Life coaches are in high demand. At the same time, the field is becoming increasingly competitive. You need to employ several strategies to establish and grow a very profitable practice.
Most life coaching practices are based on the talents, training and skills of one or a handful of life coaches. While generating significant revenues with this business model is possible, it usually requires working with the very affluent and billing them well. Even in this situation, it takes work to generate significant personal wealth.
There are a variety of non-exclusive ways to leverage a life coaching practice. Here we’ll briefly address four of them:
- Licensing your expertise. Either way or another, you “license” your life coaching approach and content to other life coaches. You receive a per-set fee and a percentage of their revenues. This is, in effect, an override model. The more licensing agreements you have and the larger they are, the more you earn.
- Extensive productization. Taking your life coaching expertise and transforming it into a broad array of products is a highly effective way to boost your income dramatically. Workshops and even larger events are often compelling ways of generating revenue and garnering new clients. Webinars, podcasts and books enhance revenues while bringing in new life coaching clients.
- Venture life coaching. In exchange for fees, you can take a piece of business ventures. By working with business owners, you receive equity in the business. The financial viability of the business and its prospects are major factors in your ability to monetize these equity positions.
- Brand extensions. Having meaningfully established yourself, you can branch off into other, usually related, business endeavors. Moving beyond your core capabilities is a function of the strength of your following and the ability to logically and emotionally connect the new ventures with your life coaching practice.
With all these approaches to leveraging a life coaching practice, thought leadership has a very potent, if not critical, role, as seen in the table below. Simply put, being a thought leader is instrumental and often essential to leveraging your practice, which is how you can become very wealthy.
| Methods | Examples of the Importance of Thought Leadership |
| Licensing your expertise | Proven life coaching methodology. Facilitate pull marketing for licensees. |
| Extensive productization | Capitalize on multiple distribution channels. Highly scalable content based on your intellectual capital. |
| Venture life coaching | Business owners attracted to cutting-edge ideas, concepts and solutions. Thought leadership content is converted in to equity in businesses. |
| Brand extensions | Brand transference based on your industry profile as a thought leader. Capitalizing on intellectual capital in an aligned business venture. |
Russ Alan Prince is the executive director of Private Wealth magazine and chief content officer for High-Net-Worth Genius. He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs and select professionals.
