It’s hard to focus on what’s important when you’re starting out as a life coach; it’s all new and there are so many exciting bright shiny exciting things to look at! As a supporter of life coaches building their business, one of the bright shiny things to watch out for is the plethora of magic formulas promising high earnings which can end up detrimentally skewing new coaches’ expectations and steam when starting out. This article isn’t about ‘mind set blocks’ or ‘money blocks’ or jealousy of others’ success: the point of this article is for life coaches new to the industry to be mindful of where to invest energy, time, and money, when starting out and to be wary that your experience and life situation and finances may well be vastly different to the ‘success’ you see online.

It’s important to say that we are in the business of making money in a business we love – which is helping life coaches like you build your dream life coaching business. But we want to do that by helping people connect with their values and goals to achieve sustainable life coach business success within a framework of what success looks like for you– on your schedule, and on your terms, no one else’s. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are life coaching or any other business for that matter.

Money is only one small part of the life coach business success jigsaw puzzle that we’re going to unpack in this article. Importantly, if your focus is on quick money – and expectations of receiving quick money – there is a risk of forgetting all the other things that contribute to the success of building your dream life coach business such as following your passion, autonomy, freedom, flexibility, less stress, helping others, inner peace, more time with family and so on. Sometimes the money-focus can get in the way of your story and ruins your credibility and authenticity.

What is the High-Earning Coaching Business Thing?

If you’ve been googling about life coaching, you’re likely to find a heap of adverts or industry pages suddenly showing up in your social media feeds or on internet pages. In the marketing world this tactic is called remarketing: where internet algorithms use your online searching or other activity to target paid advertising to you the potentially interested customer. And there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just how advertising works.

But some of the ads you might find in your social media feed or magically appearing online may be promising instant success, effortless client attraction, high-earning coaching business claims held up as the pinnacle of success that all coaches are or should be aiming to achieve (and beyond), and in record time to boot. From a new coach perspective, it’s human nature to check out industry competition and compare ourselves, but it can leave us in a doom spiral of feeling that the bar is too high and we’re never going to ‘get there’, or we haven’t ‘made it’ unless we’re hitting similar high-earning sums in record time, too.

The High-Earning Business Formula as a Marketing Tool

Social media is awash with coaching gurus leveraging off their purported success as authority to then market that success to paying life coaches eager to emulate the same level of success themselves. Typical features of such marketing often include a ‘bottom of the barrel’ or ‘rags to riches’ story combo with visual tangible success metrics: flash office, private jet, high-end vehicle, exotic location. Rarely do we see connected intangible personal authenticity and family values.

And therein lies the authenticity of brand you: as a life coach, potential clients want to resonate with you and buy your story. You’ve been in their shoes, so you understand. You know what they’ve been through and can help them move forward with your experience and skills. Your authenticity will effortlessly shine through in what you do.

Sales vs Profit?

The other thing to be wary of with claimed high-earning magic formulas in the coaching industry is to look a bit more closely at the back-story behind that success, how long that success took to achieve, how they survived financially between then and now, or how successful from a profitability perspective they really are.

Firstly, did they have a support team behind them helping to achieve high figures? Secondly, are the figures purely sales or are they profit? In other words, how much money did it cost them to get to high figures in the first place after wages, hosting platforms, tax, insurance, other expenses etc? The numbers may not be what they seem.

Wellbeing of People in the Business

When we hear anyone talking about money and their success, take a closer look at the wellbeing of the front-person or the team behind the scenes that make the business work, how many hours they’ve worked or are working, their work environment, stress levels, or their enjoyment from doing the work. Does any of that come through in the marketing or is it all about one person? Does the presentation seem credible or authentic?

Values & Ethics

High-earning marketing usually also doesn’t tell us about what positive impact the individual or business is making, either. What kind of values do they hold? Does it operate using harmful business practices such as worker exploitation, shame marketing or preying on vulnerable people? Is the core business service being offered based on teaching harmful or exploitative business practices such as pyramid schemes, unregulated investment schemes, crypto, and so on?

The Business Model

Every business is different, and each will reach business milestones in different ways and at different times. When looking at investing in any coaching program with bold financial earning claims, look at the business model: can you see how the logistics of how they are hitting that level of income and is it a business model you think would work for you – including whether it’s realistic in its expectations of your time, back-end support, and financial resources?

Also look at what the business model teaches and who it’s aimed at – new life coaches or experienced individuals? Some will be in the fortunate situation of being able to do high-ticket (high price) programs, for example, much more easily and realistically than a new life coach just starting out. When looking at a coaching program, carefully consider what else you might have to sign up for to implement the teaching in the program – for example, will you need to extend your credit card for paid advertising or sign up for pricey cloud software packages to achieve the promised results? How realistic or feasible is it for you financially or technically if you are new to life coaching? Always check what free or low-cost advertising you can do first, and also see if you can dip your toes in by utilizing a free version of software to get started and get a feel of how to use it before diving into pricey packages you may not be able to easily cancel later on or have difficulty using it.

Conclusion

No doubt about it, we’d all want to make large sums of money the easiest way possible if we could. But the world doesn’t work like that. What’s important is your needs, sustainable goals, and the lifestyle you want so you have a good balance. You can do this by doing the work to get your business off the ground, staying authentic to you, and putting in place practical and achievable strategies and learning to sustain and grow your business as you grow with it.

What we will say to people interested in working with Ascend is that we can help life coaches figure out strategies to implement achievable financial and business growth goals toward creating your business and working toward the lifestyle you want.