Ep #84: Coaching Business Skillsets

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 84. Today, I want to share a message and an idea with you that I was deeply inspired to share after listening to a recent podcast with my mentor, Brooke Castillo and her friend, Todd Herman.

And there was just a short conversation that happened and I’m going to tell you the things that were said during this short part of this conversation. It was actually about friendship. But in this small window of talking about what it takes to succeed in business, it inspired some ideas that I had already kind of been sitting on and really brought them together for me in a way that I wanted to share with you.

So I want to talk about coaching business skillsets, and specifically, the three skillsets that if you spend your time mastering when you start your business, all the way to really millions, it’s the three I have spent the most time and money mastering and the most effort in my business really putting the most time into doing.

So I’m going to talk about those three skillsets that you want to master. And one of the things that was the most profound thing that I heard in this interview that Todd said was that the person with the most valuable skill wins.

And I was really thinking about that because the life coaching industry, although I think it’s just beginning to blow up, it’s just beginning to become popular, I think that we’re not even close to even scratching the surface for what’s available, how many people will want life coaching in the world and what is available with the industry of life coaching.

It is also competitive. It’s one of these industries where the entry bar is super low. Everybody can call themselves a life coach and then the bar for success is really, really high. And there is a lot of talent out there, people who are very good coaches.

And especially when you go into – as you grow your business and scale it and you go into ads, you’re going to be competing. Like I remember thinking about my business when I started running ads around 300-400K, I remember thinking like, I’m competing for ad space with giants like Amy Porterfield and I remember thinking like, my stuff has to be as good as hers if I want to have impact in this arena.

And so I’m going to share with you what I think are the most valuable skills in the coaching business, which are selling, the skillset of selling, the skillset of coaching, and then the skill of evaluating, which you guys have heard me talk about a lot. It’s really the skillset of being able to learn and apply from your failures and the method of doing that is evaluating.

So I’m going to tell y’all why today, so let’s start with the skill of coaching because I want you all to be the ones that have the most valuable skills and I want you all to be the ones that win in the industry. I genuinely do think – side note – that my students in 2K and my students in 200K really are leading the industry in sales.

And it blows my mind the thought leadership that comes out of my 200K mastermind especially, just really blows me away. I feel like I’m creating a new breed of coaches and their ability to coach is able to be fully expressed because they’re able to sell.

So let’s start with the skill of coaching and then we’ll talk about the skill of selling. So a lot of you all think that the skill of coaching is learned. I want you to think about that for a second. Most of you think that. And I know that most of you think that because you tell me.

I haven’t learned how to coach yet. That’s what you say. I haven’t learned how to coach, I haven’t taken a program that teaches me how to coach. You think it’s a learned skillset. Now of course, I think it’s super helpful if you can find a coaching school that you identify with and you want to go learn different coaching tools.

I think you should be open to learning new coaching tools your whole career. That’s what I’m always about is creating new coaching tools, learning new coaching tools. But just pay attention if you think it’s learned and you talk about it in a way that it’s learned. There are things that you learn and then there are things that you earn and you have to earn the skillset of coaching.

And how you do that is by coaching. So very few people come to me and they say I haven’t coached enough to develop that skillset yet. None of you tell me that. When you think about I’m going to learn how to sell my coaching, the number one objection that keeps you from learning how to sell coaching is that you don’t think you’ve learned enough about coaching.

And I always tell people that come to me and ask me about this, I always tell them the best way to learn how to coach is to coach. And the best way to create opportunities to coach is to sell coaching. You have to learn while you do. That’s the best way to learn.

And then I’m going to further this argument with how you do that in the beginning. And for the first couple of years of your business – so you want to sell coaching to get clients to then earn the skillset of coaching by coaching. But the way you do that is by hours coached.

So in the beginning, you do that by coaching one-on-one. I really recommend – and some of you are going to be like, what? I really recommend that you coach one-on-one for a minimum of three years. Like, hour-long sessions.

Here’s why. Because another thing that Todd said in this podcast was that what people need is reps and otherwise you miss all the nuance and the innovation. And he was actually talking about Brooke and his experience with her being so nuanced in coaching and just so wickedly talented and disciplined.

And he says he can tell the discipline she’s put into learning the skillset of coaching. And I always say people underestimate what my coach Brooke and what I – the hours we’ve put into our programs. Her program, Self-Coach Scholars, my program, 2K. People think this is just the best set up ever. They miss the years and years and years of experience.

Like in Brooke’s case, 15 years of coaching experience, five years of coaching experience for me. And that is the result of the mastery that happens when we’re coaching on calls with our students. You see the end result of the many, many, many hours that we’ve coached individual students, and then the many, many, many hours that we have spent coaching groups.

I’m on my 15th mastermind of coaching 30 to 50 people at the same time. It’s something that I have earned, my ability to be wickedly quick with getting to the root cause and the root problem, the root solution for my students while hundreds of people are watching. That is a nuance. That is something that you earn and you build over time of doing something over and over and over.

And then when we get to evaluating, I spent so much time in my early coaching evaluating my coaching and helping myself get better and better and better, asking myself what worked, what didn’t work, and what I would do differently in that coaching scenario. So really investigating what my clients said and what I heard and what I said and how I coached them and all different ways I could coach them differently, and a hundred different ways to say the same thing and to help someone from one problem to their solution.

That level of nuance only comes from reps. So a lot of students come to me and they want to rush to group and to programs. But I just want to offer that your result for your students will not be the same if you don’t develop the mastery of coaching and the skill of coaching.

When you go to group, here’s what will happen is all of your gaps will be magnified for everyone to see. All the time that you haven’t spent coaching people one-on-one and really doing those reps and clocking those hours. And what I think happens when you’re clocking those hours is you’re practicing holding the space and you’re practicing loving your client unconditionally and you’re practicing listening.

And when you have missed reps, when you have not clocked the hours, it will be obvious when you’re coaching a group. It’s harder to hold everyone’s attention, keep everyone engaged, and coach one person at the same time as teaching the entire group.

So I really believe in, for me, 100% results for my students, if you’re in 2K, if you’re in 200K, you can feel that through our community. It’s literally our standard. Everyone is striving for it. And I’m able to teach and break down those concepts and processes so quickly to everyone at the same time, again, while also coaching someone on their individual thing because of the mastery of skill of literally 20 clients a week, 20 hours a week for three years.

And even in my masterminds, you see that mastery of holding the space and coaching in the groups, but I ran three classes a week for years. When I say years, that was dramatic. Like two. Two years. My brain. Anyway, here’s what I did. I severely undercharged. Like a thousand dollars.

I would charge a thousand dollars for a six-month group coaching. So I created a ridiculously high demand and then rather than raising my prices, I brought multiple classes through the door and served my ass off. And at the time, I will tell you my thought process with that is – and this is another thing to keep in mind is I wanted more people to have had the experience of being coached by me.

And in the beginning, I knew that what was going to create the most compounding effect over time would be coach as many people as possible. So my goal wasn’t raise my prices as much as possible, see how much I can get charged for one client, be as exclusive as possible. It was get my name out to as many people as possible, coach as many people as possible.

So I wasn’t telling myself the story of I undercharged or I should be raising my prices because of how many people I’m selling. It was like, no, just get as many people through the door as possible. I wanted to have coached hundreds of people by the end of the year. That was my goal.

And so because it was selling so great at a thousand dollars for six months, I was able to launch classes every couple of months. So I would have calls three times a week and I would be coaching hundreds of people a week, and I was just clocking those hours, just doing those reps.

So now, again, I’m going to just harp on it a little bit. You see that group coaching skill when I coach in 2K now. I have that laser sharp ability to focus on the coaching I want to give to the student in front of me. Then I have the ability to teach the group at the same time and bring them with us, and break down really complex problems very simply for the group while also again, coaching this client, staying on track, and often, breaking their problem down in three parts and articulating everything precisely all at the same time.

My brain is working so diligently and again, I’m able to do this from thousands of hours of coaching students one-on-one, and then thousands of hours of coaching group, and then thousands of hours of coaching myself.

If you think about this, 20 hours a week for three years will have you clocking over 3000 hours of coaching that will really develop a skill that sets you apart from the entire industry. To where later on, it’s an investment in the now for the later, to where later on, you see me charging $25,000 for a six-month mastermind to lots of people.

And so my $1000 a month for – I think at the time it was 20 people maybe. So it was $20,000 I was making on each six-month class, but that investment paid off to where now I’m making millions for one six-month class because I have set myself apart from the industry.

Literally, the way I’ve set myself apart is the results my students get. Like 100% of them. Every time. They all go across the finish line. And here’s what I want to say. When I teach you these things, because I can just feel your thoughts as I talk.

It’s not to give you the slowest way to growth and slow you down. When you guys hear me say you guys should clock a lot of hours doing one-on-one coaching, it’s to create mastery for you to speed things up in the long run. This is the way I want you to think about it. You can pick up pennies now and head straight to group, or you can leave the pennies and wait for the stacks of dollars.

And it’s so hard to see that in the beginning when you’re just rushing to 100K or 200K and you’re wanting to just only work three days a week and build a multiple six-figure business with eight hours a week. You’re trying to get to the – first of all, I don’t even work eight hours a week. I work about 20 hours a week.

But you’re trying to get to my – what you imagine is my end result at the beginning. But you have to think of it like an investment. It’s so powerful when you’re on the other side of it. You really see it. And I think this is the power of listening and following and mentoring with and working with someone in business that is light years ahead of you so that I can tell you this perspective.

My 200K students, we spend a lot of time making very careful decisions about their offers and when and how to transition into group and when and how to transition out of one-on-one to make sure we are making decisions that invest in the long-term growth of their business. We don’t rush anything.

When you rush, you lose the opportunity to craft. And the best at their craft get paid the most and get the best results for their clients. So I just want you to think about if you’re one of those people that really wants to get into group and you’re telling yourself the story that you want to leverage your time because of how you live your life now, listen, I’ve heard all of the bullshit.

You’re not going to get me. Heard it all. I want you to just challenge yourself to spend one week, just one week thinking that I could be right and thinking about this possibility. Thinking about if you did clock 3000 hours of coaching over the next three years, where would that have you? Where would you be at the end of those three years? Where would you be in five years? And where would you be in 10 years?

And some of you don’t want a multiple million-dollar business, so if that’s the case, that’s okay. But even if you want a consistent stream of income, multiple six figures the rest of your life, I think this is worth considering. But definitely if you’re one of my students who wants to make multiple millions of dollars, you want to be in the top 5%, you want to be in the top 1% of the industry, you’ve got to clock the time.

That is going to be very evident when you start competing with these coaches, who like me, were making multiple millions of dollars, or the version of my success. Like if you’re a relationship coach, someone who’s making millions of dollars relationship coaching. If you want to compete with them in that marketplace, you’re going to have to – your craft and the results your clients get, that’s what’s going to help you compete the most.

You could be a wiz at marketing, but what will help you compete the most is your ability to get your students results and then their level of results they get. That spreads word faster than anything else. No one gives a shit how clever your five-day training name is and no one cares how many people you have in your Facebook group or how many listeners you have on your podcast.

What people care about and what people will talk about is the results they’re getting from you. So really just think about spending that time and devoting and dedicating that time to honing your craft.

Okay, let’s talk about honing selling. First of all, I want you to remember that coaching is selling and selling is coaching. So as you hone both of these, you’re really going to start to set yourself apart in the industry. So one of the other things that Todd said on this podcast was that your level of flexibility is determined by your level of skill.

Your ability to adapt, to make fast changes, I’m just summarizing here, to go with any circumstance given to you, that is what will increase your level of skill. And then again, the person with the most skill wins. And I find that to be so deeply true about selling.

When I first started pitching, it was something that I think is the reason – I know is the reason within six months I was one of the best in the industry. There had been people that had been doing it for years and I was passing them up in numbers.

Within six months, I was already traveling all across the country to go into markets and help people sell. And I had never sold in this way before in front of live audiences. I had never sold products like that, but what happened is every single day, I went in and I practiced each skillset that they taught is in selling.

So we have seven fundamentals that we had to achieve in each show and if we achieved all of them, people would buy. If we didn’t, they didn’t. And I would go in and diligently focus on one of the fundamentals for every single show until I really got it. And then I would go in the next day and practice the second fundamental, and then the third, and then the fourth.

And then I just constantly was making them better and better and better and challenging myself to do it in any circumstance, with any crowd, any type of store, any income level that I was in. We went into super fancy areas and super low-income areas.

We would get told ahead of time if a city had a really high poverty rate. And I made it my point to figure out how to sell to all of those people. There was never going to be a place in the country or a type of income level or type of person I couldn’t sell to. I could sell in K-mart in the Bronx and I could sell in fancy department stores in Burbank, California.

And I was able to do that because of this diligent constant work on the fundamentals and then applying that to any circumstance. And I used to really practice managing the energy of the crowd. This is something I also spend a lot of time doing that happened usually in the first couple of seconds really of me walking up and introducing myself to the crowd.

But I would focus on keeping myself neutral and looking and feeling where their energy was and reading them to see where the selling needed to go, how I needed to adapt. And I got so good at being able to adjust my energy and adjust the way that I delivered my sales pitch in an instant based on just reading the crowd.

I picked up so many cues on body language and verbal communication, and it was all just listening, which is the skill of coaching, right? Listening, holding the space, and just being very positive neutral and focusing 100% on them. I teach this in 2K, the skillset of clean selling, of getting your brain clean so that you can focus on what’s happening and read other people and listen to other people.

And so what happened is I started coaching and I started doing this on consults. I started and we’re going to talk about evaluating in a second, but I started evaluating my consults to hone the skill of selling, and I started getting better and better and figuring out how to sell any type of thing.

Selling on one-on-one calls, selling on video, selling in Facebook Lives, selling on podcasts, selling in emails, selling on webinars, selling in five-day trainings. All the different ways. And then most recently, I’ve really been focusing on selling with Facebook ads. Selling to a warm audience, selling to a cold audience.

What I find a lot of people do, a lot of my students come to me is they don’t focus on every single sales opportunity to hone their skill. They’ll let them stack up, they’ll get 10 consults in before they ever think about what worked, what didn’t work, and what they’re going to differently. They will not self-evaluate in any way. They won’t take the 2K process for example I give, just like we had seven fundamentals of selling in pitching, I give them five fundamentals of selling on consults in 2K.

And they let 10 consults go by sometimes before they go back and figure out, oh wait, which of these fundamentals, which of these steps did I miss, did I not nail? And that really is the difference of your conversion rates, which is fancy for how many clients you sign, the percentage of people you sign, and how much money you make.

Now, Todd also talks about once you master a skill, you need to move on to the next. You have to add skills to your bag. You can’t rely on the same skills. And I see a lot of people do this too. So it’s why I really encourage you after you’ve made 25K in 2K or after you’ve hit 25K in your business, you want to apply immediately for the 200K mastermind.

I see a lot of people try to use 2K all the way up to 100K and 200K, and you really don’t want to do that because it’s really just – it’s not that you can’t do it. You can make 100K in 2K. So many people have done it. But the reason you want to move on is you don’t want to take – just have one skillset in your bag of what I consider foundational selling.

You don’t want to just have that skillset in your bag. You want to add advanced selling to your bag as soon as possible because now you have two skillsets. Now you can approach things in two different ways. And you can get more nuanced with your selling.

That’s what taking selling to the next level does is it gets you more nuanced in your selling. I will tell you, once I was becoming the best in the industry with pitching even, I used to be training – I was like, the top. Nobody was really making more money than me.

But I would call my peers or the people that were making more money than me at the time, I would call them and constantly ask for their help in store situations where I wasn’t selling. I might have been selling the minimum for what the company required, but if I wasn’t selling what I knew I could be selling, I was constantly on the phone with them.

I remember I called one of my mentors Adam once in – I was at a military base and he was at the store, and we were both averaging about $3000 a day, which was insane for like, a $30 product. Most people average $1000 a day on a good day and $500 on an average day and we were doing $3000 a day.

And I was calling him for adjustments and he was like, what are you doing? You’re grossing $3000 a day, you don’t need my help. And I’m like, you don’t understand, I could be grossing $6000 a day. So I always tell people that when they’re like, trying to latch onto just one skillset and they’re like, but this skillset is sufficient for me, this is working in my business now.

I’m like, but what are you missing by not having another skillset that could be working in different situations or even better? Think of the money you’re leaving on the table. So once you’ve mastered foundational selling, you want to move on to advanced selling techniques.

And even beyond advanced selling. I teach my students the skill of selling something that is always open versus launching and having open and close, and selling with webinars and selling with copy. You want to have all of these skillsets so that you can be adaptable and profitable no matter what changes happen in the market place.

A lot of my 2K students want to have a freak out because they finally got really good at in person events, like networking and getting consults, going to networking events, and then COVID hit. And now they have to do everything online and they’re like, freaking out about it and making it this super negative thing.

Or they come in and they only want to do things online, and I just think you’re selling yourself short when you aren’t interested or you’re not willing to get over your drama about selling, about meeting people in person versus meeting people online. I want you to have mastery of both skillsets.

Because then no matter – what results for me is that no matter what changes online, I can always make money, and that will be your result as well. I’m never worried about the algorithm. I’ve never once spent any second thinking about a Facebook or Instagram algorithm.

I remember there was a thing going around recently where people were like, oh my god, the Instagram algorithm has changed. And I’m like, maybe we’ve had some less likes, I don’t know. But here’s what also happens when you develop multiple skillsets is your business is never reliant on one.

So if one becomes finicky, you just focus on the other one. There was a time where our ads, we kept getting rejected. I think I talked about this with you all. We were in Facebook ad purgatory and it was fine. I just focused on selling in emails.

I have so many skillsets. And if all of it went away tomorrow, I think I’ve even told you guys this story where my CFO said if you lost everything, your podcast, all your emails, your website, everything was gone tomorrow and you had to start from scratch, how much money do you think you could make in the next 30 days?

And I was like, probably $40,000 at least. I would just go to some networking events. So I just have so many skills. I will never ever not be able to make money. I have sufficiency, I have talent, I have skill, I have experience that will always pay me, even if the life coaching industry went away, I would figure out another way to make money because I have all these skillsets.

So in a pandemic, with the world quarantined, I can make money. When I was pitching, some stores didn’t have PAs and the PAs were how we made announcements that we were giving out free gifts and that we were going to – where the location was and when the show started. But I would adapt and use this little sound box and just walk through the store and announce with this little sound box.

Or I would pass out little tickets and tell people to head over right away. I had multiple ways to get people to my counter and I would use them no matter what the situation was. And sometimes I would use them all together.

If it was a really tough store, I would pass out tickets and tell them to head that way, and then I would walk through the store and make a little announcement on my boombox. Then I would get on the PA and make an announcement. And then I would repeat the process again.

I just had such an ability no matter what the circumstance that was given to me to sell. I just had so much skill in that. Some stores had weird locations, some had weird crowds, some shows needed to be 30 minutes, some needed to be 12. Sometimes they would send us – we had a standard giveaway for each product.

Sometimes they sent us something else. And I just had that mindset that like, today I learn a new skill, and now that skill will be with me forever. So now I have so many skills for selling and I can literally sell anything to anyone, which has become my new tagline for 200K is you know what my clients buy from me? Anything I fucking sell them and I’m going to teach you how to do that too.

But really, what that is is just mastering different skillsets, different types of selling to be able to always pull something out of your bag when you go to sell. He also said on this podcast, which it was just like this – I don’t know, five-minute conversation where I’m writing down all the gems as fast as possible, that flexibility is also a mindset of I’m always looking for another way.

And in my business, at the multimillion dollar level, I was skilled at selling to my warm audience, and this year we’ve been focusing on my cold audience and now I know, I’m starting to see that pay off and I know in two to three years when we’ve mastered both, that’s a 15 to 20 million dollar business for us.

So I really want you to think about having the flexibility of I’m always willing to look and find another way. So whether it’s online or whether it’s virtual, whether it’s in person, be willing to find another way. If Instagram algorithm changes, find another way.

I don’t know that email will ever change, but if for some reason email changed, you could find a different way there too. You can always find a different way to interact with people.

So now let’s talk about honing and developing the skillset of evaluating. It’s literally one of the most important skillsets to grow in any area of your life ever, to create anything. And really what evaluating is is learning how through failure. And most people don’t want to do that.

They want to be told the how to avoid failure. But remember, there are things that are learned and things that are earned. And one of the things Todd also said is if you’re the type of person that can get used to taking action while being fearful, while being uncertain about what it may bring, that you are a tough person and you will be able to create momentum just by taking some action and that momentum breeds confidence and confidence breeds certainty.

So again, I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but evaluating is so important because you will not know how when you start. I just want you to think about that for a second and reconcile that. A lot of you refuse to reconcile that and you spend a lot of time arguing with that. Let’s just decide it’s true. You’re not going to know the how when you start.

You just have to get started. You have to take some action. It doesn’t even matter what. But then you evaluate the result of that action. What worked, what didn’t work, what you will do differently. And there are specific ways I teach in 2K, specific things you include in each one of those things.

It’s not the more you can guide and direct your brain, the more specific you can be, the more you’ll get out of your evaluation. But the what you’ll do differently guides your next action. And if you do that over and over, you will take more and more educated action. The fails teach you. They direct your next action.

And here’s what will happen. When you get good at evaluating, here’s what I see with my students in 2K that are the best at evaluating. You never get stuck in I don’t know what I should be doing. I don’t know what to get coaching on, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, I don’t know why they didn’t buy, I don’t know how to fix it.

You always have answers. You always have direction for where to go to ask a coach to get coaching. You always have direction for what you need to be working on in your self-coaching. And the more clear your evaluating is, the more clear your next action is, again, the more clear your work is, your growth is.

It’s no longer throwing things against the wall to see what’s going to stick. It’s strategic decision making on how to proceed. Now, I’ve said this a couple times in this podcast or alluded to it, but I want to say it slowly. Evaluating your coaching skill and your selling skill are the two most important things you can evaluate.

See why the three best skillsets are most important skillsets you can develop? They all three go together. Selling is coaching, coaching is selling, and evaluating your skill of coaching and selling will get you the most growth and make you the most valuable and then the most profitable in your business year after year.

I remember I used to do this with every single coaching call in the beginning. Every consult. I would literally write out a consult conversation. He said this, I said this, he said this, I – I would take up pages of writing down everything I could remember so that I could go over it with my coach or go through it in my own mind. Where did I go wrong? What could I have said to be more effective?

I learned patterns of things that worked when selling and things that didn’t work. And I grew my launching skills faster and my webinar skills faster and my teaching skills faster. And just solving my clients problems and creating concepts for them to understand it, everything got faster.

And because I was earning my knowledge through action and my willingness to fail, my mastery is so much deeper than if I had tried to learn it. You will never create the result you want learning your way there. You have to earn your way there through taking action, going out and selling, going out and coaching, and then evaluating to get better and better and better and better.

Evaluating even the action. You can evaluate a Facebook Live, say what worked, what didn’t work, what you’re going to do differently. And then every single time you do that, your brain gets a little bit clearer, a little more specific on what you really have to do, and you get your action, your what you’re going to do next just gets more educated from experience, rather than educated from a book told me to do this or I read this.

The more you evaluate, the better your skills get and the better the coaching and selling gets, the more valuable you become, the more skillsets you have to grab at in any circumstance, the more money you make in the world.

I want to offer if you’re not in 2K, I will help you do this. We have an extensive evaluation program when you join 2K. You learn very specifically what to include in your consults with what worked, what didn’t work, and what you will do differently, and then you bring that to the Facebook community, you bring that to ask a coach. You let other people see it and have eyes on it and help you add and look at anything that you might have missed.

And even if you had no one looking at it and you were just doing it for yourself, just the evaluating, you would still get better and better consult after consult after consult. Eventually you do that enough and you will start closing every single person you talk to, which is a super fun thing to have happen in your business.

Alright, so join 2K, we’ll help you with evaluating, we’ll help you with selling, we’ll help you with coaching. Because the more you sell, the better you get at coaching, the better you get at coaching, the better you get at selling. I’ll teach you the clean selling process to get your brain clear and be thinking about other people and then evaluate every single interaction you have with another human as a coach.

Alright, I’ll see you inside 2K for 2K. Have a great week, y’all.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program, where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.