Coaching, Consulting, Training for Residual Income

I have been in the training, coaching and consulting business now for 18 years; and a fine business it is. At its best, its practitioners add massive value, make a difference and help people and organisations solve complex problems. Furthermore, its hourly or daily rate is good. What is there not to like?

You set up a business and – if you have been employed before – wow! All that freedom, plus the creativity you have always sought to do things your way with the client. Add to that the expertise you can use and demonstrate and initially it can be almost heaven.

Of course, there is always for most practitioners – with very honourable exceptions who understand the game right off – the problem of marketing. Having met and worked with literally hundreds of practitioners I think it is true to say that most have technical skills, but not always commensurate marketing skills to get them to the level of business they want or aspire to. Certainly for me, marketing has always been a challenge, as year by year I have got better at it, although it never becomes something I love for its own sake. True entrepreneurs, I think, are people who naturally can market long before they have worked out which product or service they wish to sell!

Most practitioners love what they do: they love coaching individuals – it’s personal for them; or they love consulting an organisation; or they love the expectation and hush at the beginning of a training session in a packed hotel room. And they go at it full pelt. And then they – you – need a break – and then the problems kick in.

Being a practitioner means that once you take that break, the income stops. You get paid for when you work, not for when you don’t. And the same is true even for retirement: there is no automatic pension or nest-egg supplied by the corporation or the sector. In truth, practitioners are like piece-workers – as long as they churn out hours, they get paid, but as soon as they stop, that’s it.

The thing is, the quality and intensity of the work is such that they need to stop, and they need to re-charge, frequently, if they are going to be there for the long term. What, then, is the solution?

After 11 straight years of delivery I came to the realisation that providing a service was one thing, but the key issue for longevity and residual income was creating or accessing intellectual property, so that one could ‘productise’ one’s offering, and thereby replicate sales even if one weren’t present or delivering the service.

A step beneath this is I think accessing some ‘brand’ that has know-how (but it’s not a product) and which allows one to create a data-base of clients that has value for someone else to acquire in due course. There are many brands like that out there and the most well-known are American, for
example Dale Carnegie. Britain has brands like Tony Buzan.

That said, however, the best thing is creating your own product or buying into one – one that is relevant to your market and your expertise. The thing about the product from the practitioner point of view is that clients continue to buy it and once they have been shown and trained on how to use it, the income becomes ‘residual’. That means that you continue to make income even when you are not working.

This has many important side-effects. The first being of course that one’s cash-flow is seriously improved and particularly during those times when work tends to be thin: for practitioners this can often be during the summer or Christmas vacation periods, which can be pretty extended.

But furthermore, the product does something else that is quite profound. There is a proverb that says, truly, ‘out of sight, out of mind’. I have done some amazing work for some clients, but the truth is that for a percentage of them when I am not there I am totally forgotten. It’s not that they’re bad or ungrateful people, but just that they are so busy, they haven’t time to think about me! The presence of your product, however, changes all that – they have to think about you because they ‘see’ it all the time and there is a connection with you.

The result of this is far more sales – up-sales and cross-sales – than would otherwise have been possible, and the slow – consciously or sub-consciously – growth in their perception of you as more of a partner in their business than a supplier.

Thus, if you are a practitioner – coach, consultant or trainer – and you have no valuable product to place with your clients, then you are seriously missing a trick, and also missing residual income that can make a huge difference to your bottom-line.

For those who are practitioners in the people development field, you may wish to consider the latest Motivational Maps licensing course in late January. Contact me for more details.