Here’s a question we get a lot: do I need a business coaching franchise to be successful as a business coach?
Our answer is no.
Instead, there are three things you need to be successful as a business coach.
The first is a system. You need a proven system of processes, templates, and strategies to get leads, convert those leads to clients, and coach your clients to success in their businesses.
The second thing you need is a mentor. This should be a proven coach who knows what it takes to make six figures or double six figures as a business coach in real life. It’s simple consistency: if you’re going to be a business coach, you’re going to need a coach of your own.
The third thing you need is a community. This is a community of business coaches who are already doing what you are doing, to help you stay abreast of best practices in the fields of coaching and entrepreneurial innovation.
These three things are vital. But perhaps what you’re really asking is if you need a business coaching franchise to get these things?
What Will a Business Coaching Franchise Provide?
In my experience, here’s what you can expect:
Some franchises (not all) have a decent system–although there are limitations with the best ones because, for the most part, those systems are built around the learning of one high-profile person.
Most franchises will NOT provide for mentoring from a proven six figure coach–largely because the majority of franchises don’t have a very large stable of six-figure coaches to call upon–so this tends to be a no-go.
Many franchises will provide you with a community.
This means that in most business coaching franchises, you’ll get one, or maybe two, out of the three. But the thing is, thanks to online technology and social media, now you can get a system, mentoring from a proven coach, and a community–at a fraction of the price of a business coaching franchise.
This means that in most business coaching franchises, you’ll get one, or maybe two, out of the three. But the thing is, thanks to online technology and social media, now you can get a system, mentoring from a proven coach, and a community--at a fraction of the price of a business coaching franchise.
We actually believe that the business coaching franchise model is a dinosaur. If you invest in a business coaching franchise, it will cost anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 or more. But you can get systems that provide you with everything you need for a small fraction of that (such as our own Coaches’ Coach system–which, of course, we think is the best on the market…not that we’re biased or anything!)
Either way, if you’re looking into a business coaching franchise and want more information about the state of the business coaching franchise industry, check out our FREE report, The Business Coaching Franchise Buyer’s Guide. It will help you discover what you need to do and what you need to know as you’re coming into the industry.
Welcome to the second in a series of four posts designed to help your coaching clients make it through the last surge of the Coronavirus pandemic. In today’s post, we’ll explore how to help your clients develop a cash gap planto help them stay cashflow positive.
In our first post in this series, we explored the trajectory of the Coronavirus pandemic and why it’s important to help your coaching clients get through the winter.
Today, we’re going to dive into a problem that many businesses struggle with—one that can prove particularly deadly during lean economic times:
Negative cash flow.
You’ve heard the saying, Cash flow is king. That’s because poor cash management can put even profitable enterprises out of business. This is especially true of the small to medium sized businesses you’re coaching, because they tend to lack reliable, affordable access to capital.
During periods of temporary economic decline, which seem likely over the next few months until Coronavirus vaccines become widely available, cashflow problems can be especially deadly.
Therefore, one of the most important strategies you can help your clients implement is a cash gap plan.
One of the most important strategies you can help your clients implement is a cash gap plan.
In a nutshell, a cash gap plan is an efficient plan to quickly collect your outstanding receivables, get your customers to pay faster, and negotiate better terms with your vendors so your bank account always has plenty of cash in it.
Here’s an chart to help you understand what I mean:
Many businesses operate with a gap between when their expenses are due, their inventory ships, and they receive payment.
The larger this gap is, the more at risk the business will be.
The objective of a cash gap plan is to help your clients align their timelines such that cash is paid and received simultaneously.
There are three basic ways you can help your clients eliminate their cash gaps.
Accounts Receivable
The first is to help clients tighten up terms with their customers. This can be done in a variety of ways:
Encourage pre-orders
Negotiate shorter terms with new customers
Incentivize faster or upfront payment with premiums and discounts
Implement an automated collection system, including letters, calls, and bonuses for AR staff
Outsource collections to a factoring company
Accounts Payable
Second, help your clients extend terms with their vendors. Encourage them to do a thorough review of their vendors and terms in order to determine which would pack the greatest punch. Then, have them research alternative vendors to which they could switch if necessary.
Work with your clients to reach out to their vendors based on the prioritization they’ve identified in order to renegotiate terms, using the alternative vendors as both a negotiation point and a back-up if negotiations prove fruitless.
Inventory
Finally, encourage your clients to adopt a lean mindset that eliminates wasted time, material, movement, and inventory in order to improve operational efficiencies, cut production, and compete more effectively. This means identifying areas of waste and excess in inventory and elsewhere throughout the business.
If you do this correctly, not only will your clients be able to eliminate their cash gap, they’ll even be able to create a negative cash gap—that is, where cash comes in before it goes out.
This is a sign of a healthy, thriving business—one that can certainly survive not only the Coronavirus winter, but well into the future.
Want to dive deep into how to help your clients get a handle on their cashflow? Learn exactly how to coach your clients through this process, complete with white label training and in-depth cash analysis tools, by getting a FREE 30-day trial of our comprehensive business coaching system.
Welcome to the fourth and final post in a series designed to help your coaching clients make it through the last surge of the Coronavirus pandemic.In today’s post, we’ll explore why your clients need an aggressive, measurable tactical marketing plan.
If this is the first post you’ve stumbled upon in this series, be sure to check out each one! They’re all linked at the bottom. In our first three posts, we’ve talked about leadership in crisis, how to fix cash flow problems, and how to help your clients communicate the unique value they bring to the marketplace.
Today, we’re going to help you coach your clients into turning a strong message into revenue with systematic, strategic, results-driven marketing.
What’s a Tactical Marketing Plan?
A tactical marketing plan is an aggressive, measurable plan to achieve three basic objectives: first, to increase leads; second, to improve sales conversion rates; and third, to increase annual revenue per customer so that profits increase exponentially.
It turns out that in marketing, small improvements go a looooooong way.
Take a look at something I call The Profit Equation.
Here, you can see that if you can help your clients improve just 10% in each of the three categories I defined above—number of leads, sales conversion rate, and annual revenue per customer—your clients can increase their profits by a whopping 947%.
(By the way, do you think your clients will retain you, as their coach, longer, and pay you more in the process, if you can help them generate nearly 1,000% in additional profit? Answer: that’s a no-brainer.)
The best part is, achieving 10% improvement in each of these categories isn’t magic.
It’s math.
And you can help them do it.
Lead Generation Strategies
Let’s start with lead generation. Here’s where many business owners get intimidated—or stagnant. They have two or three tactics they’ve used in the past, and they resort to it again and again, because they feel unequipped or unclear as to what to do next.
There are basically nine core lead generation strategies; coach your clients into prioritizing them, understanding that a well-rounded marketing plan will include many, if not all, of these tactics.
Agency: third parties who rep your brand
Content: publishing educational materials, such as articles, podcasts, videos, whitepapers, ebooks, and reports
Digital: online marketing strategies, including advertising, SEO, and email
Events: live and online events of any kind, where they can present, exhibit, or even host
Media: traditional media buys such as TV and radio; don’t forget to explore new media, such as YouTube, Spotify, and podcasts
Network: personal relationship building
Partners: joint ventures and partnerships with other businesses
Print: collateral with your message on it
Social media: organic or paid social media
Conversion Rate Strategies
Here’s a hard fact: Many of your clients aren’t measuring their marketing.
They don’t know which campaigns are bringing in leads…which strategies are driving sales…which salespeople are performing best and why.
In marketing, everything should be measured. When your client pays for an ad, they should track response to that particular ad. When they send an email, they should measure the exact sales figure generated from that email.
Then, armed with data, they can make incremental improvements. They can fine-tune their messaging. They can improve their offers. They can duplicate the sales techniques that seem to be effective.
Get them to track everything they do, so that they can do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
Increased Revenue Per Customer Strategies
It’s infinitely easier, more affordable, and more efficient to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to generate a new customer. So be sure your clients spend as much, if not more, on customer maximization strategies as they do on lead generation.
It's infinitely easier, more affordable, and more efficient to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to generate a new customer.
Increased prices: Encourage your clients to look at their pricing model, and to create a strong enough USP and guarantee that they don’t have to fight for scraps in a crowded market based on price. Many business owners can afford to raise their prices without losing customers, and are simply afraid to do so.
Upselling and add-on selling: If your clients aren’t making offers for additional, complementary, or premium products or services at the time of sale, they’re missing out.
Bundling: Similar to upselling and add-on selling, encourage your clients to create bundles of products and services that can be sold together to increase the average ticket.
Subscription: Can your clients make what they have to offer a subscription-based service?
Referrals: Encourage your clients to create referral rewards programs, and to ask for referrals regularly.
Operations: Teach your clients’ operations teams to pay attention to what the customer needs and wants. Happy customers buy more frequently, and spend more money when they do.
By putting together a comprehensive tactical marketing plan, your clients will see increased revenue, retention, and profits—which will enable them to survive and thrive through the rest of the pandemic and well into the future.
Welcome to the third in a series of four posts designed to help your coaching clients make it through the last surge of the Coronavirus pandemic.In today’s post, we’ll explore how a solid USP and guarantee can help your clients pick up market share as competitors flounder.
In our first post in this series, we explored the trajectory of the Coronavirus pandemic and why it’s important to help your coaching clients get through the winter. In our second, we dove into a problem that many businesses struggle with—negative cashflow.
Today, we’re going to look at market position, and why periods of disruption and economic downturn are the perfect time for your business coaching clients to sharpen their messaging and re-evaluate their market position so that they can pick up market share as their competitors struggle.
And they do this with one of the most powerful business messaging tools on the planet: a USP and guarantee.
What’s a USP and Guarantee?
A USP and guarantee is a persuasive value proposition that removes risk and compels your ideal customers to do business with you, instead of your competitors, because you’re different from all the rest.
What’s more, in order to stay on the leading edge of the industry and to capture more and more market share, your clients should re-evaluate their USP and guarantee regularly.
Why?
Let’s take a look at something called the Diffusion of Innovation Theory, using a well-known example: the smartphone.
Whenever a new technology or idea comes to market, a small group of innovators—about 2.5% of the population—will take it on and give it a try. As time goes on and the innovators help R&D departments work out the bugs, early adopters begin jumping in, about 13.5%. Then, as momentum builds, the early majority (about 34%) gets on board, then the late majority (another 34%), and last of all, the laggards, who wait until it becomes almost impossible to ignore the trends.
You can see how this played out with the smartphone in the chart above.
Here’s the thing. If you want to be profitable, you want to be on the left side of the innovation curve.
Why?
Because by the time you get to the right side of the curve, the product has become “commoditized.” At this point, price pressure gets intense, margins get tiny, and you’re competing for scraps in a crowded marketplace.
If you want to be profitable, you want to be on the left side of the innovation curve. Why? Because by the time you get to the right side of the curve, the product has become "commoditized." At this point, price pressure gets intense, margins get tiny, and you're competing for scraps in a crowded marketplace.
The most effective companies learn how to reinvent themselves and keep innovating—so that they can stay on the right side of the curve (or I guess I should say the “left” side, in this case!).
Help Your Clients Educate Their Target Market
In order to do this effectively, your clients need to get good at educating their target market.
That’s because once a product or service gets to the right side of the curve, everybody knows what it is, why it works, and why they need it. On the other hand, making the case to early adopters requires skillful communication.
A solid USP and guarantee will help your clients do just that.
First, you need to help your clients find the unique selling proposition that puts them on the left side of the curve. The iPhone is a great example of this. Apple billed it as the combination of three products—a mobile phone, an iPod/digital music player with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.
But they did more than just create the iPhone.
They clearlycommunicated the ways in which it would transform the digital landscape.
Steve Jobs called it a “magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” They promised that you could make calls simply by pointing at a name or number. They said you’d be able to take pictures, sync photos, and consume digital media with a flick of the finger. They painted a picture of how you’d be able to access the entire internet, once available primarily on desktop computers, from a device in your pocket.
They promised a revolution—and they delivered on that promise.
Remove Risk through a Guarantee
It’s clear that a USP, and the effective communication of the USP, are critical to staying on the left side of the innovation curve.
So where does having a guarantee come in?
Simple.
Asking customers to be early adopters means asking them to take a risk on an unproven product or service.
Yes, the left side of the curve is where the money is, but it’s also where the barriers to entry are highest for your clients’ target audiences.
Therefore, encourage your clients to develop a guarantee that lowers the barrier to entry.
In some cases, a guarantee in and of itself can put you on the left side of the innovation curve!
We did this with a web design company we coached a while back. While web design isn’t exactly a new product or service, we worked with them to create an unparalleled guarantee that is basically unheard of in the industry: namely, that clients would be happy with their website, that they would receive top rankings in the search engines, and that they would get ongoing high-quality traffic and content, or they could request a full refund.
Now, they were able to offer this because they really did deliver great work that got results. The quality was indisputably there.
And here’s the kicker:
The guarantee was powerful enough to put them in a class by themselves in an otherwise overloaded marketplace!
And it worked.
After rolling out this guarantee, they generated $14,400 from just one ad over the course of six weeks—when before, they hadn’t made a single sale from their old ad content.
I mean, see for yourself the difference between typical ad content, and one infused with this kind of guarantee:
versus
Come on, when you need a new website built, who are you going to choose?
As the winter drags on, take this opportunity to help your clients create a killer USP and guarantee. This way, they’ll be able to reposition themselves in the marketplace and capture more and more market share—now and in the future!
Just getting started as a business coach? Check out my FREE ebook, How to Become a Business Coach, and learn exactly what it takes to be an effective player in the field.
Welcome to the first in a series of four posts designed to help your coaching clients make it through the last surge of the Coronavirus pandemic.
As the Coronavirus pandemic presses on, there’s good news and bad news for your SME coaching clients—and, indeed, the entire world—on the economic front.
Bottom line: the end is in sight, but things will probably get worse before they take a permanent turn for the better.
As a coach, what can you do? How can you help your coaching clients survive the next few months and put themselves in a position to weather the storm, so that they can emerge in even better shape on the other side of the coming Coronavirus winter?
Crisis Leadership Model
Back in March, when the pandemic started raging, I introduced this crisis leadership model to my business coach clients:
That is, businesses need to act quickly in order to adapt to rapid changes in a crisis market, and to execute on those adaptations effectively, so that they can make them at scale—or they risk ending up like one of the thousands of businesses that have permanently closed their doors.
If your coaching clients have made it this far, chances are good that you’ve done a great job helping them adapt and execute at scale. But as the pandemic, and therefore, in all likelihood, the economy, descends into one last downturn before a permanent resolution, you need to help them anticipate another shock and yet more adaptation to survive.
Accelerate into Adaption and Execution
Did you know that 65% of the Fortune 1000 were born in a recession or depression?
Companies with household names like GE, GM, IBM, Hyatt, Disney, FedEx, Microsoft, HP, Google, and Salesforce used the shock of widespread disruption to enter the marketplace and make a lasting difference.
Now is a time to lead innovation, to encourage your coaching clients to make necessary changes they might not have had the will to do before, to become more efficient, creative, nimble, and effective.
Now is a time to lead innovation, to encourage your coaching clients to make necessary changes they might not have had the will to do before, to become more efficient, creative, nimble, and effective.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll introduce you to three key strategies that will help your coaching clients adapt, execute, and scale so that they can make it through the Coronavirus winter.
