124 - The Truth to Making Your First $100k in Your Coaching Business Pt. 1
What does it really take to earn your first $100,000 in your coaching business?
In this episode, Business Success + Life Coach, Debbie Shadid, is going to talk about the truth to earning your money goal in your coaching business. She is going to share with you some of the things that she wished she knew sooner, and some of the things that she did to get to where she is today so that you can learn from it, apply it to your business, and earn your $100,000 faster than she did.
Wherever you might be in your coaching business, you can definitely go from zero to $100,000 if you stay committed to your business, and take action consistently.
Join us for this episode and learn about the do’s and don’ts to earn your first $100,000 in your life coaching business.
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Transcript
The world needs help. The world needs positivity. It needs all of this mindset work and thought work and life coaching skill that we all know how to do. The world needs that we need light, we need hope, we need guidance. You are in a position to be able to offer that to the world, and you just have to learn how to sell it in a way that's authentic to you.
And so you are going to need to learn the skill of selling.
Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.
Welcome to the Life Coach Business Building Podcast. I'm glad you're here. I'm gonna be talking about the truth to making a hundred thousand dollars. This is a two part podcast series and I really wanna go through all of the details of what it is going to take for you to make a hundred thousand dollars and more in your business.
I'm going to share in part one, kind of the preparation and doing, because you always have to be doing, taking action while you are preparing. And then in part two I am gonna be talking about the actual doing part, the actions that you have to take and the details, the actual numbers that I, you know, earn the numbers on my email list, the amount of money I spend and the steps that you need to take to get to that a hundred thousand dollars and beyond. All right, so today I'm gonna talk about a lot of truths that I wish somebody would've shared with me.
The first thing I wanna talk about is the truth about knowing what it's going to take to get there. Now, I wish I would've known that a long time ago because when I started my business so many years ago, in 2000, Even then, I had unrealistic expectations about what I was going to be able to accomplish in my business. And I do think that that sort of sets you up for, gosh, not having much fun in your business, because when you don't make the goal that you've set, and it's a big goal. All you do is beat yourself up. You think like, Why am I not able to do it? And everybody else is. Raise your hand if you've been in that category.
So let's talk about my business, the hundred thousand dollars that I'm gonna talk to you about, that I earned in most, uh, the second half of 2021 in a brand new niche with a list of zero. Yes, I had some business experience, but everything else I had to start over was brand. I will tell you the truth of what I had that most people don't have is I had mastered this skill of action.
So I had been in business for many years and what I was able to do that probably got me to that a hundred thousand dollars last year in that brand new niche faster was that I didn't quit. I kept going. So we'll talk about that. Before we get started, though, I do wanna have you think about the facts of what you're doing in your business.
Now I'm talking about sorting out the facts about the people that you're following, the people that you think like are overnight successes that you are sort of setting your goal in comparison with. I want you to think about those people and I want you to think about what it really took for them to get to where they are today.
You're looking at their picture today. You're not looking at the journey of what it took, and I want you guys to think about, What it's going to take for you to get to a realistic goal. I think that when you set just a huge goal, honestly, you're setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment. I would rather have you guys know what it's gonna take, and I would rather have you be working towards something that you're gonna accomplish. Because honestly, I think you'll do it faster when you don't have a brain that's protesting against you all the time telling you, See, you're not, You didn't do it. You haven't accomplished it. What's wrong with you? Why can't you be like them? When you really look at the facts, and many of the coaches that we follow, they have tremendous success.
It took 'em a long time to get there. Many of the people that we're looking to that, we think, Oh, they make millions. You guys go back and listen to their stories. They might be in year 15 of their business. They might be in year 10 of their business. Sure, we hear about overnight success stories, but there's not very many of 'em. So I would rather that you look the facts of whoever it is that you're kind of positioning yourself against when you think about a goal that you're trying to accomplish and consider how long it took them to get there. You also don't know how much money those people have invested to get to where they are today. They have tens no probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on poaches, on teachers, on courses, on all the things they had to learn how to be to become a person who knows how to market themselves, who knows how to do all the technology, who knows how to do all the things that I'm gonna talk to you about shortly that are required.
I wish that I would have made more realistic goals for myself because I think, again, it would've helped me grow faster. All right, I'm gonna talk about 2018 and forward, and I'll talk about those goals in details about how I got there. And I wanna tell you about my business really from 2018 forward. That's when I became full time online at that point. I wanna tell you, it's kind of funny, the goal that I set in 2018 when I left doing any other kind of business besides online business, just like you guys are doing now, the first coach that I worked with, she was, you know, of course doing millions just like everybody else I thought. I made this goal to do $187,500. I have no idea where I got that goal, but the funny part about it is, and the truth is, I didn't surpass that number until this year, in one year.
All right? So I'm gonna talk to you about what that takes, but it took me four years to get there, you guys. It took me those years to get to, to where I surpassed the goal that I had in 2018. Now, there was a pandemic in between there that changed my business dramatically, but we'll talk about that. Now, how could this be different for you? How could you get to your goal faster? Well, I will tell you, we all know more. We all know better than what everybody else did. I know better now than what I did then, and we have so much more experience to draw from of what other people have done successfully.
The biggest strength that I bring to my clients as a coach is that I have time in business. I've been in business 24 years. I have learned so much and over all of those years that I've spent with women helping them learn how to market to sell, how to take care of their clients. How to build a solid reputation, how to build this business that will allow them to live out, you know, the income they wanna earn, to have the time flexibility that they want to have, and to also have a purpose driven business.
So that's what I bring into where I'm at today, which is an advantage. But each one of you guys comes into your business with your own advantage. I want you to write your story. I want you to be able to tell yourself a story like I just told you about the strength that I bring into my coaching business, because each one of you has that.
Let's talk about the thoughts that you have to have to get to a hundred thousand dollars or whatever the number is for you. Maybe it's not a hundred thousand to have a successful business on your terms. What are the thoughts that you have to have first? Well, first of all, you have to believe in yourself.
That is, you have to believe that you can figure it out. You have to believe that there's possibility in what you're doing. I love that word possibility because when everything else is like negative, it's like, wait. It is possible that it could work. You have to believe that if all those other people can do this, that if Debbie can do it, you can do it too.
I want you to make a list of the things that you can believe about your. Today, I just told you my list. In 24 years I've done X, Y, and z. I want you to tell me in the comments, share back to me, DM me on Instagram, wherever it. Tell me what you believe about yourself, about what you know you can accomplish, about what you know you've done, about why you know that you are meant to be a coach, who coaches enough people consistently, that you'll make that kind of money, right?
The, the income is just a result of the success that you're having as a coach. And then once you make that list, I want you to keep referring back to it over and over. I'm gonna ask you to basically brainwash yourself. I want you to override your primitive brain, that primitive brain that says to you, Hey, stay right here. It's safe, right? You don't go take a chance on this business, this crazy business idea. Go back and get a corporate job, or don't quit your corporate job. I want you to override your primitive brain with that list of things that you believe about yourself that says, you know, Hey, look, I know what I'm doing. If Debbie can do it, I can do it. Or whatever your picture is going to be. I want you to review that. All the time. That is the thought work that you have to do. All right. A couple of principles that I also want you to believe, write these down. Business can be simple and you can be authentically yourself and be successful.
Next thing I wanna talk about is feelings. I'm gonna talk about the truth about how you're going to feel when you build a business because it is not fun. You guys, again, if you know that, You can approach your business in a different way. You'll have success if you don't hear anything else you guys today, you're gonna have success in your business when you learn how to manage your feelings. If we think about the coaches who coach people on how to finally stop overeating, you know how they stop overeating? It's because they finally sit with the feeling.
They learn how to not run to the refrigerator and grab the ice cream. They learn how to not overeat and you know, cover up their feelings with food. That is the same thing you have to do in your business. As soon as you can learn how to sit with the feeling of. Doing things that you don't wanna do, doing things that are hard, learning things that your brain is not used to learning, right? Going on sales calls, talking to people, and offering your services when you don't know how to do it, when you learn how to sit with a feeling of that discomfort and you keep doing it anyway, those are the people that win.
That's how I win you guys. That is the skill that I've learned. I just keep going anyway. Many, many days, you're going to be approaching your business from the feeling of. Why? Because you're not gonna be inspired all the time. If you guys have gone to the life coach school, you know the principal about 50 50, 50% of the time, you're gonna feel inspired. And 50% of the time you're not like life is 50 50. It's the same way in your business. So half the time you're gonna be inspired and you're gonna be motivated. It's like, Oh, I'm going to go do all the things that I know I need to do to build my business. Half the time, you're not gonna be inspired, but you will be successful in your business when you make the commitment to. Honor what you've planned on your schedule to honor yourself and keep going. Whether you feel neutral, inspired or negative, whatever it is, you just keep showing up every day for yourself. This is when you become the employee, not the ceo, but you become the employee of your company. When you don't feel, you know, inspired and motivated, you just show up as an employee and get the job done. When you are inspired and motivated, you show up as a CEO and the visionary for the company. The next thing I wanna talk about is always having a simple plan. I just mentioned it. You gotta have things planned out. You guys doesn't have to be complicated. I help clients build a business plan or a marketing plan in like one hour. It can be that simple, by the way, one hour for an entire year. So I know that you can do that too, but you just wanna write things down that need to be done, and then you put it on your calendar and you do it. You don't decide to go have lunch with your girlfriends or to, you know, go out for a walk because you need some fresh air.
You just follow the planning and you do not change your mind. All right? And you work with one coach at a time. This is one way that you won't be confused. You guys, I wanna invite you to work with me, but you work with one coach at a time, you guys. So if you're working with somebody, Get done with them and then work with me really honestly, because we all have ways to get you to the end. We all have a way to get you to our goal. My way is different than her way is different than his way. And if you're working with too many of us at one time, you're not gonna get anywhere. Pick one coach. One coach at a time. And by the way, I think that the entire time you have your business from this point on, if you wanna be successful in business, you need to be working with a coach. When you're a solopreneur, it's a lot you guys to figure out on your own. You need somebody else. To provide some insight, to provide some accountability, to kind of speak some truth into your life, to remind you of where you're going.
All right. The next thing I wanna talk about is your mission. Your mission as a coach. You guys, it needs to make you want to cry. The desire. That I have to help you is so deep. I will not quit until I am helping as many women as I possibly can. Each of you that I have talked to, I know has a dream, feels like they have a purpose. You have come to life coaching or coaching, whatever kind of coach you are, leadership coach, executive coach, weight loss coach. You've come to. Because you have overcome something and you're determined. I know you, you're determined to not let somebody else experience that. You're determined to help somebody else. This is that passion. This is the mission that you're on, and it needs to move you emotionally. So that's what I say. You gotta have a mission that will make you cry. You cannot quit. This mission needs to be so big that it won't let you quit. Quitting needs to be taken off the table. People said to me early when I started my business in 2000, Well, how did you do it? Quitting was never an option. Take quitting off the table.
You grow your business when you stop quitting on yourself. Right? So what does it mean when I say quitting on yourself and what does it mean? Stop quitting on yourself. It means that you don't change your niche . I know you hate that. Yes. You're gonna get more clear on your niche as you go. I know I talk about that all the time.
There's clarity that comes. You refine your marketing message. All of that's true. You don't change your offer. You don't just have a consultation, call with somebody or meet somebody in networking event and. Throw out an offer. You decide on your offer that is well thought through before you do it, and you just work on getting better and better and better at making your offer.
You do not change what's on your calendar and you stop looking for other ways. To get your business built. You work on what you're learning with your coach or in the course or whatever you're taking. You just keep going until you have mastered that one thing. So take quitting off the table, guys. All right.
Let's talk about pricing and selling. Oh my goodness, you guys, if you're not selling, you're not gonna have a business. You as a coach, as a professional coach deserves to make a living. You have a family to support. You have people in your life obligations, expenses. You have to be able to sell your services.
Let me just say, the world needs what you have to offer. The world needs help. The world needs positivity. It needs all of this mindset work and thought work and life coaching skill that we all know how to do. The world needs that we need. We need hope, we need guidance. You are in a position to be able to offer that to the world, and you just have to learn how to sell it in a way that's authentic to you.
And so you are going to need to learn the skill of selling. Pricing your services is key to you guys. I want you to shut out all the noise of what everyone has told you to price your services at, and I want you to price your services where you feel most comfortable. What will happen is if you price based on what somebody else is doing.
Six months for $5,000. If you price yourself that way and you don't fully believe in that, you're not sure if you can sell that. You're not sure if you could deliver that kind of transformation, that's a $5,000 transformation, which by the way, you can, but if you're not sure about that, you're not gonna be able to sell it.
So you're gonna sell your coaching at a price that works. When I tell you the. In part two of this podcast about how I got to a hundred thousand dollars. You guys, I sold stuff all over the place, and I did lots and lots and lots of free coaching, all right? I took payment plans. I mean, I did whatever I needed to do to figure it out.
Along the way, you will start at a low price, and maybe that's free. Then you'll decide I'm not gonna keep poaching for free. Like these people are getting so much value from it. Then you'll decide I'm gonna charge $500. And then you'll get a group of clients at 500 and you'll think like, Dang, you know the amount of time that I'm putting into this and I'm worth more than this.
And you'll charge a thousand dollars. And then the next thing you know, you'll be up to where you wanna be, whether it's three or four or $5,000 with your coaching, you will be there. But start where you're at. I promise you, I learned this lesson the hard way. I was trying to sell my coaching at a price that my coach told me in 2018.
It slowed my business progress down so much. I sold coaching because I had 800 consultation calls in 2018. I'll tell you more about that in part two. So I sold coaching, but I did not sell as much as I could have if I'd have had a lower price to start. And then if I'd had built up my pricing and sales confidence, and by the way, the results that I was creating with my coach.
If I'd have built that up along the way, I would've been selling so much more coaching. All right, so how long is it gonna take you to do? You know, when I started growing my business, nobody knew that I was taking care of my grandmother half of every day. So I was only working part-time in my business. If you guys would've looked at that, you might not have known.
Maybe when I say to you, I made a hundred thousand dollars in 2021, you're thinking, Why didn't you make more than that? Well, Because I was taking care of my mother who was ill. She was outta state. I was taking care of both my grandmother, then she passed away, and then my mother. So nobody knows what's going on on the inside of somebody's life.
I don't tell you any of that as a sad story. I'm just saying stop looking to see what somebody else has done and then thinking either why didn't they get there faster? Or how did they get there so fast? Because you don't know what the circumstances to their life, what's happening, any of. All right, so it could take you days, weeks, months, and will you do it for a year?
Will you work on building your business every day consistently for a year? That's a question you guys need to answer. I do not want you to quit before you get there. My coaching program is six months, and it's six months for a reason. There are some people who come in, they've already got clients, they wanna grow their business.
They're kind of like wanting to put fuel on their business, and so they'll grow faster. There's some people who come in and work with me, and they're just at the beginning, and we have to figure out nailing their niche, you know, maybe even getting a website done, getting 'em started on their marketing, whatever that is.
Sometimes you guys will be right up to the six month mark and I can see it. Month five, let's say they're getting frustrated. They're thinking like, Oh, nothing is working. I haven't sold anything. And if you keep going, then it just happens and you're like, Wow. All of a sudden I have consultations on my books.
I'm like, No, it's not. All of a sudden you've been consistently working on your business. We've been growing your little tiny list, one person at a time. You've been posting on social media, you've been networking. All of those connections eventually add up and your business starts to work. So do not quit on yourself.
I want you to give yourself six months a year of really working on your business to learn all those skills because it will be so worth it. You have to have willingness and determination. I talk about the year of hustle, and sometimes I get some kickback on that because it's like, who wants to hustle?
Well, look, hustle to me is not quitting. You have to have determination to keep going. You have to invest in yourself. Do you have the willingness to do that? Because the same investment that you learned how to be a coach, a certified professional coach is the same investment and probably even more actually, that you have to make in establishing a business.
So how do you want to show up? The women that I work with, they like to have a plan in place. They like to look good. They like to have their websites ready. They like to have branding that looks good. They wanna have a clear offer. They wanna know what they're talking about. They don't like winging it.
Some of you guys are gonna say, Look, I can just wing it. I can just do it. I don't need any of that. If that is you, you're not my client. My client comes to me and they're like, I wanna know how to do this. I wanna sound like I've got it together when I talk. I wanna know how to do the emails. I wanna know how to do social media.
I wanna have a beautiful website. I wanna have a great offer. I want to know how to sell. I wanna have a sales plan. Well thought out. All of that is what makes me feel confident. But not everybody needs. So if you can just go do, start selling your coaching and you don't need a niche and you're just ready to go talk to people, go for it.
My friend. Most of the clients that I work with though, they have to learn how to be in business for my clients. I teach 'em how to learn how to write, and that sounds so crazy. Like what do you mean write? Many of the people I work with are very high end professionals. Some with, you know, master's degrees, doctorate degrees, and they have to learn how to write.
Like marketing copy is different. Writing emails is d. What you say on social media is different. You have to learn all the technology about maybe editing a podcast, editing zoom, editing videos. You have to learn kava. You have to learn how to have an assistant. I know you want to have an assistant today, but you have to learn how to have an assistant.
That's not easy either. You can't just hire somebody to do your business. You have to know your business, and then you hire an assistant. You have to learn how to work with what I call loose fingers, which means. You're not gripping on so tight to keeping things exactly the way they are. You're willing to let things flow and grow and shift and change as you grow your business.
You have to learn funnels, webinars, workshops, opt-ins. All of that has to be talked as you learn how to be a person who can earn a hundred thousand dollars in your poaching. All right. Let me wrap this up. I know that was a lot in part one, the wrap up and the recap goes like this. Number one, get some helping your business honestly, get some help.
I just listed all the things that you have to learn and you'll grow your business so much faster if you just find one coach and learn that stuff. You also have to allow time to grow your business. If you guys go get an SBA loan, you're going to give them a three year business. When they send you the small business association, send you the paperwork to complete for your loan, you have to give 'em a three year business plan that you will have enough money borrowed, which we're not even borrowing money.
As coaches, you have to have enough money borrowed to sustain a business for three years. Like I'm just asking you to wait and give yourself time a year, six months. But honestly, you. What if it did take a year? What if it took longer than a year? Are you committed enough to keep going? All right, the last thing that I'm gonna say, recap and really make a note of this is don't quit.
Don't quit. Just keep going because people wanna quit when they're all most there. Give yourself the time, the flexibility, the freedom to grow this business that you are meant to. All right. Join me back here next week. I'm gonna talk about part two, where I'm gonna go into all the numbers, exactly what I earned, how I grew my email list, what the steps were I took to market my business and how I did it.
All right. I'll see y'all next time. Have an amazing week.
Okay ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com . I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.
I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.