Maximizing Cash Flow and Scalability in Coaching Business: Solutions and Strategies

Faisal: maybe we can start with what is the problem we're trying to solve here? And there are a few problems here to solve that. From a business standpoint, the biggest problem I would say is like a cash flow problem, because your business needs cash flow.

If you don't have cash flow, you're not gonna do anything. You're gonna be just in survival more trying to look for clients and there are ways to go around that when we're selling packages, you can charge at a higher ticket price. And you can do that, but then you always have to kind of be ahead of the game with that.

Is that okay I have three clients for the next three months trying, charging at a higher ticket than you should always be looking for clients, but then that's gonna end at some point. Or they might not re-up. So how do I move around that? How do I create consistent cash flow, whether it's on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis?

Yeah, the way I look at it is the way schools work, like they have a consistent stream of clients, always. It's like an open-door kind of system. So I think the best analogy that I saw was actually somebody promoting that the difference might be and assuming that you're at a point where you have a lot of clients, and this also solves the scalability problem too, is that their client waiting for you, but they're waiting for an elevator and the elevator is already booked, but they can't get in and sooner or later they're gonna go somewhere else.

Right. Compared that to more of the like an escalator. Is that it's always evolving. There are people coming in constantly and nobody needs to stop. You don't need to start the launch and stop the launch. You can consistently bring in clients and there might be some clients that will leave. And ideally, you wanna bring in more clients than the clients that are leaving.

That will depend on your program. Also, you're creating a central place and this is where the impact increases. A central place for your clients to come together and support each other. And this also brings together the group coaching model, which is much more scalable. That you can do it in different ways and I'll share how I do it.

But you can scale it much, much better. And the other benefit that it has is that you don't need to start with 10 people. You could start with one person, to be honest. Yeah. 

Sheri: Yeah, which I, I think is completely outside of the thought process that most coaches have. So kind of unpack what that would look like and how would one market it, if it's only one and what do you think that would be?

Faisal: So originally as I started this, I started running webinars or more like live Zoom calls, and I did live group coaching. And then at the end, I would offer my program. And in the beginning, I didn't have that many. I had maybe five or six people sign up.

And on average, sometimes 1% would show up in the group. In total five or six, and I started with two groups. So it was divided between the two groups. And what I found out over the years is that if you have a group of 10 that you're running, you wanna schedule at least 20 people in there because about 50, 60% will show up more regularly.

Okay. 16 to 20 people you wanna have registered. So I had like five or six people registered on average, there would be one person who would show up. In the beginning, that would freak me out. I'm like, oh, oh my God. But then over time, I saw that this person is getting a lot of value because what they've done is they've paid for a group program, but they're getting one-on-one coaching a lot of times as they come into the fold.

And that's okay. We might freak out, oh, well, I'm promoting this as a group. We don't need to, you don't need to explain it. You don't need to justify it. The person comes in, you serve them. That's it. And ultimately, what people care about is, whether are they served or not.  

Sheri: We actually had a similar scenario with a mastermind that my husband and I do around real estate investing.

And you know, as a business person, I want this really robust and active community with lots of people. But the challenge is like, how do you start with that? Most of us as coaches, unless you have a waiting list that's a mile long, you're probably not gonna start your group or your membership or whatever with that many people.

And so I kind of had this mindset of a little bit of embarrassment that we're starting so small and starting with such a small group. And there was one time I asked for feedback. I said, Hey, you know, what do you love about this group? Just wanted to make sure that we were, staying on track and a couple of the people actually commented that they like the fact that the group is smaller because they got more specific and more dedicated feedback from them. So I just wanted to really echo Faisal's comment about that. Being small, having one person, two people, or just a few you might think is embarrassing or is like, shows that you're not, you don't have this nice great thing that you're trying to build, but it might actually be the other way around.

They might actually appreciate it, so don't let that fear stop you.

Faisal: Yeah, and that was the fear I had from the beginning. It didn't matter at all. Like the person would show up ultimately once I got over my own shit. And then the first few minutes, then I would just, either we would jump into a topic that I had prepared, or if it was one person, I would ask them like, what, what would, what would serve you to you?

Would you like to go into the topic that we've worked through? Or is there any area I can support you on? And this is around more like mindset coaching. This could be used for several different reasons. And I felt really good about it when I signed up for this 20 4K program. It was a group program.

I go in, there were three people in the group. And my first reaction, I was glad that there were three cuz I wanted my questions answered. And go to the next one. There were two, and then once in a while, I would be the only one. It's a very high-ticket program, and they didn't need to justify anything.

And from my perspective, I was glad that there weren't too many people and it was more of a business program. But I liked it. So now backtracking, cuz I know people are hearing this. Okay. What the hell are you talking about? We were mostly talking about the advantages, why this is important, why it's scalable but how it might look like, and I want you to think about it from two different angles.

One might be an evergreen group coaching model and I'll go into that. And the other one might be a hybrid coaching model. And I'm sure there are other ones there, but the idea is that you offer the program maybe as part of your one-on-one package, maybe as a bonus that all my one-on-one clients get it, or you offer it as a separate one.

It raises the value of the program overall, but those who can't afford the one-on-one, go into the group program with you. So the way it works is, though, the way I offer it, at least at this point, it's either a monthly membership or a yearly membership, and the yearly, when I give a good discount of around close to 16%, so about 30, 40% sign up for yearly any, and which creates a good cashflow.

Now, I've seen other models like that. What you can also do is, and I haven't done this myself, but my business coach does this. Is that he takes about 50% upfront and the rest goes into the membership. So you have more of the deposit paid. I like that model. It's just I need to do some structuring and restructuring. But the idea is that once you get somebody's credit card or payment system, they're part of it. You're not asking to re-op or anything. As long as they're getting value in the program, they're part of it. They decide whether or not they want to be part of the program. And that's the evergreen model.

And here's how it might work. So let's take mindset coaching as an example. So I started as a high-performance coach, but any kind of mindset coaching falls into a few specific, it's categories. So for example, there's your, how much clarity do you have in your life? What's going on with your relationships?

What's going on with your emotions? What's going on with your productivity? What's going on with how you look at the bigger themes like purpose in your life? What's going on with how you're structuring your day-to-day habits in life? There are certain themes that come up for human beings.

And the reason you can run it on a continuous is let's say somebody joins at Clarity, they will get value in that session, but they'll get ongoing value. But let's say somebody joins in, when you're talking about emotions, you're discussing that they will get value from that. You don't need to backtrack to the last one because you will recycle the last session and the discussions will be very different because the group dynamics are different.

The people are different. Their thought processes are different at that point. So you can keep revolving the door around the themes and human awareness or human experience. Yeah. 

Sheri: So what you're talking about is that the content that you're delivering on this evergreen is not dependent.

It's not building on itself necessarily. You don't have to have been here last week to understand what we're doing. Yeah. This week one of the challenges that I am trying actively working through on our membership model, our mastermind membership, is that we have a combination of teaching as well as coaching.

Yeah. And so one of the things we're looking at doing, because if somebody jumps in, You know, three months, six months after we kind of started for the year, they're behind the ball a little bit on some of the basics that we're teaching around real estate. And so I'm shifting to conceptualizing, having like an intro course, like four or five little videos that they can watch to get them up to speed on just like the basics of things.

So then that way when they jump in, I'm not saying things. We're talking about things that are completely over their head and they are up to speed. So I just kind of wanted to share that that's one solution that we're looking at doing so with the Evergreen model when we still have content that they kind of going to need in order for things to make sense.

Faisal: Yeah. Yeah. So that will work better on the hybrid model. But I want to share the thinking behind it as even more important than the intention behind it, because why do we create groups like this? If the purpose for us is to deliver information, it's probably not as valuable because they can pretty much take that, they can find all that information for free, no matter how complex you think it is, no matter how you're, yes, you're curating it a certain way in your own way.

Great. But they can find the same information for free anywhere. The whole purpose of live group sessions like this is to help clients implement this process, whatever it is. Whether it's a mindset, or habit, whether it's they're trying to find clarity in their life, how can they implement it better in real estate?

And they're gonna get information. Like every real estate program, I've been a part of, they will go and binge on the information, but they don't do anything with it. Because information doesn't do anything unless you implement it. And usually implementation. The blocks around it are they have hesitations, they have confusions, they have fears, they have all sorts of things that need to be dealt with, and usually that gets dealt with in either one-on-one or group live sessions.

So just going back to that, my intention is to help create transformation, not to give more information necessarily. Information will come into it naturally, but how do we get them to change behavior, not to give more information? So having said that, for example, the way you were describing, and even in C M C, the way we're thinking about our 90-day challenge is very similar.

So at this point, we've kind of come up with two ways. So we do have a set of information they need to go through. For example, building their niche. Coaches are building their niche, so we don't need to go through the whole process of niche building. Every time we can have a video recording, have it in the member's area, and they can go through it.

And then they can show up to the session and we can support them with their specific questions. And we can create a conversation around it where other coaches who've had experience in this area, how they've dealt with it in real life. Now it might happen that you have a combination of different members.

Like some of them are new, some of them are more experienced. They don't need that. So depends on how you structure and how many members are there. If you have like three, or four members in the whole group, You can literally structure it as a hybrid model. You can let's say the new members come in, they have a set of training they go through, and then you just tell 'em to show up.

We'll support you in whatever area you need support with, and even the advanced members could show up and they could learn from it, but you answer their questions separately. The way I've seen it, for example, in a business program is that there are two, if you have partners, this is helpful. There are two coaches in there.

One of them goes into a breakout and answers. The other question and the other one stay and answers the question and help create a generator discussion around in the other room. Like there are so many other creative ways of doing things. Another way we've thought about it, for example, and C M C, is that if we have new members coming in, they go to the one video every week and they come in, we support 'em in that area. But we might also have advanced members who deal with a specific topic, but not at a basic foundational level. That would be another session where they can join us and discuss this thing. They already know the terminology they've already gone through.

For example, niche building or let's say they're thinking about membership models. We create a discussion around how we can make it more implementable in what they have done. Like what are the challenges that are coming across? You can either combine these or run 'em separately.

But as you think about this, there are so many ways of doing this that it shouldn't stop you from doing it. It's just that once you start, you find more creative ways of running the sessions. There shouldn't be a reason why you don't start something like this.

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