Ep #1: 3 Things You Need to Do to Make Money as a Life Coach® – Part 1

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.

Hello you. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. If you’re a Diva, welcome back and let’s keep building on the work we have done. This podcast is about making money as a life coach. I want to share with you today how I did it. How I got my business off the ground and got started making money.

There are three things and only three things you have to do to start making money as a life coach. Today I’m going to tell you what all three of those things are. We’re going to dive into the first thing, and then we’ll finish up the next two things you have to do and really dive into them over the next couple of episodes. Just make sure you stay tuned. I’m so excited.

So I do want to just share with you a little bit about me. You’re going to learn so much more about me over the rest of the podcast episodes as we continue on. I love to share stories about me personally because so many people ask me and they’re really curious and I’m always curious about other people’s stories. So you’ll hear a ton about my story.

But I was actually thinking about getting my business started when I was creating this podcast. I’ve always talked about my income and my story and I’m always super transparent about it, but I always have told people about my income from a full calendar year perspective, and I actually was thinking back. When I look back at when I actually launched my business and my first actual 12 months of being in business, it’s a little bit of a different story. And so I wanted to share that with you all.

So I got certified in March of 2015 and for my first 12 months from March to the next March, I made $18,000 in my business. And you might be in a similar place where you’ve been in business for 12 months where you actually feel like you set up shop and 12 months later you have made a lot less money than you thought you would have, and that was where I was for the first 12 months of my business.

But then, something magical happened. I started doing the three steps we’re going to talk about today. I actually started them a little bit before the next 12 months but it kind of all caught up from there. But I really spent the second 12 months growing my business, doing these three things and that’s why I want to share them with you as they’re so important.

But I took my business – and this is really what I want you guys to hear – from $18,000 to $211,000 in a 12-month period, just from the three things, truly, that I’m about to share with you on this podcast. And then I took it from $211,000 to $429,000 for that third year. And then over the next year, we’re going to bring in over a million dollars from the next 12 months, which is so fun and exciting.

So your business can grow from what feels like nothing to everything in such a short amount of time, and what you do and what you spend your time on is so important. So flash forward to now, life coaches come to me to work with me for a few reasons. They love my authenticity and transparency. You’re going to hear a lot about that on this podcast.

You will not get this level of vulnerability in the market anywhere. Promise. They come to me to be a better businesswoman and coach, to truly think at a higher level, to master sales and conversions so you can market less, make money faster, and spend way more time doing what you love. And because I make it simple, and that’s what today is all going to be about. Simple, simple, simple.

I’m going to give you the simplest way to make money as a life coach. So I remember when I was in that first 12 months when I made that $18,000, I remember being so confused and overwhelmed with all of the steps I was seeing to create a life coaching business. The website, the freebie or the opt in, picking a niche, creating a blog even.

I had no idea how to do any of these things. Sound familiar? And I thought for a while that those were the only way to make money and succeed as a life coach, but I quickly learned that they weren’t. I figured out a way that worked for me and this way just so happens to work so well for all the other life coaches that I work with.

Because when you are new – I want you to really think about this – you’re just trying to believe in yourself. You’re scared as hell that you’re going to mess up your client and do it wrong. You lack so much confidence it’s crazy, and you’re just hoping to sign that one client that will prove to you you are capable of doing this and getting paid to do this incredible career.

So then when you throw on top of that the need to produce newsletters, blogs, podcasts, create free gifts to offer people, learning how to use an email server, building a website, getting a Facebook ad up and running, you enter complete meltdown mode. If this is you, I just want to offer, I feel you, you’re in the right place.

So here’s what I did. I focused on three things. I’m going to tell you what they are. Again, we’re going to dive into the first thing today and then we’re going to uncover the next two in upcoming episodes, so stay tuned. And they were really simple, and I spent all of my time doing them. And by the end of a year straight doing this, I had built a multiple six-figure business and had an entire tribe following me. And it takes a lot of time for coaches to build a dedicated audience base, what I call a tribe, but I did it really quickly and it was truly because I spent my first year focused on these three things. Here they are.

Meet as many people as possible, tell them you’re a life coach, make offers to help them. That’s it. I’m dead serious. This is all you truly have to do to build your life coaching practice. So you can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s super simple. Much simpler probably than you’ve been making it. So we’re going to dive into meeting as many people as possible today and why it’s so important.

The first reason you need to meet as many people as possible, you’re going to meet people who don’t know you from before. As a coach, one of the things I see life coaches struggle with the most is who we have known ourselves to be our whole life and who we are trying to become as a coach.

The people in our lives currently who already know us are usually the last to get on board with that person, if ever. They know about who we used to be and how we used to be. They know us as the person we were. And suddenly, that thing you struggled with your whole life that you have partially created new results for your new life is the thing that now you’re claiming to be an expert in.

Can you blame them? If you don’t already have a good dose of fraud complex going, your friends and family are probably going to be pretty great at helping you get there. But the people that you just meet, they only know the person that you greet them as. They get the opportunity to meet you as the person you want to be, as if you’ve always been that person.

They get to meet your highest self, so they in turn help you become that person. They help you solidify your belief in yourself and this new identity that you’re forming. I always say to my clients, the fast you can figure out who you want to be and become that person, the more money you will make. When you tell your sister, your husband, your colleague that you’re now a life coach, it’s usually on your end, laced with asking permission to be that, to be accepted as that, for them to believe that you can be that.

And you can’t blame them. They know that you have zero clients and you just got certified or not, that you haven’t even been certified, and this brand-new person you meet just has no idea about any of that. They don’t know that you’re still unsure and that saying I’m a life coach might still be difficult for you. They know nothing about you except what you decide to show them. It’s your brand-new opportunity to start over with every single person you meet.

For every person you meet, you get an opportunity to strengthen your own belief in who you are and what you offer. So practice being confident. Be the coach who has all the clients and the successful coaching practice. Be the person living her dream.

You know, the second client I ever signed was someone I met at a networking event and I showed her the version of me who was living her dreams, helping people, doing what she loved, running her own business, and she signed with me because she wanted to be that person too. And I wasn’t pretending or faking it or being dishonest. I was courageously believing in that life so much I was embodying it before the results came in. Even before I actually had that life.

It’s like saying the way that I would say in a few months I’m going to Napa. I haven’t actually been to Napa but I know without a doubt that I will be there. We’ve already booked the plane tickets. It’s that kind of energy. You will need to work on this energy of really believing that that is where you’re headed and that is the life that you will have and that is who you are now. That’s why you need to meet as many people as possible. The more people you meet, the more practice you get in becoming that badass life coach I know you’re meant to be.

And don’t tell me, seriously, like listen. Do not tell me that you can’t get out of the house and meet people, that there’s just too much to do and you have no time. Six-figure coaching businesses don’t just fall out of the sky. You aren’t entitled to one. You don’t just get it easier because you’re busy and you have limited time. I hear it all of the time. It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Jack Canfield said in his book, Success Principles, for every obstacle or excuse that you have, for every reason you can’t do it, there is someone else who has had the exact same obstacle and figured it out. Success is for the person willing to figure it out and let go of all those excuses. And we all know, excuses are like assholes. Everybody has one. So your kids, your full-time job, your laundry, none of that is a good enough reason to not get out and meet people. Zero excuses, seriously. Don’t let that be an excuse.

Okay, end rant. The second reason that you need to be meeting people is because you need to get the word out and expand your network as fast as possible. Every person you meet knows a few hundred people themselves. I want you to imagine the size of weddings. Each person you meet is like growing your network the size of a wedding.

And I really like to give you that visual because think about a huge room full of people at a wedding. Like, every person you meet gives you access to all those people too. It’s really awesome. It’s like the six degrees of separation thing. And you just never know where a referral might come from that situation.

Like, I have the best stories about this. So I’ll give you a couple of those. So my second client introduced me to one of her friends who signed with me maybe three or four months later. Maybe six months later. And then as soon as she signed with me, she told another friend of hers that the other friend – she told another friend of her that my original client didn’t know.

So she – six degrees of separation like, my client referred me to a friend of hers who referred me to a friend of hers, and she signed. And the day she signed, she told another friend of hers in a completely different state that she was signing with a life coach and she was feeling 100% better after the very first conversation that she had with me.

And so her friend messaged me that day, set up a consult for two days later and signed with me as well. So I signed three clients within like, a week. It was insane. I also had a client who met a person. So she didn’t even know this person and fell in love with her mission and what she was trying to do, so she messaged me and said, you know, I don’t think she has the money to pay for a coach but I really believe in her message so I want you to do a consult with her. And if you think it’s a good fit and she’s committed to doing the work, I will pay for her coaching.

So not only did I not know that person the week that I found out about this person, but my client didn’t even know this person. It was someone she met and if I don’t have you on board yet with how incredible meeting as many people as possible is, my first two clients I was not in the network marketing niche. I was just offering to help really anybody that came my way with the tool that I use the most, which is called the Model.

And I just really believed I could help anybody get any result that they wanted, and so I didn’t niche and I was just going out and positioning myself to help as many people as possible. And I met these two girls that were in network marketing businesses and they had teams of people underneath them. And they started – they loved working with me so much they started having me do workshops for their people so that their people could also have the transformation and breakthroughs that they were having.

And so all this that I now had access to 10, 20, 30 other new people that I’d never met before, and then those people wanted to start working with me. Every person you meet is an opportunity to introduce you to someone who might end up being a client of yours for the next couple of years. It’s a really big deal.

And every person you meet is a person who can engage with you online as the new person you are becoming. More about that in a second, but first let me just say you can totally meet people online. I highly recommend doing that. It’s free, it’s fast, you can do it in your jammies. Meet people in Facebook groups, you can meet people with paying for Facebook ads if you want to, you can meet people in trainings, you can meet people in paid groups.

I actually teach my entire process for Making Money as a Life Coach in my 2K for 2K group, and we have a Facebook community, and the people in that group expand their network and engagement like crazy just by being in the program. They friend each other, they watch each other’s Lives, they do business with each other. There are lots of creative ways to meet people online.

I’ve met clients in being in somebody else’s program, I’ve met clients being in other people’s Facebook groups. Just building relationships and meeting people. So let me explain how every person you meet is a person who could engage with you online as the new person you’re becoming and why that’s so important.

I’m going to talk to you about how I built up my social media presence and how I got people seeing me as a big deal and really taking me seriously kind of from the get-go. I went to all kinds of networking events like, with live human beings, and I wasn’t too concerned with whether it matched my niche because remember, I didn’t even really have a niche at the time.

And also let me just say I recently had a client that made me specify, maybe not networking events for lovers of German Shepherds. Not like crazy far out networking events, but if there are adult people doing normal things, go to that event. So go to every party, every wedding. I went to Rodan and Fields events, 31 parties, Stella & Dot. I went to anything I got invited to.

Also let me be clear, I actively participated. So I would buy stuff. I would be a fun participant in the group. I created my own networking events. I sponsored bigger networking events. I met people for coffee. So you want to go to anything and everything, but then here’s what happened. I would friend them on social media or whatever profile you’re using, like you could use LinkedIn. I personally want to vomit when I think about LinkedIn because it feels so professional and uptight, but that might be perfect for you.

Or you might love Instagram, but whatever I would – whatever social media platform you’re using or whatever way that you’re connecting with other people, for me it was Facebook, I would connect with them, and then I would make sure there was content there for them to comment on. So I was engaging on there constantly.

And I went from one to two likes on a post when I first started coaching to 30 to 60 engagements a post, which might be small in the big scheme of things when you look at huge influencers that are getting hundreds of posts, but if they’re getting hundreds of likes, they were either already an influencer or they’ve been doing it for years.

And so when you’re new like right now, when you think about it and you might be in that place where you’re getting one to two likes, going from one to two likes to 30 to 60 likes and comments and engagements is a pretty big deal, especially when you’re new in business. So I would establish a connection in person and then when I added them in my social media world, they were more likely to connect online because they had that personal connection. So important.

Then the more people that are engaging, all of a sudden, my business looks legit, and now people are finding me online and engaging with me. Now when I’m in a Facebook group and people friend me, they see people engaging with me, now they feel comfortable to engage as well.

So before I became a coach, I was a pitch artist. That’s what I would call it. I would do live infomercials across the country. I was the best – one of the best in the entire industry. I was always number one in the US in sales for seven years straight. And so I would go into retail chains across the country and I would do like, 10 shows a day of a new product.

And for every show, I would have a group of about 20 to 100 strangers around my counter. Sometimes they were a bit hostile, and I knew the one thing I had to do is get someone engaging with me first. This gave permission for other people to do it as well. The more people who are engaged, the more others engaged.

We used to have a joke that no one wants to be the only asshole who buys, and no one wants to be the only asshole who doesn’t, and I think that’s true for social media engagement as well. So one of the things that would help me in particularly slower stores with smaller traffic or more hostile stores, and when I say hostile, I just mean they would be more skeptical or more like – not like, excited about the show. More like, annoyed that they had to watch a show.

And so here’s what I would do in those situations is I would walk around and hand out free gift tickets, and it would just be a ticket that said you’re entitled to a free gift. I would walk around the store and let people know ahead of time that the show was going to start soon and where to go, and I’d make them feel special by saying – I’d kind of walk by and whisper to them, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know we’re about to hand out free gifts over at x, y, z location. You can go ahead and head over there now if you want to be first,” and then I just keep walking.

And I would say it kind of like it was a secret, like I was doing them a favor. But here’s what I was really doing. I was creating personal connection ahead of time. So many people would be like, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much,” and then they would feel connected to me. So when I walked up to the table, we’d already established a relationship. They were much warmer to me then than if I had just approached them and they’d never ever seen me before.

So as annoyed as you might be about networking events and trust me, so many coaches tell me they are so annoyed about networking events, and I used to think the same thing about them but this is why they’re so important. They aren’t even really about you signing clients at them. In fact, if you’re trying to sign clients at them, you’re probably in the wrong energy.

I think I signed one client ever at an actual networking event, but I signed tons by showing up at events my clients hosted and parties they held and different – I would go to multilevel marketing meetings with my friends. I just signed a ton of people by meeting people through those events and building the relationship through social media and keeping in contact and engaging with them.

So it’s not necessarily about who you meet. It’s just about the relationships that you build from who you met. It’s about who you become in having met all those people, and it’s about creating an audience to really establish yourself. Because it doesn’t matter how talented you are if you’re performing to an empty theatre.

And that is so important, so when you do meet someone who really can use your services who is a great fit for you, they can feel safe to engage with you and ask for help because you’ve created this audience, because you’ve become this person that people engage with as a life coach, and because you’ve met all these people and built up your confidence that way.

Meeting as many people as possible is truly about creating a safe space for people who need help to come. It’s truly about expanding your network and building your audience. It’s like, if you build it, they will come, and I promise, that is always true.

Alright, so this week, go out and meet as many people as possible and keep doing it. I spent a year doing that, maybe two really. If you count both of those years, that $18,000 year and then the $18,000 to $211,000 year. And that, I really do believe is the reason my business is as successful as it is and why my tribe is so strong. And you can do that too without any start up capital, any tech stuff, even without a certification. If you’re in training to become a coach, get out there. Meet as many people as possible. You will be so grateful you started early.

Okay, I will see you next week and we’re going to dive into why it’s so important to tell everybody that you’re a life coach after you meet them. So you meet as many people as possible, and then you tell everybody you’re a life coach, and then we’re going to also dive into making offers to them. Alright, I’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you’re 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 $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.