From coaching practice to coaching business

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Do you meet hour after hour with individual coaching clients, without any other source of coaching income?

As Michael Gerber says in his book, The E-Myth Revisited, if you are still just seeing clients, then you have not graduated from the technician stage.

If you don’t move out of the technician stage, you run the risk of getting burned out.

And worse, you will lose out on all of the benefits of being the owner of a successful business, including having more time for yourself, and earning more income for less work.

It’s difficult to make this transition out of the technician phase if you don’t have a clear road map.  My specialty is helping people form group coaching programs, particularly programs that they, or coaches they hire, can run online.

But how do you start a group coaching program (which will get you out of the one-hour-for-one-payment blues), if you haven’t been planning for it over time?  

That’s why I work with clients to help them move from a coaching practice (meeting with clients hour after hour) to a coaching business.

I recently spent a wonderful afternoon with a client during a VIP half-day (actually it was a VIP day done in two different half days – a much more humane way to give intensive attention to one person).  

I think you’ll learn a lot from my brief description of the process.

I quickly realized:

• This person is brilliant
• If she hadn’t worked with me, she would stay stuck at the coaching practice level for a long time

In a few hours, we were able to clarify her niche, her ideal client, and what she is most passionate about.  She learned what she desperately needed on her website (an opt-in box with a juicy free offering to entice people to sign up), what her free offering could be, and how to go about having a shopping cart and autoresponder system ready to capture the names and email addresses of people who loved her message.

I asked her to define her UBS – Unique Business System, sometimes called Unique Branded System (Lisa Sasevich).  This is a system that’s all your own, made up of three to ten steps, that show how you move people to the transformation they desire.  It helps to have something that clients can understand or visualize, so that they’re eager to sign up for your programs.

One of the main points in The E Myth Revisited is that you need a system in order to make a business that endures, that you can teach to others, and that is replicatable.

For example, I have the F.A.B.U.L.O.U.S. System, which outlines the steps to take to create a membership site that brings you leverage, recurring, passive income.

My client didn’t have any kind of system.

This is where coaches who have been working with clients one-on-one have difficulty.  I know, because I’ve been through this process of figuring out what the heck I do, and what the heck I know!  I’ve often thought in the past, “How can I teach this to more than one person, when everyone is different, and I do different things with each person?”

No problem!  

The thing is, there really are some steps that you take with almost everyone you work with.  No matter what you do or who you work with, you can identify your own UBS.

In other words, you have a system.  You just don’t know it.

So this is where it got really fun during our time together. My client started out by saying (just like I used to), that each client and situation is different, and that there was no way to find one standardized system.  So I started asking clarifying questions, gently pulling her brilliance out of her.  As she gave examples of cases, she started to see the universal steps that she takes in helping people.  

Even more exciting was the innovative, beautiful and useful system that seemed to magically pour out of her.  

My client was astounded.  As I reacted with awe to what she was telling me, she said, “I couldn’t have done this without you!”  

All of her knowledge was there – it just needed a method to have its fibers spun into gold.  A listening ear and the right kinds of questions can work wonders.

By the end of our ½ VIP day, she had a five-part system that she saw could be used on her website, in her free offering, in talks, blog posts, articles and classes.  Each of the five parts had such depth, that she could create entire teleseminars out of each one.  As a matter of fact, I could easily see her turning it into a book.

And of course, she saw that her new UBS could be used to run “Get-It-Done Groups,” my specialty.

We ended with six very useful action steps that she felt she could do before our next ½ VIP day.  Each step will take her closer to making more money and helping more people.

My reason for describing this half-day to you is to show you part of the process of moving out of just being a technician, towards being a business person, by running groups that can bring you passive income.  It’s a fun process, but it’s a heck of a lot faster and easier if you get help.

That’s where I come in!  If you would like to apply for a Finish Agent Business Assessment, in which I spend 30-45 minutes with you to figure out what direction your business needs to go, and whether Get-It-Done Groups and Finish Agent could be right for you, then go here:

http://tinyurl.com/FinishAgentBA

This could be the turning point for you to turn your brilliance into a business.

Are you a technician, or have you moved into having a business?  What has your experience been?  I’d love to know; just write below.

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