may ask, other people in your group programme may be either too afraid to ask or hadn't thought to ask, and so everybody benefits from this mastermind effect of, you know, bringing knowledge in from multiple people and ideas and implementation. A group programme enables you to be able to enrol multiple clients in your, into your coaching or consulting business each month without it impacting your ability to be able to deliver high-quality coaching. And the reason for that is, imagine a scenario where you're doing a coaching session, for example, which is 90 minutes or a couple of hours with a client. It's very energetic, it takes an awful lot of energy out of you, and if you're doing multiple coaching sessions each day, day in and day out, it's gonna zap you of energy over time. Whereas actually in a group coaching program, you can throw absolutely everything at a 2-hour coaching session, mastermind session, with a group of clients, and they benefit from that extra energy and that extra mastermind effect. Rather than your energy being watered down across multiple client sessions. So, there you have it. If you've reached a point whereby your coaching or consulting business is starting to hit maximum capacity, there's 3 different ways there which you can actually use to scale your coaching or consulting business. The first way, you could look at implementing a really fearless pricing increase, double or treble your prices in order to manage capacity, and for every client you take on, win-win, what a great result. The second way is to bring in associate coaches or consultants into your practice, and what this does is it enables you to be able to charge out at your full rate whilst paying your associates maybe a slightly lower rate. It means you can profit and your time is much better leveraged. And the final way is to create a group program. This means that you can have a limitless number of clients potentially coming through your program over a set period of time, And everybody then benefits from that mastermind effect, and your energy levels can be thrown into delivering a single coaching call on a weekly or monthly basis with all of your clients. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe. We will be producing more videos to help you grow your coaching practice or your consultancy business in the future. My name's Robin Waite, and I look forward to catching up with you on the next video.