The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
What advice would you give coaches about charging clients?
A couple of pieces, number one: my observation, pricing is in your mind in terms of what you’re comfortable with or not in terms of your fees, so there’s a hurdle for coaches to understand about what their value is that they bring to an organization.
Number two, it is important to raise fees on a consistent and regular basis, although I make the distinction that I still have clients from 1995 and 1996 that I have never increased their fees. I only increase the fees to the new clients who are coming in.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
What do you feel is the biggest key to your success?
Far and away, getting so very clear that I wanted to identify my perfect clients and live in their world. The clarity I had on that has been unwavering. It just got better and I got better at doing it, and building better alliances.
I never have lost that focus, I’ve never changed that which is to say ‘here’s who I want to serve, how deep can I live in their world’, and the deeper I did, the more business that came and the more services we provided for them. And the more referrals that came from that. That success has been a formula.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
How would you recommend coaches start to build their business?
I co-authored a book with my partner Judy Feld, titled ‘SmartMatch Alliances’. If we were building a business in 90 days and we put the driving principle of SmartMatch Alliances into play, we could catapult our business from nothing to something and be moving forward at a rate that is simply extraordinary.
The interesting piece, or the challenging piece, is that many and most coaches are not using this formula, and quite frankly they’re not building businesses that thrive and exceed their expectations. Many, many coaches are not making enough to even be considered a paycheck.
It took us thirty two thousand words to put this formula together. It took the entire first half of the book to explain the concept of ‘living in the world’ and having maximum exposure and having the foundation in place so that you can serve those who are your exact perfect audience.
The once you have that in place, the alliances, and all the additional services that you might provide for that audience, it just falls right into place like dominoes, it’s extremely easy.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Earnest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
What words of advice would you give to a coach starting out?
Have fun in your business, enjoy the clients you’re working with, and quite frankly, be the very best coach that you can be, because people in your hands are giving you their lives and they’re asking for your help. So be very respectful, always, of the work you’re doing.
Be clear on your passion. Have a passion for the work you’re doing. Recognize you’re touching the lives of people that you’re working with. Be clear on the work that you’re doing, that it’s fun, that it’s joyful, that you love the particular clients that you’re working with.
But never lose sight – this is sort of Covey’s principle ‘focus with the end in mind’. As you look to the horizon what’s the next step?
If I were looking at the horizon, initially: I needed to replace my income from my corporate days. But really from there it was, number one: subscribers. Number two, more subscribers. Number three, now I want to be in the magazines, the same magazines read by those subscribers. That was the next step. Then the next step, I wanted to have some alliances and even more exposure, speak at upcoming conferences. And then there was the next step, writing a book to tie it all together. I’ve always been able to look over the horizon twelve, fifteen miles in front of me and say ‘what does the next parade look like?’.
So I would encourage those coaches who are thinking about their business to work both in their business, but don’t forget to work on your business. Have a vision for what the bigger game is. Have a vision for what the next parade is.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
What was perhaps the biggest mistake you made in practice building?
The greatest mistake was I thought about subscribers one at a time, I set a daily goal of twenty and I only worked four days a week, so it’s twenty times four which was eighty or three hundred and twenty a month. That was very, very slow, so the greatest mistake we made was building our subscribers very slowly.
Looking back I would have done it with writing articles in trade publications, I would have built alliances, I would have done some of the things that we know today accelerate our velocity and the exposure almost immediately.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
Roughly how much capital/money did you spend in the first 6-12 months, and on what?
It was about $40,000. We had to buy a computer desk, a computer, phone, fax, cost for insurance, cost for telephone calls – we call all of our clients. We have a phone bill that’s quite sizeable. And so those were the costs.
Here’s the interesting part though, when we were billing about $100,000 – $200,000, our expenses were about $40-50,000. Then we grew it from $200,000 to $400,000.
In most businesses your expenses grow proportionately, but our expenses today are almost parallel to our expenses six and seven years ago. It still runs us about $40-55,000 a year to operate our business. A coaching business has fixed expenses so as you add more revenue all of that just flows straight to the bottom line.
