Imagine how great it would be to have a consistent amount of income coming into your business every month. You’d feel more confident hiring a team, you’d be able to finance your business goals, and maybe you’d feel less guilty about taking a well-deserved break. Consistent income is the holy grail for owners of coaching businesses. Let’s talk about how to create some!
What Is Consistent Income?
Consistent income is stable income that comes in on a regular basis. In most cases, it is measured on a monthly basis, but it could be every week. Clients employ you on a long-term basis rather than for the short-term or a one-off consultation. For the duration of your working relationship, you charge them the same amount per month.
What is the Benefit of Consistent Income?
The benefit of consistent income is it reduces the amount of marketing you need to do. A portion of your income comes in every month regardless of if you do any marketing.
Consistent income also provides stability to coaches Usually, our businesses are trapped in a feast or famine cycle. We have really good months and really quiet months, and it can be hard to predict a pattern. Consistent income provides a stable baseline to ensure you can pay your bills in quiet months.
It also provides more contact with your clients so you can continue to build relationships. If you offer single consultations, then you do not have contact with the client between projects. They may not remember you or be that committed to you when it comes to working on another project. When you have a relationship with a client and provide regular coaching, they are more likely to stick with you. It becomes a bigger hassle to find someone new.
Does Consistent Income Exist For Coaching Businesses?
Yes, absolutely! Coaches have an advantage over service-based business owners in this sense. Building consistent income is just easier in some businesses than in others.
For example, a business coach may offer single consultations to answer client questions. But they can also provide short or long-term coaching services for their clients. They could offer 2 or 3 month launch preparation coaching or even a 6-12 month coaching to help their client level up their business.
But what if your coaching business focuses on problem-solving? Generally, you come in and identify problem areas and then make a customised plan to help your client solve it. Options for creating consistent income may be less apparent, but they are still there. Done-for-you services could be a great offering if you have the resources.
Let’s look at some ways you can create consistent income in your coaching business.
Types of Consistent Income
There are many types of business models out there, so we can’t tell you exactly what you need to do to create consistent income in your business. What we can do is give you some types of consistent income and some examples of how they could work for your coaching business. Choose the best consistent income option and tailor it to your business
Subscription Service
A subscription service can take many different forms depending on the type of service you offer. The subscription provides access to a bank of resources for as long as the client is subscribed. In most coaching businesses, the subscription service targets clients who value your skill or service but prefer to DIY rather than pay for a professional.
If you are a mindset coach, you could provide a subscription service to a bank of ad-free meditation and affirmation videos. The subscription service would allow you to sell to people who can’t justify the cost of working with you or who aren’t ready to commit to working with you yet.
A relationship coach could offer a subscription service that provides access to a bank of exercises or scripts to address common relationship issues. There may even be videos of how to approach these issues to communicate in a healthy manner.
Figure out what would be helpful for your audience (ask them) and what kind of resources you can create on a consistent basis. You need to make sure you are providing more value than you offer in your free content to justify the price. This often takes the form of blueprints or follow along resources.
To start a subscription service, you need an initial pool of resources that provide enough value to justify the subscription fee. The resources should be updated on a regular basis so your clients can justify continuing to pay for it. This means adding more resources and continuing to provide value. You should check in with your subscribers on a regular basis to find out what else they may want.
Monthly Service
There may be a monthly service you can offer that you have overlooked. Sit down and brainstorm all of the services you offer and consider if there is one that people may pay for on a regular basis.
As a consultant, you could charge a small fee for a monthly check-up service to ensure your clients are implementing your plan correctly. Depending on your service, you would spend an hour or a couple of hours checking on things and writing a report with findings and recommendations. This allows you to continue profiting from clients after your consultation. Your clients will like the ongoing support to stay on track.
If you choose to offer a monthly service, be clear on the scope of the service you offer. This stops your client from bombarding you with little questions and favours that take up more time than you allocated. Providing advice and answering questions can be a great way to identify areas where you can provide additional services, but be clear when they are crossing the line from a quick question into needing to book another service. Something like the following would work:
“I took a cursory look at your service pages, and I can see that you’re right; they are not ranking well in search engines. Currently, you are paying for monthly keyword research, so this falls outside the scope of your package. I do offer an SEO check-up service for £X where I analyse your website and provide step-by-step recommendations to improve your entire website SEO. Would you like me to send you more information about that service?”
It addresses the scope creep in a polite way and points the customer toward the service you offer while maintaining a good relationship.
Retainer
A retainer is not suitable for all coaches. Retainer clients are given priority over the rest of your work; that is why clients pay the monthly rate.
Coaches often offer retainer packages that give clients additional access to them. For example, a fitness coach’s retainer package may allow for text messages to ask questions and regular accountability check-ins. Clients could choose between a one-off meal and exercise plan or ongoing coaching via retainer.
Passive Income Products
These don’t provide consistent income in the way the other options have, but passive income products can provide additional income for your coaching businesses. Once you have produced the passive income product, all you need to focus on is driving traffic and scaling the income. The amount of income the product produces may not always be consistent, but you will always gain some income while you are marketing it.
A passive income product requires some upfront work (or money to pay other people to do the work), but then the product will bring in income without any additional work on the product. The most common passive income product for coaches is books. In addition to creating another income stream, a book or eBook can increase the authority of the coach and bring in new clients.
A lot of coaches also create templates or guides to sell online. For example, a legal consultant will produce contract templates, or a writing coach will create book templates or prompts. The idea is the coach has done all the technical work, and the client can just modify it slightly to suit their needs.
Information Products
Another popular income stream for coaches is information products. Some of these information products are passive income products, as discussed earlier, but others, like courses, require ongoing work.
Long-term courses can create a stable income stream over a period of time. Let’s say you sell a 3-month course worth £250 per month to 20 people. For the next 3 months, you know that you will make £5,000 per month even if you can’t take on any extra work. This is a common way many coaches introduce some consistency into their income.
How to Find the Right Type of Consistent Income For Your Business
It takes a little bit of planning to find consistent income for your business.
Start by writing down all the services you currently provide and all of the services you could possibly provide. Think about what services you have provided in the past where a client needed your help for a longer period of time than usual. Perhaps you have had clients enquire about long-term support or clients have talked about issues that they had that would benefit from more support.
Another thing to consider is areas where a client would benefit from consistent help. Is there a type of client you work with or a service you offer that the client struggles to maintain? Coaching clients often work with coaches for accountability more than anything else. Perhaps there is an option to offer membership to an accountability group for clients who “graduate” from your coaching packages. Even if there is scope for providing quarterly maintenance services, that will provide a little bit of consistent income.
Browse forums and social media for posts related to your coaching niche and find out what people are saying. People speak more freely around other people in the same boat than they would to someone they hire. This will allow you to identify common issues that you might be able to solve with your coaching services.
Let’s say you are a financial coach who provides financial goal-setting services. Currently, you offer yearly consultations to help people set goals and create a plan to achieve them. You identify areas for improvement and give recommendations. After browsing forums, you realise that people struggle with accountability. They can stick to their plan for a month or two, but the plan goes out of the window the minute there is a sale on. Perhaps there is scope for monthly budget check-ins where you review your client’s progress, and you refine the plan for the next month.