Transcript
A (0:00)
Does it feel like it's getting really hard to figure out the best way to save for retirement? Fidelity can help you find clarity so you can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way. Get started@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSE SIPC.
B (0:28)
Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. So you just click the Play button right now to find out if it's possible to make a million dollars with a coaching business and if so, how? And I get it. A million dol does sound massive to some of you until you actually do the math. And this episode is not about hype, it's actually breaking down. Exactly how you can pull this off. And I'm telling you right now, it's not about being an influencer or being some sort of big name guru. I know a lot of successful coaches that make eight figures a year in revenue that have very small social media followings. And it's definitely not about grinding yourself to the ground. This is about working smarter with your coaching business. It's about building a real business that can generate a million dollars. Yes, a million dollars a year using group coaching, leverage and a simple system that I want to share with you that has worked for me so that it could work for you in 2026. Welcome back to the Hundred Dollars MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Let's work backwards. So I ran a coaching program for many years inside the $100 MBA. It was like a higher level elite coaching program. And everything I learned in that process I'm going to be sharing with you today. And I also am friends with a lot of coaches and creators and I've pulled some things that works for them for you in this episode. Now, full disclosure, I don't offer coaching anymore. I just have limited time and it's not something that I'm pursuing. But if I was starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do. And I would start with step number one, which is doing the math. Most people never actually do this part. It's actually pretty crazy. And that that's why they kind of stay stuck. So what we want to do is we want to look at three different pricing options. Let's start with option number one, and that's the $2,000 per month option. Let's say you offer high level coaching for $2,000 a month for 12 months. That's $24,000 per client per year. I'm going to stop right here because many of you are like $2,000 a month. Who's going to pay that? Plenty of people. I've paid more than that every single month for coaching because it helped my business, helped me grow, helped me make more money. I got a return on investment. And at the end of the day, as long as your client gets a investment, then they're willing to pay. So if you go back to the math for option number one, and we want to make a million dollars a year charging $24,000 per client per year. Let's divide a million dollars into $24,000. That equals 42 clients. That's it. 42 clients is all you need to hit a million dollars. If you are charging $24,000 a year per client. And this is why I start with this option, because when you start with a higher priced product, you don't need as many customers and it's easier for you to hit your goal throughout the year. What about option number two? $1,000 per month. You charge $1,000 per month for your coaching and that will equal $12,000 per year per client. You know the math. Now It's a double 84 clients. You need 84 clients in your program to make a million dollars a year. Still very manageable, especially in a group format. And it's still very manageable in terms of getting that many clients. Last but not least, option number three, $500 per month. Full transparency. This is where I started in my coaching career where I charge $500 per month. That meant I need 167 clients to get to that million dollar in revenue a year mark. Now that's a lot of clients for some of you and that the reason why we're doing this exercise is you could see that pricing really makes a big difference in terms of hitting that million doll. So the takeaway here is the higher your prices, the fewer customers you need, the simpler your business can be. This is why getting clarity on how many clients you actually need to get to your goal really matters. It helps you understand which pricing model you should go with. Let's move on to the next step. Step two in building your coaching business. What people actually pay for. I want you to listen to me very closely because these are the reasons why people fail at coaching businesses. They don't understand. People are paying for. People don't pay for coaching calls. They don't pay you for your time. They don't pay you for how passionate you are about the topic. None of this. They pay you for outcomes. Full stop. That's it. They want an outcome. They want a transformation. And high demand outcomes usually fall into a few categories. I'm going to give you those categories so that you know what to go after so you can make your life easier when you're building your coaching business. Here are the categories. Making more money so this is a very easy and straightforward thing where you coach them to help them grow their revenue so they see the return on investment in your program. So like if I pay you money, you're going to help me make more money. Very simple. The other category is saving time. People value their time. You may not know a lot of people like this, but they exist and they're plentiful where they really value their time and they want to save time and they're willing to spend money to save time. They also will pay. In the category of career advancement. They feel like you can help them move up in their career. And this is kind of like a pseudo making more money. But it also adds prestige and adds fulfillment. But they feel like you can help them advance in their career, move up in their career in some way, move up to management in their company. Then they're willing to invest. People are also willing to invest in health and confidence. So this could be personal fitness, this could be mental health. This could be feeling more confident in front of the camera, for example, stage presence. People will pay money to feel more healthy and more confident. And the last category I'm going to throw in here is reducing stress or complexity. If you can make things easier for people, less stressful for people, more convenient for people, then people will pay. This is why people pay for business class, because it's convenient. It reduces stress. They get to sit in a nice, beautiful, luxurious lounge before their flight and then they get to board first and they get to put their luggage without having to like wrestle and fight for space in the overhead compartment. They have a very comfortable journey. They get served with dignity and a nice drink and nice meals. You get the point. People will pay more to feel less stress and have more convenience. Now the reason why I talk about this is because I want you to package your programs and the way you present them in a way that actually allows people to sign up and feel like it's a compelling offer. So don't call your coaching mindset coaching. What is that mindset coaching going to get them? What's the actual result? Is it going to save them time? Is it going to make more money? Is it going to reduce stress? Talk about that. The outcome, don't talk about business mentoring. What is that business mentoring going to get them? What's the outcome? Maybe it's as simple as getting their first ten high paying clients. If somebody can come across your coaching program and they could say to themselves, if this works out, if this actually works for me, my life can change in some way. If that happens, you don't need to convince them, you don't need to sell. They understand the value immediately. And that's what you need to do is make it clear enough for them to say, hey, if this works, then I see the change it could do in my life. Full transparency. I was on a sales call before I was recording this episode on somebody introducing a coaching program for me. I'm always looking for ways to improve this one in particular will help me with my presentation skills. And, and I thought he did an excellent job. And the reason why he did an excellent job is because I immediately, in the first few minutes of him presenting, could see what my life could be like. After I was coached, I could see the result. I could see how this can help me in my business. And immediately I started to see the benefits. I needed to see the return on investment. So when it came for him to pitch me his program or his one on one coaching or whatever it might be. And you know, he shares his prices. I'm not so concerned about the price so much. I'm just like excited to get started. I'm already kind of sold already and as long as the price is reasonable, then I'm happy to pay. All because I quickly understood the value. I quickly understood the return on investment I would get. How this would help me in my life and business. If you've been a listener of the show for some time, you know how much I believe that the little things really matter in your business. In fact, Nicole's got a keynote talk that she gives on stages called the Doll are in the details. If you want to level up your business, if you want to take things to another place, you need to make sure you nail the basic stuff in your business, like how you talk to your customers and how you keep your team on the same page. A cleaner, more modern setup can make everything feel smoother, which is why today's episode is sponsored by Quo, spelled Q U O. The modern alternative to running your business communications. If you like to travel like I do, you're going to love Quo because Quo works wherever you are, right from an app, on your phone or on the computer, and it lets you keep your existing number. Add new numbers or teammates in minutes and you can sync it with your CRM and rely on seamless routing and call flows as your business starts to scale. Quo isn't just a phone system, it's a smart system. Quo's AI automatically logs calls, generates summaries and highlights next steps so nothing gets lost. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com mba that's quot com mba no missed calls, no missed customers the all new five year business boost from Comcast Business. It's the certainty of a price lock for five years on qualifying Internet bundles plus the most reliable WI fi with their best equipment. And ask about a $500 prepaid card when you add two lines of mobile. The five year business boost only from Comcast Business Powering Possibilities ends 22226 new customers only one year contract required for guaranteed rate. Five year pricing applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Best WI Fi based on Open Signal Awards USA Fixed Broadband Experience Report May 2025 Step 3 in building your million dollar coaching business is leverage. Specifically, group coaching is a form of leverage, right? You Want to coach many people at one time. And I'm telling you right now, group coaching is actually better than one on one coaching in many ways, not only for your business, but for the actual clients. Let me tell you why. The first thing is you help more people. This is no small thing because you're able to multiply your revenue quickly when you're in a group setting, when you're on the zoom call and helping several people instead of one person. But this also means that you're able to get more case studies. You can learn more about your customers, learn more about what they're struggling with, and get better at coaching because you're helping more people. Secondly, you're protecting your time. You spend one hour and you help 50 people, for example, versus one hour and only helping one person. So you're leveraging your time in a better way. You're also building momentum. You're getting more wins out in one hour. Meaning when you help 50 people at one shot, 50 people are learning and having the penny drop and sharing their, you know, aha moments and praising you for the help that you're making. And they're sharing this with everybody else. And then lastly, you deliver better results through the community. What do I mean by that? Is when you're in a group setting and you are a student, you're not only learning from the coach and learning from the adv that coach is giving you personally, but you're also learning when they're coaching somebody else. What I learn in business is that there are no unique problems. Most of us either encounter the same problems or will encounter the same problems. So if you're on a coaching call and you're the student and the coach is helping somebody else out, just paying attention to that and learning from their coaching example, you can understand how you could do better in your own life and your own business. So you're actually giving your students some more with group coaching than one on one. So how do you structure this? Well, actually you can create a simple structure very easily. You can do a weekly live group call and this could be on Zoom or whatever live video software you want to use. You can have a clear 8 to 12 week roadmap where you say, hey, this is where we're going to learn these things in the next weeks, 8 to 12 weeks. You can have a community for accountability. This could be a Facebook group, this could be a WhatsApp group. Could be a Slack channel so people can ask questions or maybe cheer people on or share wins throughout the week. When you're not on the call, then you're going to be sharing templates, you're going to share maybe some frameworks, some examples on the call and off the call. And then you can also have an optional one on one upgrade. A lot of coaches do this where it's like hey, if you want to do a quick 30 minute call with me, one on one, it's going to cost X amount of dollars and it's just like a one off charge. Here's the thing. A lot of people think they need a huge massive course library. They don't. Some of the best coaching programs I was a part of as a student, they didn't have a lot of videos in the library. They had a few. And then guess what, every week you do a call, you add this to your library, it becomes part of the library and this is where an EA really comes into place. You should have your EA on the call because sometimes people are going to ask questions and you're going to answer them. But maybe you covered it more in depth or gave you know, more information on in a previous call and you can refer to, to that call in the library and your EA can kind of pull it up and put the link in the chat and allow people to dive into that old recording. And in my opinion, when you're part of a coaching program, the value is the live is being coached live in the live sessions and, and, and getting out of the community what you signed up for. So most people are not so interested in this library of stuff that they never watch. It's good to have if it's referring to something that they need to kind of dig into. And that's when I gave that example of like a past recording. So you always have that. So make sure you record your calls so that way you have a library as you're doing your calls. Step 4 How do you actually get the clients? Let's get really practical. I believe that if you're going to coach people, this is the product, a coaching program, then you should get your clients through coaching. Why? Because it's the easiest way to sell your program because they're going to see you in action. And the best way to do this is through webinars is to do a one off live webinar. Whether it's an hour or 90 minutes or whatever it might be. This is a great way for you to help people. Whether it's for free or maybe it's a low ticket item and at the same time a chance for them to see what it's like to be coached by you. This is like a test drive. And the reason why I recommend webinars is not because they're flashy. It's actually the opposite. They're easy. They're easy to do, and they actually build trust really fast. They let you teach and show your stuff. Where you start pitching and selling allows you to handle objections really in a live fashion. So when people have questions about why they should buy, or if some people have very simple questions, like, do you take Amex? Or, you know, do you have a payment plan? And you can easily handle those objections. So they're not like, kind of like festering and lingering their head. They just saw you on a sales page. So that's what's great about webinars as well. You can handle objections live. You can scale your efforts and sell to many people at one shot with a webinar. So here's a simple funnel that you can use. A simple webinar funnel to make it super simple. Number one, you want to just create a call on Zoom, a free webinar. You want to teach one painful problem that your audience has on that webinar. You want to share your method, share your framework on that problem and how to solve it. And you want to invite them to apply to your coaching program at the end. Very simple, right? And what a lot of people do is they like to answer questions, of course, not only about the program, but about what you taught throughout so that you can be able to handle objections and get people interested in your program as you're going through the webinar. This is not pushing, this is guiding. And frankly, you could just simply say, if I helped you on the webinar today, then you're probably going to get a lot out of my coaching program because I'll be helping you out throughout the year or in the next, whatever, how long your program is. By the way, as you're growing your business, whether it's a coaching business or a service business or a software business, you're going to want to learn how to scale your business beyond your first few customers. And we have an upcoming episode that I recorded that I want to let you know about. It's a Q and A Wednesday episode where I answer the question, how do I go from freelancer to agency? How do I scale that kind of business? But the lessons I teach will apply to any kind of business. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss that episode. Step five is getting over your own mental barrier. You know what I'M talking about. Many of you have this question in your head right now that say, who am I to be a coach? Who am I to help other people? I'm no expert and I'm here to tell you, you don't need to be the world's best to help other people. You're actually better off not being the best in the world. It's actually better to be just a few steps ahead of whoever you're coaching. You want to be able to tell people, hey, I just went through the journey you went through and I can show you the way. You're clear about the process. You know, a lot of people ask me, how do I start a podcast? And my answer immediately is, I started my podcast almost 12 years ago. It's really hard for me to give advice on how to start a podcast versus growing a podcast because it's been so long. And then lastly, it's okay to be honest with your experience and say, hey, I'm not the biggest guru in the world. I'm not an expert. I'm not a New York Times best selling author on this topic. But I've achieved what you want to achieve. And let me share with you how I did it. There are so many things you can leverage that you have at your disposal. Your career, your mistakes, your wins, your lived experience. Your perspective is probably a unique one that many other people may not have. People don't buy perfection again, they're buying an outcome. And if they can believe that you can help them with the outcome because you've shown them that you have the outcome or you've achieved the outcome before, then that's all you need. That brings us to step six, selling out every month. This one is an important lesson that I've learned from a good friend of mine, Taki Moore. If you don't know who Taki Moore is and you're in the coaching world, you should know who Taki Moore is. Takimor is like the coach of coaches, and he's helped so many coaching businesses make a million dollars a year. He's actually called the million dollar coach. And he's one of the most honest, legit, good people to learn from. And I learned this from him. You don't need to sell all the time. You need to sell in cycles. For example, you should only sell a certain number of spots per month in your coaching program. So say, for example, every month they're going to open up 15 spots per month. Why are you doing this? Because you need to create boundaries. You need to create scarcity around your program, not only so that people can feel the urgency to buy, but also so you can serve your customers properly and kind of move into scale as you grow. So you're going to choose a number that you feel comfortable with, like a number of spots per month. You're going to tell them when the program starts. Let's say, for example, you can join the first of the month to join the cohort. And then once it's full, once those 15 spots are sold out, you close. You tell them there are no available spots, no exceptions. This works because scarcity is a real thing and it helps people make decisions. It also allows you to start all your clients at one shot, one cohort, so you know exactly where they are in their journey. In the coaching program, it also allows the energy to stay high when everybody's starting. At the same time, they have accountability, they have a group, they kind of a class that they're all part of. It's also a way to help improve the results of the group because they're all kind of holding themselves accountable. And word of mouth kind of grows because, hey, we're in this group, we're going to talk to each other. They might be telling their friends and family, hey, you should join and join the next class. And what Taki taught me is that, hey, once the doors close and you say, hey, we're sold out. And somebody's like, hey, I want to get in, can I get in? You can say, yeah, you can get in, but for next month, go ahead and you can start selling the next month's program or the next month cohort so that they can put down a deposit, for example, and then pay the rest when it's time to start. So as you can see, building a million dollar coaching business isn't built by just hustling your brains out or posting more on social media or being louder online. It's built by having a clear outcome, a simple offer, a repeatable system to get customers in through webinars, for example, and the courage to charge properly for what you are offering. A powerful and really important outcome for your clients. When your clients feel like this is important, I need this, then they will pay. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If people already ask you for advice, if you've helped others, even informally with advice over the years, if you've been sitting on some experience that you've had, you're probably closer than you think. You're probably selling yourself short. Start small and start growing. Okay, charge fairly because you're going to do the work, you're going to do the work, so you might as well charge what you're worth. And as long as you deliver on the outcome, you deliver deeply, you give it your all, and you know you're going to give your all, then you're going to be good. You just could continue to repeat this month over month and you'll start to grow an incredible coaching business. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, then you're going to love this one. I know there's a lot of buzz these days when it comes to AI, but what are the best businesses to build around AI? What are the best AI businesses to start in 2026? Well, I cover that in detail in an episode because when you combine leverage and technology and a strong offer, everything just accelerates and I don't want you to miss out on the opportunity. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts by hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
