How to scale your coaching and consulting business from someone who has made all the mistakes

This article shares the advice I gave to the Fellows of the Professional Speaking Association on how to scale their business (coaching, consulting, speaking)

If you took a three-month holiday from your business, what would happen?

For most coaches, consultants, accountants, lawyers and speakers, the honest answer is that your revenue would grind to a halt. This is the expert's dilemma: when you are the business, your growth is capped, and your freedom is limited. You are trading time directly for money.

This was the theme of a presentation that I gave to the fellows of the Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland. In the room were mostly speakers, coaches and consultants.

After running the session I decided this would make a great topic for my substack. So here is the article.

As I have proved, it is possible to go from a business built around your expertise and the cult of your personality into something that is scalable.

This is unapologetically a paid article!

Let’s first look at the myths that I hear and see all the time:

Passive income is anything but ‘passive’.

To generate passive income means one of two things:

• Being great at digital marketing so you can sell products at scale. Or having the money to pay for this digital marketing expertise.

• You being able to win enough work and develop a team to be able to deliver the work.

In my experience there are very few people who can do either of these. They all require skills or money that many of us don’t have. The problem is that when you are delivering flat out, it’s then difficult to create the time to win more work to feed and develop others or work out how to get your digital marketing engine going.

Stop trading time for money

Yes, you do need to stop trading time for money. But whatever way you try to leverage your time and expertise will take time. All you are normally doing with most of the ways that the marketplace decides is “stopping trading time for money”, is still trading time for money. Just at a higher charge out rate or a higher price point or on a different product.

Our Progress To Partner Academy is our membership site for our How To Make Partner Audience. And yes, it was our way of stopping trading time for money. However, as my diary will show, I am still needed to create content and be the subject matter expert. Until this gets big enough that others can create and deliver the content, it's still me trading my time. Just for a different product or service.

If you personally are still required to turn up and deliver then you don’t have a scalable business. Yes, you may be growing your revenue but, and I repeat, you don’t have a scalable business model. But for most of us, that’s the problem. The very nature of being a knowledge worker type of business means we need to turn up to have a business or drive the business forward.

Group coaching is not coaching

But let’s be honest, things like group coaching are rarely what we could call coaching. But they are touted as a way of you stopping trading time for money and leveraging your time and expertise. Yes, you can still help your group coachees get great results. Then there is the benefit of coachees sharing, which is often perceived as valuable. But you can never go as deep as you can when it’s just you and the client. And what the marketing suggests is ‘group coaching’ where you have 5+ people in a room is not coaching. They are facilitated conversations. You’ve become a facilitator or trainer.

From my conversations with the Fellows of the Professional Speaking Association it became clear that most of them hadn’t really thought in depth about what it would take to scale their business and whether they wanted to.

Growing is different to scaling

A few weeks ago a very successful entrepreneur who ran a 9 figure offshoring business announced that he was shutting down his new coaching business. He’s grown it rapidly in 9 months from zero to 600k (not sure of the currency, but this is still impressive whether it is US or Australian Dollars). He’d brought in a great new team. The problem wasn’t profitability. In fact he declared the profit margin to be high and very desirable.

The problem was it wasn’t scalable. It all relied on him still being in the room to deliver some or part of the service. This was why he was shutting it down. It didn’t align with who he was.

In my experience what most of us think of as scaling our business is growing our business. Putting up your prices or doing more work, of whatever form, is not scaling. It’s growing your business.

Your business, I would suggest, is only genuinely scalable if you could take a 90-day sabbatical and the business would still grow nicely and not be harmed in any way, either now or in the future.

If you are a paid subscriber you can now scroll past the next section.

---

This is an article for paid subscribers.

Thinking about subscribing? Here’s why this article could make a real difference for you and your growing business:

• It reveals the 11 key things that you need to do to turn your business into a business which is profitably and sustainably scalable

• It shares 2 graphs which show why it is difficult to scale your knowledge business with your current pricing model.

• It shares my profit and revenue figures from 3 lean years (and yes, it was not good!)

• I give you my rate card for how I split money with my associates which is flexible reward who brings value to the assignment

• You’ll see how your business and role needs to change as you grow and scale

• You’ll get my top tips for ensuring that you stop kissing frogs and find your prince first time when you recruit in a team member.

As per usual, this article (over 4000+ words) will be full of practical tips to implement what you are learning. These are tips that work for me and my clients.

---