4 Steps for Growing Your Coaching Business to $1 Million a Year These strategies will help your online coaching career take off with unlimited growth potential.
By Ben Simkin Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Depending on where you're at right now in your coaching business, an income of $1 million dollars may seem intimidating, or even out of reach.
But the fact is, scaling your coaching business to seven figures per year and beyond is much easier than you might think. The key is following a step by step process that is easily replicated and proven to work.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing A.J. Mihrzad. A.J. is the owner of "Online Super Coach," where he passionately mentors fitness professionals and coaches in creating profitable online incomes doing what they love.
During our interview, A.J. spilled the beans on the exact four-step system he uses everyday to effortlessly grow his own coaching business and those of his clients.
If you implement these simple strategies you're about to learn consistently, you'll watch with delight as your own coaching business takes off with unlimited growth potential.
Related: 5 Secrets to Coaching Your Employees to Greatness
I'll let A.J. take over from here.
1. Who do you want to serve?
The first thing to consider is if you want to be a generalist or specialist. Using medicine as an example, consider the difference between a family physician and a cardiologist.
Cardiologists make at least twice the annual income of family physicians. Why is this? The answer, is that by specializing, cardiologists are solving a specific problem that provides life-changing results. Compare life-saving cardiac bypass surgery to visiting your family doctor for a cold…or hemorrhoids….or take your pick of mild health nuisances. I urge you to consider specializing in your own coaching business. For example, one of my primary target markets as a health coach is busy moms between 29 and 55 years of age who want to lose weight. It is much easier to convey my expertise and provide transformational results by focusing on this smaller segment of the weight loss market.
Next, you need to answer the following two questions to determine who you want to serve as your audience:
- What is the No. 1 problem you can solve for others? Think about your skills, knowledge, and experience. How are you uniquely positioned to solve this problem in a powerful way?
- Who do you want to be a hero to? When you provide life-changing results in an authentic way, you create loyal followers who will hang on your every word and sing your praises to anyone who will listen.
Now that you're clear on who you want as your target audience, the next step is attracting your ideal clients.
2. How to easily attract your ideal clients.
These are the three primary ways that I market my coaching business and you can do the same.
- Pay per click advertising. This includes Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and LinkedIn ads. Pay per click (PPC) is the fastest way to start sending people to your funnel and content. Platforms like Facebook make it simple to target members of your audience with laser precision. With Facebook in particular, it's easy to connect with your ideal clients through demographic, interest, and behavior based advertising. You'll need to allocate a budget dedicated to PPC costs. Keep in mind, testing different ad variations and campaigns is the key to turning your advertising into a profitable venture.
- Strategic partnerships. The secret to developing a profitable partnership is finding someone who provides a service or product that complements what you offer. They are not your competition, but you have the same target audience. Let me give you an example. I partnered with a popular mommy blogger for my health coaching business targeting busy moms. She promotes my coaching business to her blog readers and I promote her blog to my clients and audience.
- Expert positioning. The best way to position yourself as an expert in your space is by creating insanely valuable content for your audience. This could be almost anything, including a blog post, video, or social media post. If your content is good enough, people will start sharing it on social media, helping your content to go viral. Place yourself in the mind of your audience. Determine their most pressing problems and fears. This will allow you to create quality content that your prospects will happily devour, leaving them hungry for more. While I'm generating leads through these three marketing channels, I'm sending them to the beginning of my sales funnel. And that leads us to the third step:
3. Creating an automated sales system.
The first part of our funnel is the landing page or lead capture page.
Related: 4 Reasons You Should Seek Out a Business Coach
You'll want to create a valuable incentive to entice people to sign up to your email list. Here are three of my favorite ways to do this:
- Email autoresponder series
- Four-part video series
- Webinar
Email autoresponders and four-part video series are great, because they allow you to deliver value quickly through multiple points of contact. These multiple "touches" are essential to converting someone from an "interested" lead to a salivating buyer. It's all about building a relationship and trust with your audience. Webinars are my personal favorite because this can shorten the trust building window to as little as one hour. Once again, all of these are completely automated.
At this point, you just need to do some simple math to reach your income goals. Let's say your goal is $1,000,000 per year. This translates into $83,000 per month. One of the best ways to achieve this level of income is by creating a 90 day transformation package. If you price this package at $5,000, you'll only need to sell 16 packages each month to reach your income goal.
If done correctly, your automated sales system will produce a very predictable and reliable income month after month.
Related: Why Would a Successful Entrepreneur Hire a Coach?
4. Automating delivery of your package.
Forget any misconceptions you have about one on one coaching being better than group coaching. I have profited more by offering automated 12 week group coaching programs and my clients have often achieved better results. My busy moms audience is a perfect example. For six years now, I have been successfully selling an automated 12-week program for $5,000.
Every week for 12 weeks, a new piece of content is delivered through automated systems. This can easily be accomplished through email and membership sites.
You'll need to decide which type of content will best serve your customers (videos, webinars, podcasts , etc.) and what information they will need to guide them through their transformation journey to the desired end result.
Organizing your content in a way that progressively builds on each other is important too. You'll work your butt off in the beginning to get all of this set up. But once these pieces are in place, it truly becomes an automated, hands off income stream.
You'll have so much more free time and energy to focus on other profitable activities in your business and more free time for leisure and family.
What's next for your online coaching business?
You now have in your possession a proven system for growing your online coaching business to $1 Million per year and beyond. All that's left to do is determine your income goal and put these 4 steps to work for you. By leveraging automation and technology, you'll enjoy rapid growth while delivering incredible results to your clients. For a practical guide, you can get a hold of AJ's book "The 5 Systems You Need to Start a Profitable Online Coaching Business" at his website www.OnlineSuperCoach.com
