Recurring income is a wonderful thing to have—especially when you’re building life changing income as someone offering coaching for life or business related topics. It’s hard to get new customers—you know that as a businessperson. It’s much easier and much more ideal to have the same customers pay you over and over again.
That’s exactly what can happen when you focus on recurring income from coaching. You’ll find coaching clients, win them over, hook them with a fantastic, long-term coaching plan or program, and they’ll pay you over and over again.
As a coach, you provide a wonderful service. People pay you to learn what you know. They pay to get access to your unique insights for their life or business. They’re also paying to tap into your experience, including your prior failures, so that their path to success is easier and quicker.
Sometimes, coaching is a one-off thing. A client will hire you as a coach and pay you one sum of money in exchange for help in reaching a particular milestone or help in resolving an important problem they have.
That’s a great arrangement. It feels really good to help people in this way. You’re truly contributing to their life and success in some important ways. Being a coach can be extremely fulfilling. You’re giving back and earning a great income doing it.
But, is that all there is? Should you have to struggle to get new coaching clients time and time again? I don’t think that’s necessarily what you want. There’s an even better, potentially more lucrative coaching business model to focus on. What is it? It’s earning recurring income through coaching.
As I mentioned before, it’s much better to get the same clients and customers to pay you over and over again than it is to find new clients each time. Don’t get me wrong—it’s great when you do get a good one-off customer or client who pays you well.
But, what’s even better is when clients pay you over and over again. It’s great when you earn an income without having to focus on marketing and the struggle of wondering where in the world your next client is going to come from.
Sure, this all sounds great… but will the same clients really be willing to pay you for coaching over an extended period of time? Will they be okay with paying you for coaching every single month?
Sure, many of them absolutely will. They’ll be thrilled to have you by their side because they’re getting real results. And that’s one of the key things right there—they’ll be happy to pay you because you’re the best at getting them to take action and lead them in the right direction.
When the same clients are paying you a monthly recurring income you can focus on providing great value instead of focusing on recruiting clients all the time. You can focus on growing your business and boosting your income.
What’s Your Coaching Program Going to Be Like?
So, what does recurring income from coaching look like? What can people expect from you when they become your client? That’s totally up to you. There’s no one-size-fits-all mold here. You have to figure out what’s going to work for you. Figure out where your talents, skills, and passions lie.
The answer to what your coaching program will look like differs depending on what you want from your coaching program and the role it will play in your business. What’s your specialty? What’s there a need for in your niche? What are other coaches in your niche offering?
Will you be working with individual clients one on one, on a regular basis? Or will you be working with groups of clients on a regular basis? Group coaching makes it more affordable and more attractive for the students, but it also makes it a little tougher for you to make sure they all make the desired progress.
Of course, you could do both of the above. Group coaching has the obvious advantage of leveraging your time. It also means that if a client drops out, you still have income coming in from the others in the group.
For example, it isn’t unreasonable to charge $1000 a month for one on one coaching, while group coaching might be $97 to $197 per month. You could conceivable take on a large number of clients in your group program, depending on how much individual access they’ll have to you.
If you want to increase your income, there’s a limit to how many one on one clients you can take on, because of the time factor, but really no limit as to how many group clients you can handle.
One main decision to make is how you’re going to make yourself available. With one on one coaching, it could be by phone or Skype calls and email. With groups you could run teleseminars, webinars, Google Hangouts, and have Facebook and/or Skype groups, in addition to email access to you.
These are all great questions to ask yourself. The number one thing, of course, is to figure out what people in your niche are desperate to learn or do and what they’ll be willing to pay good money for.
If you already offer coaching, then this is probably all figured out already. You just need to tweak or add to your program to get people coming back for more. If you don’t have things figured out yet, then it’s time to do some research and soul-searching ahead of time. Then, you can figure out how you can turn the coaching leg of your business into a successful, recurring income business model.
Transform Your Coaching To Earn a Recurring Income
Structure your coaching program in a way that will encourage people to pay you over and over again—happily, because your advice is giving them a positive return on their investment.
Maybe that just means meeting people where they are and growing your program as they grow. Your clients will eventually want to turn small goals into bigger goals, and you can get right there along with them.
Or, maybe you can offer coaching to the same clients on a different topic each month. That can get people interested and keep them paying. Or, perhaps you can offer tiers of coaching—beginner all the way through to advanced. That can keep your customers active and engaged at all levels. You’ll be there for them all the way through.
Your coaching is something that can and will grow and change over time. Switch your mindset from the possibility of getting clients to pay you for coaching one time and figure out what you can offer that will have them paying you over and over again.
Getting Paid—the Recurring Way
Now, how are you going to accept payment? There are a couple of different options here. You can simply have your clients sign up and pay manually each month. Many will be wiling to do that and you can simply invoice them.
But, it might make more sense to ask your clients to sign up for recurring billing. That way, they don’t have to think about paying you and you don’t have to think about getting paid—it just happens on autopilot.
You can set this sort of automated billing up using PayPal or whatever payment processor you prefer to use. JVZoo and other sites make it easy to do this as well, while using PayPal.
Getting Clients to Stick Around Month After Month
You have to make sure you’re providing enough value so people will want to stick around. That means really wow’ing them with your content, experience, and insights.
Share what you know and what you’ve learned. Test and tweak new things right alongside them.
Be open and honest about what you think about their ideas and plans and help to hold them accountable when it comes to those ideas and plans.
Remember that the value isn’t just on your end. You could have a top-notch coaching program content wise and still not be doing it for your clients. Why? Because you have to understand the human mindset as much as anything else as a coach.
For example, one of the most challenging things you’ll face as a coach is getting people to follow through with their goals and assignments. You’ll be up against their bad habits and tendency to procrastinate.
Hold them accountable, one way is by having them do homework after each session they have with you. Then when you have the next session, you can check up on the progress they’ve made. They will see real results if you do that. When they see real results, they’ll be a lot more likely to hire you and pay you on a recurring basis.
One great way to encourage recurring payments is by breaking steps down for them. Make it easy for them to follow through by removing overwhelm in any way you can. Get them to decide on their goals and the steps it will take to achieve those goals.
Help them cut the fluff in their business and in their life. That’s what’s most important and that’s what’s going to lead the way for real results. That’s your job as a coach.
If you can help people achieve real results, and I know you can, you can do very well. People will gladly sign up for your recurring coaching program.