This is article #2 in the series on Coaching as a business. Article #1 was "Is Your Coaching Business as Successful as You Thought It Would Be?" (See link at bottom of article to the previous article).

Most coaches dont treat their coaching as a business, therefore they either never make it profitable, or they never make it successful enough to live on. Very few make even $20K in their first year. This is how to turn that around and make as much as you want.

Im going to give you a formula to run your business. Weve got to start with the end result in mind, and then build the step by step critical goals that will deliver the results. Weve got to know where were going before we can build the roadmap to take you there.

• Marketing Activities deliver Number of Appointments needed
• Sales turns those appointments into the number of closed sales needed
• Production turns those closed sales into the Completed and paid for jobs that will deliver EXACTLY the number of dollars of revenue you WANT this year.

Lets start with the end in mind. How many dollars would you like to make this year? $___________

Dont answer with how many dollars you THINK you CAN make. Put down what youd like to make. Be reasonable about it, but dont hold back either.

Im rather amazed at the number of clients that dont know this, and actually argue with me that there is no way they can give me that answer. Some responses are, How can I tell you that? They are all different. Ive got $10 customers, $100 customers, and $1000 customers. Im going to tell you: What you do not measure, you cannot manage. Therefore, if you arent defining a measurable target, and then measuring your progress toward that target, you arent managing your business, and that is one of the biggest mistakes unsuccessful coaches make.

So, take your best shot. After all I asked for an AVERAGE. So what is the average customer worth? You can figure that.

For some of my clients well break that up into customer segments. That $10 customer is certainly different from the $100, or $1,000 customer. So, this is a good time to talk about what the average $100 customer looks like. How he is different from the $1,000 customer, and should we be focusing on one instead of the other? Who should we be building a business with that just might catapult our business forward because we worked with only one type of customer?

We can look at the average customer purchase (one time) and we can look at whether a customer buys from us several times over a year, in which case we may want to know what they are worth to us for the total purchases throughout the year.

Just take the target revenue for this year and divide by the average customer worth? So far weve been talking about the target for the year. Now Im going to ask you the same questions for NEXT WEEK.

Why next week? Far too many people make excuses about their business. The usual one is: It takes months to build a business.

Im going to tell you this, and listen very closely because it may just be one of the most important things you will ever learn about your business:

• It does not take months to get results.
• The results you see this week will be almost the same each and every time you do it.
So, why do people wait weeks, months, and sometimes years for results? Because they have been told that it takes 5-6 times of being in front of a customer before they respond, and because they think it just takes a long time to get in front of enough people, and other excuses.

Well cover that in more detail in the future articles of the series on marketing. Just take my word for it, it may change a little after 5-6 times, but you wont have to wait if you do it right. You will see the results NEXT WEEK. And if you are waiting week after week for results, youve already done it wrong and missing the boat. Well have to fix whats wrong NEXT WEEK (not later) and get back on track. Those that are waiting week after week, or month after month are the 90% of the coaches that fail in their first year.

Ok, Ill get off my soapbox. Now, answer the question. How many customers do we need NEXT WEEK. Just divide the yearly number of customers by 52 weeks. Simple.

That answer should be obvious. We have to sell the same number of people week to week that we are producing, or delivering our coaching service to. We are just selling them, or closing them, usually a little sooner than when we are coaching them.

If you answer isnt up to about 50%, then ask yourself a couple of questions.
• Am I talking to the right people?
• Am I saying the right things to these people?
• Do I need help in increasing my sales close ratio?

Take the number of sales you need to close in a week divided by the percent of sales closes to get the number of appointments needed in a week. If you need 3 closed sales this week, and have a sales close ratio of 50%, then you need 3/.5=6 appointments. Moving on to marketing/lead generationWhere are these people coming from?

Create a list of all of the lead generation activities you are doing, how much are you doing in each of the activities, and what is the response rate? It might look a little like this.

Activity---------Qty ------Response-- # Leads Generated

Direct Mail---1000 pcs-------5%------------50

Email---------1000------------1%-----------10

• to manage those numbers,
• to deliver exactly those results each and every week,
• and if those numbers fall below target, then fix it by increasing the activity, or by changing something (marketingwhat you say, how you say it, and who you say it to), sales (what you are saying and how).

Look for the next article in this series: Coaching as a Business Series Marketing/Lead Generation That Will Blow Them Away

Come back next week to get the next article in the series. Next week, we will talk about how to develop effective marketing for your coaching, how you can achieve even better response rates than you have been doing, and even better than AVERAGE marketing by 5-10 times.

This is article #2 in the series on Coaching as a business. Article 1 was "Is Your Coaching Business as Successful as You Thought It Would Be?"