As modern therapists…

we’ve all heard about online coaching.

But there is so much more to the industry than life coaching. In fact, wherever there is an individual who wants to walk through their challenges with another person, there is an opportunity for coaching.

These challenges can be emotional and relational just like they are in therapy. OR, they can fall into other categories health, business, achievement, and so much more.

Coaching can feel like the answer to our prayers as we look for a way to live a lighter lifestyle without the income ceilings or impact limitations of therapy. I mean, it's basically way more money for the exact same type of work.

Yet, while there are many upsides to coaching, there are definite drawbacks too.

So this episode kicks off a 6 episode series.

And we’re taking a look at the most common online offers, giving them a more concrete definition, talking about the pros and cons of each, what you can expect as far as marketing, overhead, and revenue.

Basically all the things.

Today we're zooming in on coaching to help you decide if this is the right business model for you.

By examining things like income potential, marketing effort, and scalability, you can get the clarity and confidence you're looking for to turn your what if's about online income into how to's.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Transcript:

Hey, risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. If you're on the fence of exactly what it is you want to do for your online income stream, this series is going to explore coaching and it's going to explore courses, but it's also gonna take a look at info products, membership sites, group programs, and even in-person retreats because while they're delivered face-to-face, they are still marketed and sold online.

I was talking about this in the last back-to-business school lecture. We all just kind of hung around and chatted after the lecture was over about the fact that this online income stream needs to be something that you love. Because for a while you're gonna be running two businesses and maybe for ways you're gonna be running two businesses. It's not as if you are closing your therapy today and starting your online revenue stream tomorrow, right? For the most part, most of you are wanting to sort of balance the two as elusive as that could be to be able to run both at the same time. Eventually, you may scale down your caseload and you may ramp this up, or this may always just be a side hustle for you and give you those extra few thousand dollars to pay off your student loans or whatever that might be. While you were in the process of running two businesses concurrently, while you're in the process of some of that stress and some of that craziness, this online income stream needs to be something that you really love and that feels like the right fit. Okay?

So by now, if you consider yourself a modern therapist or someone that is hip to the industry and all these changes and things that are going on, you have surely heard of the world of online coaching.

So what we're all probably the most familiar with is life coaching, since this is what feels the most similar to therapy. But the truth is coaching can exist in every industry, every niche, and really every capacity. Okay? So wherever there is a person out there who. A problem or a concern or an issue, and they want support on that issue. There is the opportunity to become a coach. Wherever someone is seeking one-on-one guidance for a question they have, there is the opportunity to be a coach. So this may be an aspect of their life, like dating and relationships. If you remember the show, millionaire Matchmaker with Patty Stinger. I don't know if you guys watch Trash TV as I do. She is a really good example of someone who could be considered a relationship coach. She was there when they were having emotional ups and downs. She was there to offer advice. She was there to provide her expertise. She was there as an accountability holder. She was there as a cheerleader. And all of these roles will come back up in a moment, but she is somebody who can really be considered a coach when it comes to relationships.

But there are also maybe parents out there who want better communication with their teenagers or people who want to embrace more spirituality in their lives. So these are places you may see life coaching come up.

Or it could be an aspect of someone's health. Like for instance, they just got a diagnosis of an autoimmune disorder, and now they're looking to cut out gluten and dairy from their diet. They may want to walk alongside someone who's done this before, or they may want to have access to someone who has expertise in this so that they can ask questions too. So coaching can overlap into areas of health, not just life.

And obviously, a person could want help in their business and want to have access to an expert who they can call on for guidance, right? It's that ability to answer and serve in a one-on-one capacity, wherever that might be. So my favorite facetious example of late. That I've been throwing around a lot is the idea of someone who has this beautiful rose garden. They've been gardening for years and every year they enter the county fair and their roses get second place every year.

And this year they're just fed up and they want that dang blue ribbon, right? They could reach out to somebody who has a beautiful garden who gets that first-place ribbon and they. Offer to pay them for their advice. They could offer to say, I would love one-on-one help. Can you show me what I need to do with my soil, with my fertilizer, with whatever, to get these roses to get first place? Okay, so you could literally be a rose gardening coach. Right. It doesn't matter the level of seriousness of the problem. It doesn't matter if there is an impact on their emotional health or stuff like that, right? If there is a problem, a need, a desire, a want, a craving, anything that a person has that they want to work with, somebody one-on-one, there is the opportunity to be a.

Okay. I think this is important for therapists to realize because the first place that we go to is the difference between. Therapy and coaching. It's a bit of a fear-based place, and it's a bit of a protective place because a lot of times we see coaching as encroaching on the mental health space as something that is taking over our industry. But I hope from the examples above, you can see that there's just actually a small cross-section of coaching that goes. Or even kind of touches on what we do in mental health and I also think what gets our backup about coaching is the fact that it's so unregulated when we compare it to therapy, which is highly regulated, right?

This is where we feel like, oh, I've done all of these things. I've jumped through all of these hoops. I've got the degree, I've got the continuing ed, I've got the thousand dollars in student. For thousands of dollars in student loans and I'm practicing therapy. And then here's this person with no credentials, practicing coaching.

Okay. Now this can definitely be true in some cases where you might see somebody who's like an anxiety coach, right? I think this is a very fine line for therapists to try to walk while they're still practicing clinically because it taps into that gray area of licensure, ethics, and things like that. But I really think it's a fine line and pretty much a line I wouldn't cross as an untrained professional. Are there people out there who are going to try that and try and do that? Sure. But the majority of coaches out there are really wanting to serve in the capacity of where their expertise lies. Okay. So I'd love us to start looking at mental health and coaching as two separate.

Industries is there crossover? Sure. It's the same thing with like a doctorate, or a dentist, right? A Dr. May be doing their yearly exam and they may look in your mouth and they might notice something that is. Weird. Right? But they're not going to go ahead and do dentistry on you. Right. And the same thing might happen.

You may be at the dentist and you may, they maybe notice something with your teeth and they may say, are you having regular headaches? And you might say, yeah. And the dentist says, okay, I think it's time to see a doctor. Right? There's crossover there but they're not stepping on each other's toes and they're not going into each other's lanes. Right. So I'd really love for us to be able to see it. And therapy the same way. So what I hope you take away from just this part of the conversation is that people want to walk through their challenges with other people. There is a loneliness epidemic in this world, right? And I think as therapists we see that. So people want to walk through their challenges with other people, and sometimes those challenges are emotional or relational, which can feel close to mental health. They can feel close to the work that we do, but other times those challenges are completely different than what we do in. So it doesn't make those challenges any less deserving of one-on-one attention and one-on-one help.

All right, so let's continue with getting a clear idea of what coaching is, and I'm gonna share my perspective here and my experience with coaching. So I want you guys to keep in mind, I'm not a certified coach and I honestly don't necessarily think there are. Is a need for coach certifications, especially for therapists. I know that opinion puts me, in a position of polarity, right? There's gonna be people who say you need a certification. And then there's me on the other hand that says you don't need a certification. Right? I take a much more. Homegrown approach to coaching, and I think you can hear from some of the examples that I offered above.

Often someone will reach out to a friend or a colleague, or a peer. It's just a couple steps ahead of them, and they just want that personal guidance. Okay. And I think that that plays a really important role in coaching. I don't think that we can negate that. Okay. So I am not sharing here some definition from like the International Federation or anything like that.

Instead, I really just wanna lay out this episode from my perspective. How I've used coaching in my own business, what I see across the coaching industry, and also from what I've seen with really other really successful coaching businesses who, some have a mental health background and some definitely don't, but they still.

Show up in this coaching role and can have wildly successful businesses. So I'm kind of a sports person, like not really a big sports nut, but I get sports. And so I'm gonna run with a sports analogy throughout this episode. If you're not a sports person, just go with me. But if you know more about sports than I do, give me some grace and some freedom and some leeway here.

I would love it if you just go with me. When we think about a sports team, right? Their ultimate goal is to win a. To win a game, to win the games, to win the series, to get the trophy at the end, right? That is the ultimate goal of a sports team. Are there other benefits of being on a team like camaraderie and, you know, all of that stuff?

Sure. But what is the point of playing sports if it's not to win and to be the champion? And the coach has a few roles in this, right? So there's the team and then there's the coach. And the roles that they film are vast and varied. So sometimes the coach is the cheerleader, right? The team is just on fire and the coach is just on the sideline saying, yes, you got to keep it going. Woohoo. Right? Sometimes the coach is the ass-kicker for the team. Like, what the heck are you guys doing? I can't believe you made that mistake. Whatever. Or, get in there. You can play better. Totally making this up, right? The coach can be the motivator for the team. They go in into the locker room at halftime and they give that motivating speech, right?

The coach can be the accountability holder, the advice giver, and even sometimes the hand holder. Okay. The coach meets the players and the team where they are in that moment of that game and keeps them moving forward toward the ultimate goal of winning the game. Okay, so the coach isn't asking the players how they feel.

The coach isn't bringing up the last game or last season, right? They're calling on their expertise to respond in real-time, to get to the ultimate goal of winning the game and winning the championship. So can we think about how that relates to coaching a person instead of coaching a. What is that person's ultimate goal?

What is that person's drive, and how does the coach need to show up for their client to get them to that ultimate goal? One day they might be the cheerleader. One day they might be the space holder. One day they might be the accountability person. It's all the same kind of analogy here. It's a variety of roles that the coach shows up and is able to ascertain what their client is.

So I think it's important to spend a little bit of time focusing on this idea of the ultimate. In therapy, we definitely have goals, right? That's the whole point of the treatment plan. But in therapy, the goals are often much more loosely defined or much more abstract. So it's like a reduction in symptoms or an improvement in this or something like that.

But other than, you know, those good old Likert scales. On a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling today? It's really hard to measure. Reductions or improvements. So with coaching, here's where we can go ahead and get, start to see some of these differences. Okay. We wanna go ahead and make more explicit promises. When we're coaching, we want to strive to solve measurable problems and give measurable results. So in therapy, we might process what it's like to go on that first date. Going back to this Patty Stinger example. So the clients just divorced. You know, they've, they've been divorced six months, a year, whatever they're ready to start thinking about going on their date in therapy. We might process this. In coaching, we might put a plan in place to have that client ask someone out within the next four weeks. In coaching, we might practice some talking points for the first few minutes of the conversation. And in coaching, we might even work out what outfits to wear on the date. Are we holding space for that person? Yes, but it's not the same as processing the deep emotions of the failed relationship and the questions of self-worth and all of those things, right? That's suited for therapy and coaching. Let's guide them toward getting that date. Let's guide them towards having a new relationship.

Let's guide them to another marriage if that's their ultimate goal. So it is much more action-oriented and it's much more forward-moving. So it's not to say that that person who's going on their first date isn't gonna have jitters and nerves and other emotions, and the coach can be there for that. But it's more about calling on your expertise and filling the role that the client needs.

So do they need accountability? Do they need an ass-kicking? Do they need support? What do they need at that? Rather than processing. There also tends to be a more methodological aspect to coaching than to therapy. And what I mean by that is a follow-in-my-footsteps element. Okay. Hearkening back to sports now, usually, the best coaches with the best teams and the best winning records were players themselves.

So they know firsthand what it's like to be out there on the field. They know firsthand what it's like to score the goal or the touchdown or hit the home run. And they also know firsthand what it's like to strike out 15 times in a row. This firsthand knowledge, like asking somebody who has done the exact same thing that I'm trying to do is really important to me, and I think it's important, to the concerns out there, the people who are buying coaching.

So it would be essential for me that the person I hired knew what they were doing, and knew that they could get me the results because they had gotten themselves the results. So in coaching, there is much more of a tutelage feel, or even like an apprenticeship, like, follow my path, do what I've done. Where the coach is passing on what they have gained from their own coaching and as well as what they've done in their life and the knowledge and experience they've cultivated on their own.

So it ends up being that much more of the self is brought into coaching than it is into the therapeutic relationship. Right? In the therapeutic relationship, there's none of them. We don't bring ourselves in at all unless, very rarely when we know it has therapeutic value. But coaching people are hiring coaches specifically for their personal experience.

They want to hear those personal stories and see how that person has overcome the hurdle themselves. And what else I've seen in the coaching industry and what I do myself is I follow a coaching curriculum so much, like a course or a group program, which we'll be diving into later in the series. You can outline exactly what is covered in your coaching package and how you plan to facilitate your coaching client as they move toward that ultimate goal or that promise.

The difference here though is that your curriculum is delivered one-on-one instead of one too many, and you typically don't have to be so rigid or clear-cut, whereas the course has module one, module two, and it goes like that. You can still have it. Pre-planned what you will do on call one or call two with your coaching clients.

But there's a lot more leeway when you're working with one client and again, you're able to meet them where they're at much more than you are with a group or with students or membership me site members and things like that. So you can follow your curriculum but know that there is breathing room there.

There is space there for whatever the coaching client brings. Okay. There's more flexibility, there's more adaptation, as long as the client is always making that forward progress. And this is where we get into that art of coaching, right? How are you gonna create a curriculum? How are you gonna create your coaching package or your coaching plan? , and what is this dance like between sticking to the curriculum and allowing for that leeway, right? That's where coaching is really an. All right, so we spent a good amount of time talking about my interpretation of coaching and how I think it fits, and how I think it works. And I wanna talk now about some of the pros of this.

The pros of coaching really are the fact that you don't have to do a single thing. Then you already do as a therapist. You don't need that certification, especially because you have a therapy license. You don't need a coaching certification. But honestly, like I've talked about before, with this tutelage and this apprentice outlook, I don't think that other people necessarily need coaching certifications. Okay. You don't need a single thing extra, and often you don't necessarily need new tools or new software or things like that because you might already have an E H R for your practice. What you can do is simply add a secondary brand to your E H R, and you can use the same. All right.

Also, you might also be doing telehealth and you might already have Zoom, so you can use Zoom for your coaching clients. Okay. So. The skills to meet the client where they're at are not necessarily different skills than you're using in therapy. And the tools and software and delivery method of coaching is not necessarily different than what you're doing in therapy. Okay? So it really is a very easy and very smooth transition.

It's also super familiar, right? You are used to sitting in a room one-on-one with a client. That is the most terrifying part about this. I remember back in practice an internship when I finally had my first like session where it was just me and the client in the room, and I was sweating bullets. Man, that is to me the hardest part of this.

You've been doing that for years, right? So there's nothing different about the feel of coaching. There's, there's nothing that really needs to change about the way you work. With all that said, the transition is easy. What else is really, really, really great about it? Is that it is boundaryless? This is part of that not regulated piece, right, where you definitely have rigid boundaries by your state board and your state license.

Even if you are doing online therapy, some states require you to be licensed where the client is and some require you to be licensed where you are. And so there are still. Rigid pieces of therapy. You don't have that with coaching. Your clients can live around the world. You could be on a four-month, 12-country crew around the world, and you can still support the coaching clients that you have cultivated and the caseload that you have built for coaching, no matter where you are, where they are, what time it is, any of that stuff.

So coaching is boundaryless. Okay. The other big pro, the other big feature of coaching that doesn't exist for therapy is the idea of pre-selling and packaging. Okay. So with coaching, You don't have to worry about no-shows or cancellations or anything like that, and should I charge them if they didn't come because your coaching client has paid you a predetermined amount ahead of time for a coaching package? Okay? It's no longer about necessarily trading dollars for hours like each therapy session is this many dollars. Instead, it is the value of this coaching package is this many dollars. If your coaching client ghosts you, that's okay. They've still paid you. If your coaching client wants to reschedule a bunch of times, you can say, sorry, that's not in our policy, that's not in our contract. If you forfeit this coaching call, you get one reschedule. And if you don't make that reschedule, you forfeit it. They don't get a refund, they don't get their money back. You aren't out any money. Okay. Of course, these nuances are things that you're gonna have to set up in your own coaching business and your own coaching contracts, but I think that that is a really big selling feature of not having to worry about if your income is going to be stable or not.

But let's go ahead and switch over to the cons because coaching can sound like a dream, but there are definite cons. Okay. If you're looking for an easy transition from therapy to coaching often. The easiest way to do that is to look at your therapy niche and try and serve them in a coaching capacity, but that's where the blurriness comes in, and that's where the ethical grayness comes in.

So I really want you guys to focus here and make sure that. If you are looking to serve your same niche in the same, in just a different way that you are really explicit on what the difference is between the therapy you're offering and the coaching you're offering, because when you cut it that close, there is a licensure risk, okay?

And there is an ethical concern. Some states really, really care. Some states don't care at all, and some states have no idea what you're talking about. Okay, so the due diligence is yours to do and the burden of proof lies on you. Okay, so how much do you want to be taking responsibility for that? Now if you are a rose gardener or you are a baker or one of my students inside Hustle does sugar work, in the baking and cake industry.

If you have something like that doesn't touch on therapy at all and you wanna start coaching people on a different skillset or a different challenge, then go for it. I don't see really any risk to your license there, but if you're really set on life, And coaching in a capacity that can resemble therapy.

We need to be careful there. Okay. Now I mentioned above that with packaging, it's not necessarily dollars for hours anymore like it is with therapy where it's a hundred dollars for one hour. Literally, it's still dollars for you, your butt still has to be in the chair in front of the computer coaching the client.

And so it's still dollars for time exchanged. Is it more lucrative, is the amount you're making per hour? More definitely. But it's still dollars for time. Right. Which means that coaching is really not scalable. While the income ceiling and the impact limitations may be broader and higher with coaching, you're still facing the same constrictions with this business model as you are with therapy.

So the only way to make more money is to raise the rates on your coaching packages or to see more coaching clients. It basically requires more of you. So it's not. Okay, so that's a little bit about the pros and cons. Now, if we move into the expected profit from coaching, coaching has the highest profit margin.

Meaning you can charge the most for coaching and keep really, really low expenses. So you can pocket the highest percentage of money with coaching then you can from other online offers. Okay? It's the lowest cost to get started. Zoom even has a free tier to start with. , there it's quite limited, so you're gonna move up to the paid version of Zoom very quickly.

That is a really relatively low expense. I shared in the last episode that I pay $16 a month for Zoom. Okay? And then you're gonna want something to have the coaching contracts and a scheduler. I mentioned DTO in the last, uh, episode, and I think they're up to three 50 a year. So let's round that 16 bucks up to 20 bucks, $20 a month, 240 for the year, plus three 50 for the year.

Under $700 for the year, you could be coaching and you probably would charge more than $700 for one coaching package. So you would be in the same position that I am where one student or one coaching client, and you're actually profitable. Right. You can book one coaching client, pay your expenses, pay your taxes, and still have money left over.

So the expected profit margin of coaching is the highest. You can also charge the most for coaching because of that one-on-one component. When we get into groups and when we get into courses and when we get into some of these other business models. Access to you may still exist, but it's going to change because it is not one-on-one delivery where that person gets undivided attention and undivided access to you.

Okay, so this is why coaching is the highest-priced online offer. Now, you might be comfortable starting at. $3,000 for a 90-day package or a three-month package, you might be more comfortable with $5,000 for a 90-day package. But there are coaches out there who charge 10 grand, 25 grand. Now, that brings up a money mindset. That brings up a whole nother set of issues that we're not covering today. But coaching is by far where you can charge them. An online income stream. Okay. And like I talked about before, you can keep your expenses super duper low with coaching, so your profit can be really high. But how do we start getting into this, right? How do we then start getting coaching clients? Now, I'm not gonna talk a ton about that, but what I want to talk about is the fact that coaching is much the same. Business model as it is for therapy. So just like you have to build up a therapy caseload, you wanna build up a coaching caseload. And where in therapy to meet your income goals, you might need 20 therapy clients.

Because of the pricing nature of coaching, you might only need five. Coaching clients to equal the same that your 20 therapy clients equal. So you're looking for fewer clients, but much of the business building and much of the marketing are going to feel the same. So if you're using online marketing for your therapy practice, you can use online marketing for your coaching practice, especially because you can now market the world.

And you can now market to everyone who speaks your language really. And if you're bilingual, that opens it up even more. Right? So a lot of the marketing strategies that you would use for your therapy practice, can. Be opened up even more for coaching practice. Just like you might go and talk to doctors or obs or other people for in-person referrals for your therapy practice.

You can use that exact same strategy for your coaching practice, but now, instead of networking with four doctors in your area, you can network with 25. Coaches or other people, that would refer coaching clients to you? Okay, so the doors get blown wide open. It's much the same as what you're already doing, just on a bigger scale.

Okay. And the access is so much bigger and the people that you can serve are so much bigger. Right. So I hope this has put coaching into a perspective for you. , I know I talked a little bit differently about it today from a different angle, more from my perspective on how it works, more from what I use it for and how it works in my business, and less about the ethics and legalities. I feel like I've talked about that a lot. , like I said in that episode with Lee, and there's several others where I've hit on that I didn't focus there today. I focused more on what do you do as a coach and how does coaching work?

Okay, so. There's so much more I could even say about coaching if that is what you're thinking about for your online income stream. It really is the most natural transition that therapists can make towards online business because it's the same skillset, the same business model, just without state boards or location boundaries.

Okay? So that's how I want you to think about it. I hope that this was, And at this point, you may or may not be thinking that coaching is for you.

All right. Thanks, guys. Keep on rising.