In this instructional video, video strategist Sheryl Plouffe shares three revenue‑generating services she created in 2020 to help coaches, consultants, and other solopreneurs adapt during the pandemic. She first introduced free 15‑minute “Video Strategy Hotline” calls, offered via Zoom to provide quick, actionable advice, build trust, and generate referrals that later converted into paid work. Next, she launched paid 60‑minute “Implementation Calls” priced at $247, which included a digital audit and a customized mind‑map PDF deliverable branded for the client, turning the call into a tangible product. Finally, she evolved the implementation calls into ongoing one‑on‑one consulting sessions, maintaining the $247 price point with plans to raise rates. Throughout, Sheryl emphasizes listening to audience needs, creating short‑form, high‑value offers, and leveraging the resulting trust and referrals to create additional income streams.
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If you're not making money in your business, then you have a hobby. I trust that as a coach or consultant, you're probably not in this for a hobby. You want to have impact, you want to build influence, and you want to have income. Because if you can make more income, you can of course pass that down and really make a difference in the world. And isn't that what coaching and consulting is really all about? Sheryl Plouffe here, video strategist. In this video, I'm going to share 3 different things that I did, different streams of income that I launched in 2020. And I'd like for you to listen to this through the lens of, okay, how could I adapt what Cheryl did to my own niche, to my own business? So the first thing that I did, and again, 2020 being a crazy year, uh, with the pandemic and all, in the early stages, stages of the pandemic, I realized that my audience, you as a coach or consultant or a speaker, author, entrepreneur, small business owner, many of you were freaking out, right? Because you were pivoting, you were trying to figure out, okay, now that all these events have gone away and everything's going virtual, what do I do? How do I pivot? How do I adapt? And a lot of you might not have digital presence. You might not have a bunch of content that's out there doing your work for you and really bringing in clients and generating leads and all of that, which is, of course, content marketing is really where it's at. So if you didn't have all that dialed in, you might have been freaking out. So here's me as a video strategist going, okay, what could I recognizing what was going on, what could I do to better support my audience? And that's the question you'll ask yourself. What could I do to better serve my audience? The answer for me was what I called Video Strategy Hotline Calls. They're 15-minute calls, and I would give the client the option to do it on the phone or on Zoom. I always preferred Zoom because I would be able to share my screen and share resources and ideas with them. On the call. But these video strategy hotline calls, interestingly enough, I did not charge for. So you might be saying, okay, so how is that a stream of income? Hear me out. It's a stream of income because I was building trust with the audience. I was getting them to know me better. They were— it was turning out that they were liking me because I was helping them. And by virtue of doing that, many of those people came back to me later for other services, other products. And there were a few cases on those hotline calls where, when appropriate, when I saw that there was a fit, when I knew definitively that they were a great match for something else that I offered, be an online course or maybe a longer form call, I would invite and enroll them into that. Now, that wasn't the energy that I put behind these strategy, uh, hotline calls in the first place. It was really meant to be free calls, just help people get some wins, quick wins. But as it turned out, I ended up making money from it. So this is something that you could implement. You could look at maybe creating— maybe it's not a 15-minute call, maybe it's a 10-minute call, maybe it's 20, but they're short-form calls that are intended to get the client to say, okay, here's my biggest problem right now. If I could just have a solution, a prescription to this particular problem, I would be well on my way and I would have a win. Great. Many cases when I got on those 15-minute calls, we would at least attack one big thing, sometimes upwards of 3 things in the course of 15 minutes. That builds a ton of trust. And those people then go out and say good things about you and tell their friends and colleagues and family or anyone that they think would benefit from your services about you. So referrals obviously can come from that. The second thing that I did, this was closer to the middle part of the year, was I started what was called— what we called implementation calls. Again, you can call it whatever is most appropriate to your, to your coaching and niche. But the idea was to get on a 60-minute call with a client. I did charge for the calls themselves, in this case $247 for 60 minutes. And what we would do is do some digital auditing. We would also do some mind mapping. Because I had had earlier in the year, I had to solve my own problem. My video strategy was in my head and I decided I need to see it visually. So I created a mind map and I put out my strategy and put little icons on it. It was really cool. It was really helpful for me. I shared it with someone one day on a call, maybe one of my weekly trainings on Wednesdays, and somebody said, oh my gosh, I totally want that. So I walked that person through how I did it and I shared my screen and they were like, this is amazing. I got great testimonials from it. And then I went, okay, well, wait a minute, this might be a service. So as it turned out, I was able to again launch an extra stream of income and made several thousand dollars from those implementation calls. It wasn't really my main focus. It just ended up being truly an extra stream of income. So could you do something like that? Is there some type of tangible thing that you could create with a client? In this case, for me, it was a mind map that I then saved as a PDF. I branded it with their logo. I emailed it to them after with suggestions on how to use it. So it was a whole thing. It was a whole service. What could you do using that idea, you know, to launch again a call? Maybe it's a 60-minute call where you actually follow up with something tangible that you can deliver back to that client that's customized to them. Now, that implementation call later in the year really became what I currently do now and how I offer it now. Which is a 60-minute one-on-one consulting call, rather. And I still charge $247 for it, although I do expect those prices to go up to, you know, $300, $350 in the near future. We can go in any direction that the client wants to based on what their problems are and really what the solution needs to be for them specifically. Now, I've been doing this for a while, so I do have the skill set and the ability to adapt and be able to respond in the moment to whatever problems that person's facing. If you don't have that much experience, it would probably be best to construct and structure your coaching calls to be achieving a specific goal, like the mind mapping example. But if you feel confident that you're able to go with the flow and help them get the results that they're after, then you could really construct that as a 60-minute consultation as well. So your streams of income are really only limited by your imagination. One of my clients today on my free coaching today said, "Hey Cheryl, I implemented the thing you talked about last week," and she's already made 2 sales, $800 in her pocket, and the product isn't even created yet. I was like, yay! So your streams of income are literally right there. They're right at your fingertips. You just need to think about what you can do to serve your audience. That video, by the way, where you— she made that extra $800 is right below this one. So go check it out, and I can't wait to see you there.
