The Coaching Business Model
There are essentially three stages in a coaching model. This is how I like to look at it. First, you attract, there's an invite, and then there's delight. Attract, invite, delight.
Attract is your marketing. There's a whole bunch of people doing ridiculous stuff in this arena. They're following Robert Cialdini's psychology of persuasion. Their strategies are false scarcity and all this other nonsense. Just don't do that, it’s not right.
Now, can you make a horse drink water? Maybe you imagine blunt force to get the horse to drink? No, no. We don’t want to drown the horse. This is attraction. This is not coerced. This is not manipulation. Or you might just think no, you can’t. The phrase goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Bzzz! Wrong. I can make a horse drink all day long. How do you think I do that? Put salt in the roads. Make the horse thirsty. That's it.
So, when we talk about attraction, sometimes the coach thinks they can't share their best stuff with people. Bzz. You failed the test, my friend. Here's why. Information nowadays is a dime a dozen. It's ubiquitous, especially with the introduction of AI.
Transformative results never come from information. Otherwise, you go to the library, you get a book on wealth, and you’ll be rich. You go to the library, you get a book on fitness, you’ll be thin. So, there's always, always going to be the need for a coach. All high-performance performers have coaches. The challenge that as a society, we are going through now is we're abandoning the biblical framework of the old teaching the young and equipping the young, which is discipleship.
We're going into this weird thing where we think YouTube has the answers, podcasts are the answers and AI is the answer. Information, information. And people are now more confused than ever. Because if you're seeking, let’s say information on YouTube about fitness. You might get insight from one coach who is high protein, low carb for weight loss, and you might get insight from another coach who preaches high fat, low carb. And then you might get insight from another coach that is high protein, high carb, low fat. Now we're sitting here and we're creating a Frankenstein of an experience by pulling.
The most exceptional people, the best actors in the world, have coaches. Usually just one, not 27. The best athletes also don’t have 50 different coaches. Tiger Woods, he might have five golfing coaches, but he has one on the swing, he has one on the putt, he has one on the fitness, he has one on the stretching. He doesn't have five people on the swing.
That is why you can give away your best stuff, friends. You can salt the oats because then people interact with your best stuff and they can see that you know what you’re talking about. And they're still going to need your help. Because there's always confusion. There is always something that is unclear.
Especially with the velocity of information, we’re losing our ability to think, we're losing our ability to focus. So, the coach will always shine brightly. That's another reason I love this model, it's evergreen. This model will never go away, never. It's been around for hundreds of years; it's not going anywhere.
When we talk about attracting, there are basically two ways to do that. You can trade your time for attraction or lead flow, or you can trade your money for attraction or lead flow. Time is like social media posting, money is advertisements. Depending on the starting place determines the velocity. If you're trading your time, then you're going to be constrained or bottlenecked by how much time you have. If you're trading your money, then you're able to kind of go beyond that.
That is attractive. Give your best stuff away. It's nothing to be afraid of.
As far as invite, now you must have a mechanism that when you are attracting people, you have some way to talk to them about what you are offering. We like using the phone because you have two options there. You can use the phone, or you can use funnels and technology. If you choose funnels and technology, you literally have to become a rocket scientist.
Do you know how much people charge to build one funnel? I had somebody who quoted me $100,000. One funnel. You may get 25 or 50 grand and then they want a piece of the business. If you think you want to go down the funnel path, by all means, go down the funnel path. I think that that business model is not the best. I'm not putting people down who do that.
One of my gifts is business model analysis. And in fact, the superpower that I have, which is really bizarre, is I can drive by a business, and if it's a newer business, I can predict with astonishing clarity how long it will be successful and if it will be successful or not.
The funnel model, again, I believe there's more sophistication than ever with paid media, with the algorithms and the platforms. This means that, especially with AI, now we can punch a button and spit out a funnel, I believe that model is dying, and I believe people are hungering for relationships and community and high touch.
The cool thing with our model is you can do some social media, you can spend a little bit of money on ads, and you can set up a very simple system to get people on a phone call, a quick 10, 15-minute phone call. We call that a filtering call. We just talk to them, find out what their goals are, and what they are looking for, and determine if we can help them. If we can't, let's not waste their time. And there's a formula to do that, a playbook. It's super simple, super easy.
After we do more of a longer discovery call or strategy session, an enrollment call, we call it an invitation where we talk in detail about their goals, about how we can help, what we see, and then at the end, we invite them. “Hey, would you like our help doing this? Here's what it costs, here's the investment, here's how it works, here's how we support you.” They will respond with either a yes or a no.
It's not high-pressured. There are some people who do high-pressure sales. But we can all feel that a mile away. You go into the store; you're looking at a big screen TV or the auto repair and someone walks up they're like being all nice and friendly to you. And you know, they just want their hand in my pocket. Even if you do fall into that, you usually aren’t happy about the decision I made. We don't like the scuzzy sales stuff.
That's why we call it an invitation. We attract people with our best content. We have a very simple structure to have a personal conversation and invite them into the program. And then once that happens, then our job is to delight them.
The other mistake most coaches make is overcomplicating it. I heard it described as you're on a mountain climbing expedition. You have a sherpa and they're bringing a hundred ropes and 15 sleeping bags and 30 days’ worth of food for one overnight trip. What people are searching for is not more, they're searching for less, they're searching for elegance.
What is the fastest pathway through to that desired outcome, to that desired result? And that's how we delight them. And then of course, you can then create a situation where you can continue to help them because once problem A is solved, then they'll have problem B, and then they'll have problem C. Once we help somebody make their first enrollment, then we need to show them how to do it consistently. Once they're doing it consistently, then we show them how to hire somebody else to help with some of the administration, some of the tech and working the calls.
Now they can get to 100, 150 grand a month. And the cool thing about this model is you can get up to $150,000 a month with basically two to three people. So, your profit margin at that level is extraordinary. It's like 50%. You're doing 150 grand; you're putting 75 grand in your pocket. Now, when you go and build out an infrastructure team, that drops below that. Which is fine, because now you're at scale.
That's it. We delight them. We delight them with playbooks. We delight them by creating accountability loops. We delight them by answering their questions. We delight them with creating a community of like-minded folks. We delight them with other people enjoying success. We delight them by taking them out to the woodshed and whipping them with a wet noodle when they need it and creating that iron that sharpens iron.
And of course, we stay on the cutting edge so that we can always maintain that eye of the tiger to help them as things change. Like AI for example. You have to adapt, and you have to evolve.
One last thing that the Lord showed me. It's the funniest thing ever. The people that are aggressively consuming all this content, thinking that's a solution, they're wasting so much time because they're trying to save money by not investing in a coach who's been there, done it. If you want to cross a minefield, follow somebody who's already been across a couple of times. They're like a pucker looking for a nipple. And we're not supposed to be that. We're supposed to be the head and not the tail. We're not supposed to have our umbilical cord looking for somewhere to plug it in.
That's how we get freedom and become the salt that we are. It's in us. We just have to be bold and not play patty cake with the principles. And again, the coaching business isn’t going anywhere.
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There are three critical things that I've learned over my twenty-plus years, evaluating over one hundred and fifty different business models as a Christian entrepreneur.
I've put together my observations and these three keys (I learned the hard way) into a Christian Entrepreneur Manifesto, along with some step-by-step walk-throughs and demonstrations.
There is no opt-in required.
It walks through my favorite model, the Finders model.
It might be interesting for a Christian looking to start something new or for the first time to escape the "business running them vs. them running their business" or the nine to five and not to have to work for themselves or someone else until the age of eighty.
Check it out here:
https://christianentrepreneurinc.com/go-video
I hope it helps!
Blessings,
Paul
PS: God is a big God.
He gives us above and beyond what we can ask or think.
We must ask big.
We must think big.
And if we don't, it's not His fault if we live limited.
Work hard, pray harder, and never ever ever ever quit.
You've got this!
PPS: Whenever You’re Ready... Here's How I Can Help You Generate An Additional $5 to $10k Per Month Or More:
- Check Out Our Christian Entrepreneurship Manifesto
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