Why Most Coaches Never Hit 6 Figures (I Did)

One of the most common questions which shows up in my coaching community is, what's the best business model for coaches? Especially in 2024, there are lots of different options which you can choose from, and I, in this video, I'm going to try and break them down as best I possibly can so that you know which is the best option for you when you're growing your coaching practice. One of the first things to think about is how you want to best serve your clients, and The different modalities in which those clients work. So the 2 most common forms of coaching, as it happens, are either one-to-one coaching. I'd say that's probably the most common when people, especially when people are first starting out. I'd always recommend doing one-to-one in some degree to start off with because it's a great way to practice being a coach in whatever way, shape, or form that you want to do your coaching. Being one-to-one allows you to cut your cloth. It means you can practice on clients. You can get direct feedback from those clients. There's no jeopardy because you're just dealing with one person in person, ideally. So, um, one-to-one is a good way to start out. The next transition beyond one-to-one coaching then is typically some form of group coaching or semi-private. So there's a subtle difference between the two of them, and that difference is the volume of people that you have in each of them. So semi-private is a bit like— this has been in the fitness professional world for quite a long period of time So a lot of fit pros will do some kind of like bootcamp style, like group workouts with clients, and they use that as their, the early stages in their prospect pathway to be able to attract enough people in at volume so that they can then potentially get them into more lucrative training programs further down the road. So once you've attracted the prospects in, semi-private is typically small groups of between 4 and 6 people operating almost as like a mini group mastermind. From there, you've then got large-scale mass participation sort of So I would suggest that's anywhere from like 7 or more people. And there's lots of nuances to one-to-one to semi-private masterminds and then scaling up to group. I'll try and break it down as best I can, but I want to keep this video short and I want to keep it valuable to you. Some of the benefits of one-to-one is, like I said, you get that direct relationship building with the client. You get to know them at a deep level. They get to understand how you operate as a coach. And the client really benefits from sort of having you, I guess, on demand, on a very sort of deep and personal level whenever they have any challenges or problems or questions which they want to sort of pose to you. And they get that sort of one-to-one hand-holding support through the process. But what they then lack through that is that there's no kind of group or community which they can necessarily feel a part of. It might be whether they might not want that community side of things. But from my experience, a lot of people, they like, especially in the business world, they like to be a part of something, a part of some kind of a community. So that's one of the downsides of kind of one-to-one. One-to-one can also, of course, be quite labor-intensive. Typically sessions, even if they're just an hour and you've got 20 clients, for example, there's going to be— there's a lot of time there and energy taken up, not just in the coaching sessions, but maybe if, if you do have to do any sort of pre-work to prepare for those coaching sessions, or if they need some kind of accountability or have questions afterwards, there's going to be ongoing support at a much higher level, especially with one-to-one. One-to-one programs tend to also be what we class as high ticket, a bit more expensive than traditional sort of group programs or masterminds or semi-private sort of programs. So that can also have an impact on the type of clients you take on, how many clients you take on as well. So there's some pros and cons for one-to-one. The other option might be moving into something like group, and the biggest benefits there is the, the whole sort of building a community as opposed to it just being about you and one client. Now you've got a whole community of people which can be highly beneficial, especially if they're all in sort of complementary sort of businesses or niches. So that they can all be sort of getting some value from the rest of the community and it not be so much about, for example, what the coach has to offer. Within that, you can also bring in what I call associate coaches. So those associate coaches can also help add value to the community as well. Some of the benefits of it are generally group programs tend to be slightly less expensive than one-to-one. As a ratio, I would say that whatever you charge for group, you should be charging at least double that for one-to-one. So if you're charging £5K for a group program, you'd be looking at £10K, for example, for any one-to-one coaching clients. And you can do both. You can have some group clients, you can have some one-to-one clients as well, depending on what their needs are from your coaching program. I like the idea as well of having a bit of hybrid. So again, one of the downsides of having a group program is that a lot of coaches don't offer any element of one-to-one within group. Kind of makes sense, it's a group program. I'm not so keen on that. I think that even as a group coaching client, you should get some element of contact either with directly with the coach who's enrolled you or with their team. There should be some element of one-to-one alongside any group calls or group accountability or group chats which you've got, for example. So we do a bit of a hybrid between the two. We offer things called turbo calls within our coaching program, which means that in between the group calls, people can reach out if they're really particularly stuck with something. They know that they can always get hold of me or one of the other coaches, and we find that Because we charge quite a lot for that, we actually get, it's one of the things that people like the most because they know that they can access the coaches on an individual basis. And sometimes, I do it from a position of respect because sometimes there are genuinely things which just, people don't wanna share, they don't feel comfortable sharing in the group setting. So having that hybrid approach where people get a little bit of, a tiny bit of one-to-one, and obviously there's fair use policies around that as well, that's quite important. So we've got group, we've got hybrids, we've got one-to-one coaching. Those are the 3 sort of core delivery mechanisms. And within that, you can offer different variables in terms of like support. So it could be some coaches are just like, it's all about the coaching sessions, that's it. But you could add in some kind of WhatsApp support or a Facebook group or circle or something like that. You can have an accountability coach in there that's helping with other aspects of that per— with that person's sort of coaching journey. Like I said, turbo calls. So, um, you can include an online portal in there, for example, so they can do some self-paced learning as well. So There's lots of different ways to stack value in coaching programs, whether it's one-to-one or group doesn't matter. Lots of different ways to do it. The next thing to think about then is the length of time that you're actually working with those clients over. Again, most coaching programs, and I do recommend most coaches start out on a fixed time-based period, so like 3 or 6 months. Part of that is because you're both aiming towards something at the end of that coaching process that you want to be able to deliver a dream outcome by the end of that, that time period. I have started to see a bit of a trend, and actually this is something we do as well, where you include some element of lifetime access. So once the initial intensive coaching period is over and the client's got their results, you kind of graduate them into this alumni where they get lifetime access, mostly to the community. But by that point, because the client's got their results, they tend to taper off the amount of demand which they're placing on the coach. They just need topping up periodically. So lifetime is a really— lifetime access is a really great way to add, you know, more exceptional value into the process. The other thing to think about then is pricing. And so there's a number of different ways that you can price up coaching programs in terms of like from a business model perspective. My favorite is that you charge a fixed fee. One of the mistakes I see people making, especially in the one-to-one space, is that they'll have a 6-month program that's maybe $3K, and they'll just take $3K and divide it by 6, and then they sell that as a monthly like membership almost. So the client pays monthly for it. The challenge with that though is that clients do have a habit of treating things like a Netflix subscription if it's paid monthly. So what I normally recommend is that you have an element of encouraging the client to pay sort of an enrollment fee, which is higher than the monthly fee to start off with. So for like a $3K program, for example, you might choose to do $1,500 upfront and then 5 installments of $300 to pay down the balance. And now the client is also anchored into paying $300 a month. So therefore, when they get to month 7, they could go into something called a continuation where they continue to pay $300 a month to continue that coaching process, whatever that looks like with you. So now you've actually created 2 different sources of revenue. You've got the package price for that coaching program, plus now you've got a second stream of income from those clients who go into a continuation and carry on paying. The best coaching business models have several revenue streams built up within their coaching practice directly from one-to-one group programs, clients paying some kind of enrollment fee and then some kind of ongoing fees thereafter. Check out my video where I was talking about how to create a compelling and irresistible coaching offer, because I do go through the 3 things there about dream outcome you deliver for your clients, plus also over the fixed period of time which you deliver that in the fixed fee. It's a great model to work to if you're just starting out as a coach or even as an experienced coach. And don't forget, if you've got any questions, drop them in the comments below.