#244: How Do Health Coaches Make Money?

All righty. Hello there health coaches. You know what? Tonight is going to be one of those breakfast for dinner kind of nights at my house, maybe pancakes, maybe eggs. My son has a baseball game and lately it's just always something. I guess now that my boys are a little bit older, some of you have been listening to this show since my babies were babies. Well now I've got one nine year old and one 12 year old. It is always something in the evening, and I've noticed that I've been cooking less and less creatively. Has this happened to any of you? Like I'm just focused on cooking something fast. But I do remember that back in the day when they were younger and certainly before they were born, I was spending a lot of time in the kitchen and I was developing recipes. That was part of what I was doing with my health coaching business.

Now don't get me wrong, I do love recipe development. I was thinking about these chocolate covered chickpeas snacks that I made one time. It's like cacao and pure maple syrup and my littlest, he was two then and I asked him if he wanted to try it and he was like, yeah, yeah. So I put it in his little fist and he was sucking on it and he loved it. It was his very first taste of chocolate on a chickpea. Thank you very much, health coach mom. But the problem was that even though I was very busy all day, I was not making enough money with those recipes that I was creating with how I was choosing to spend time in my business. And that is all too often the case with health coaches. So today we're going to talk about how health coaches actually earn money.

And if you're here live, say yes in the comments. Just type in yes if you need to earn more in your business. This way, somebody who's shy and thinks they're alone in this struggle will know that nope, plenty of coaches are all in the same boat. Now listen, this episode is brought to you by Practice Better. My favorite client management tool. You can go try any of their plans for free for 14 days@healthcoachpower.com slash pb. You're going to want to use that link and you'll save 30% off your first three months with code H C P 30. Alrighty. So how are health coaches earning money? Let's start with the obvious. We earn money coaching. It's typically where we're all starting out. And I know I did when I was freshly graduated, or actually before I had even graduated from IIN way back in 2009, I started one-on-one coaching. Who is already making money through one-on-one health coaching?

I recommend this as the place to start pretty much regardless of where you want to go with your business because it's going to give you a really strong basis even if you plan on running retreats or writing books or creating courses, and we'll talk about that in a second. Having that one-on-one coach experience is going to really solidify your understanding of what people need and how they need it. Someone on Instagram over here love Life UK says, yes, she must make more money. She says she makes money as a practitioner but wants to make more as a coach. So you must have a different type of practice that is currently profitable. And the trick is how do we get more of that to fall underneath health coaching? I hear you. Okay, who else is doing one-on-one coaching right now? Hopefully all of you, if you're not, go grab the mailman and say, be my client.

This is the kind of experience that everybody needs. Like I said, no matter where you're headed in your business, the upside to one-on-one coaching is you can charge a premium compared to other streams of income that can be much smaller. And that is a big benefit, even though sometimes you hear people kind of disparagingly remark that you don't want to be trading time for money. And that's true because in a, it's not scalable. You only have so many hours in the day at a point in your business it will not be scalable to trade time for money. But don't make any mistake. Trading time for money can be very profitable if you do it at the right price point. So that is a vote for one-on-one coaching. Where do we go from there? The next obvious step in many cases would be small group coaching.

Again, sometimes I see coaches doing this stuff out of order. You're trying to start a small group when you haven't even had two or three private clients yet small groups are more profitable for you because you're only going to spend one hour coaching, say four or five people instead of spending four or five hours coaching, four or five people. So, we like that small group coaching typically is going to cost each individual about half what you would charge for one-on-one coaching, but then if you have four or five people or six or whatever in your group, you are earning more for that time as well. So, it can be a real win-win. But the downside is that with small group coaching, you have to be able to gather a group together. And that can be tricky based on timing. Somebody may want to work with you, but now's not the right time for them because there's something going on in their life right now.

But for somebody else, it's the right time. You got to match everybody up together. Or even just the day of the week that you're going to meet, can everybody meet on Mondays because that's when you're planning to hold your sessions. So small group coaching takes a lot of coordinating and so I usually recommend they don't try to do it until one of two things happens. One is you have so many private clients that you just literally can't take anymore. And I was just talking to Emily, who's one of our current fast track. I'm sorry, my voice just cracked right there. One of my current fast track members, and Emily said that she has so many people signed up for her five day challenge. I think she has like 600 something people signed up in her five day challenge. She has lots of people who are applying for spots in her coaching program.

She may not be able to take them all on. So the obvious thing to do is have an option possibly for a small group to form. And so when you have so many people, you can't serve them, it's an obvious choice. The other time that it becomes viable as an option for you is if you have a very large audience. I don't mean millions very large, but let's say you have, oh gosh, at least 500 people on your mailing list. I'll just put a stake in the ground and say 500, but maybe a thousand because you need enough of an audience that you're going to be able to gather four or five people that all want to coach with. You want to be part of a small group can do it now and can do it at a certain day and time. You know, just need numbers to make that possible is my point.

Okay, so we make money coaching, you make money coaching, and we make money coaching in small groups. Has anyone here already done any kind of small group coaching? I'm curious. Did a little bit of it in the beginning and then I quickly moved my practice and this was so many years ago, you guys, I get gray hair just thinking about it. Then I quickly moved my practice into online courses and that's another way that health coaches can make money. Now I was just talking about how coaching is hard to scale. You only have so many hours in the day. Even if you had small groups back to back all day long, there's still a limit to how many people you can serve that way because you only have so much time. And also, like I said, there's certain people are just never going to be able to make those meetings.

So I love online courses because it is asynchronous. I love that word so much of what we do these days in online, in the online space, it is asynchronous. Right now I am live on Facebook, I'm live on Instagram, and yet we're recording and somebody's going to listen to this episode next year that is asynchronous and it's a wonderful thing cause we're able to reach people on days and times where they are available. And when you have an online course that becomes an option for you to make money asynchronously with asynchronously coaching, asynchronously teaching, educating and online courses. By the way, we do have the wait list open right now for our online courses for health coaches program. So if you're like, I think I want to create an online course, add your name to the list and you'll find it if you go to healthcoachpower.com/courses.

In fact, if you go there, you're going to see all of our courses and if you just scroll down, you'll you'll find online courses for health coaches and you can add your name to the wait list there. Online courses are a phenomenal way to add streams of income to your practice. I mean, heck, you can entirely replace your one-to-one coaching if you want with an online course. You can offer hybrid online courses, so it's an online course bundled with one-on-one coaching at the same time, or maybe they do the course first and then they have the sessions with you or vice versa, however you design it. But you can offer a premium when you're offering a course that solves somebody's problem. It kind of doesn't matter if it's an online course or if it's a private coaching relationship. At the end of the day, if you're helping somebody solve a big problem, same price tag.

So don't think that there's a limit to online courses. But then of course there's all different kinds of online courses that you could run that are in that or in that lower range. So I usually think of, so your high end, your comprehensive online courses, they're going to cost in the thousands. Then you could have sort of a middle size, a medium size container for your online course and that might be something like you're teaching how to make sourdough bread or how to meal plan. It's like a how-to course very specific topic and that's going to cost in the hundreds. And you could also bundle it with your one-on-one coaching. It's very flexible what you could do with online courses. And then there's the smaller online courses, something that's going to be like $100 around the $100 mark and that'd be like your five day detox type online program.

I usually call those a short experience course. So health coaches make money with all those different types of online courses, individually selling those individually, selling them bundled together and selling them bundled with private coaching. So lots of opportunities there. Again, if you're interested in learning more and you want to build some of your own courses, you can add your name to the wait list. And again, just go to healthcoachpower.com/courses and you'll find it on that page.

All right, what else can we do to make money in our practice? Amber says, I have hosted group challenges. Yes, I would say a paid group challenge is very similar to what I just described as a small online course. Something that I don't know what you charged Amber, but something that you would charge like $50, a hundred dollars, maybe $120, something around that price point.

So yes, when you think challenges, challenges can be free, which are, I mean those are great for building your list and I know we're leading into paid clients. We can also have a quote challenge that is paid and that's more of an online course. We can also make money you guys by running workshops. You could also do workshops for free. Again, it just depends what stage you're at in your business and when you think, I don't want you to just think about the health coach that goes to the library and uses the free room at the library to hold a workshop. There's so many ways that you could be running workshops. You could be running like a three part workshop that's held over maybe three consecutive weekends at your local gym or yoga studio. And you could be charging hundreds of dollars, maybe even more, gosh, depending on what the topic is.

And that clientele for a bigger scale workshop. So think of it that way. Think about holding classes. We have health coaches who teach at the community center who are teaching classes where they're even at colleges, you could be like an adjunct professor. I kid you not. Have you ever thought about this for a local college or an online university Anyway, you could be teaching classes and getting paid directly through university for that. You can be holding retreats. I know coaches who go on to create entire retreat companies, companies that run retreat after retreat after retreat during the year, and that's what they've done with their health coaching. These are health coaches who probably love to travel and do this kind of thing in the first place. I personally would never be in charge of running retreats around the world. That is not my style. But for somebody else, it can be very lucrative and it can be very, very fun.

So there's an idea for you. What I have talked about so far and I got more, don't you worry, I got more, is a natural progression. So like I said, when you first graduate as a health coach, I don't recommend that the first thing you do is try to sell a yoga studio on a three-part workshop that costs $900. That's just probably not the easiest thing for you to do, for you to accomplish. You're not going to be able to even pull it off as well as you will later. And it's kind of like fighting upstream. It's going to be so much easier and more beneficial and profitable for you to start with one-on-one coaching. Then when you have that under your belt, move to the small group coaching, move to online courses, then move to something bigger like holding retreats or doing large scale workshops and classes.

All right, where else are we making money? Tell me in the comments. If you just hopped into the room, I'd love to hear where money is coming from in your health coaching business right now. This is very useful exercise, by the way. It is. Good practice once a week to sit down and look at your bank statement, go online, see what money came in and what money went out and see where it came from or what it went to. This is very, very basic bookkeeping. Even if you're not doing any bookkeeping at all, it's just awareness. You're just like, oh, look what I'm spending on. Oh, look where my money is coming from. It's amazing what just looking at those numbers will do for you. Your brain becomes attuned to what the heck is going on. Sherry says, I am coaching one-on-one. Good. I have also spoken to a group like a speaking engagement.

Yes. So that would be another way to get paid. We can do speaking engagements for free, but we can also be doing speaking engagements paid for sure. I wanted to talk about an idea that typically is on nobody's radar, so let's talk about it. This is affiliate marketing. Now I'm taking a left turn. This is a little different. Affiliate marketing. So what is that? Affiliate marketing has to do with referring people to a product or to a service that you do not sell. So this is different than you yourself selling a product and we'll talk about that next. Affiliate marketing. You're referring people to a product or service, but you are not selling that product or service and then you receive a fee, a commission, or a percentage of every sale. I find this to be a really practical way to increase income without spending more time, more time building things, more time working with clients, more time taking care of all the admin stuff that goes along with working with clients.

Because I mean, let's face it, that's a lot of time. If you can just say, Hey, this is a product I think you'd love, or this is a service that I think would be perfect for you, and someone signs up and you make money and you don't have to do anything else. It's a glorious thing. So it's the kind of thing you're not going to make a million dollars with affiliate marketing overnight or maybe ever, but you can make hundreds, thousands, eventually tens of thousands. The opportunity is there, especially as your audience grows. So a good place to start is any brand. Think about any brand that you are already referring people to. If you're already sending everybody to a certain makeup brand or some type of kitchen tool or whatever, find out if that company has an affiliate program, sign up for it. And then every time you refer like you were already doing, now you can make a commission off that sale.

So what just popped into my head was like Burkey water filters, which I think they still have an affiliate program. I haven't done it in a while, but for a couple years I was very heavily promoting perky water filters and I still have one. And every time somebody asked me about water filtration that was sending people to my affiliate link and I would make like a hundred and something dollars every time somebody bought one. So this is a nice way to pad your income and you can have as many affiliate marketing relationships as you want. So you can see that as you're referring more and more products, you can be earning more and more. As your audience grows, you can be earning more and more. And it's so nice because you don't have to do anything except tell people about something you were already going to tell them about.

Good, love it. Let's move on unless we have questions about affiliate marketing is asking, are you posting this? I missed out. I post everything I do every week on the show on my website. You can go to health coach power.com/podcast, but we also have all of these episodes available on Apple, on Spotify, on YouTube. So just search health coach, power community podcast and you'll find us everywhere and then you can subscribe from there and you'll never miss a thing. We can also make money, as I alluded to a moment ago, selling products where we are actually selling the product. This starts to lean into getting involved with the company that is like Beauty Counter or doTERRA or one of these. When you start getting involved, and I'm going to say MLM, even though I know many of you'll jump and say it's not an MLM, but it's an MLM.

Anyway, that's fine. You want to sell a product. Again, I recommend doing this with products that you are already very enthusiastic about. So just because I get emails all the time, Hey, do you want to sell this vitamin? Do you want to sell this, whatever? And I'm like, no, I don't know or care about this brand at all. But if I'm already heavily using a brand and telling people about it again, why wouldn't I make sure that I'm making some money every time I talk about and share this brand with other people? So that is another way for health coaches to make money. Now let's talk about something even more off the beaten path. Meaning you might not be thinking about this right now. Have you ever thought about making money by supporting other coaches or coaching organizations? And what I mean by that is, first of all, you can get hired as part of a team and there are big companies doing this.

I'm thinking about Noom for example. Not that I'm necessarily advocating that you go work for Noom, but that's an example right down to everyday health coaches like us who've just built their business to a point where they're like, I need other coaches on my team. So when that happens, there's an opportunity for you to get hired within that group you might be getting hired to coach. The other thing that you can get hired for, and I would say there's probably many more of these opportunities, is to provide some type of admin support within a health coach's organization or a health coach's business. Because I know on my team I sometimes need help and to hire any Joe Schmo who does not understand the health coach industry, I don't really like that. They don't get it. They don't fully understand who I'm working with. So if I'm going to hire a copywriter or if I'm going to hire somebody to help me out with video editing, I mean it just really helps evade themselves or a health coach.

So if you have skills in another related area, I'm going to tell you, you can make some good money supporting other health coaches and providing that much needed service. So that's just something for you to put in your back pocket. And I know a lot of coaches, even myself in the beginning, I would kind of poo poo that idea. I'm like, no, I didn't get into health coaching so that I could be like, so I could still do copywriting or that I could still do video editing or that I could provide admin services. But if you think about it, we are all here to make the world a healthier and happier place. So if there's a coach who's doing that really well and needs support, if you can lend that support, you are also helping reach that ultimate goal of making the world a healthier happy place and you can be making income at the same time.

So we like that very much. What about this one? How many of you, I got a lot to say on this topic, so maybe this should really be its own episode, but how many of you would like to work with a doctor or get hired by a functional medicine practice? This is becoming something I hear more and more health coaches talking about, especially now as more and more coaches are getting certified through the NBHWC. This idea is very, very appealing of working with doctors or through functional medicine practice. And I'm going to tell you, I mean you guys, I talk to thousands upon thousands of health coaches every year. I've been in the industry for 14 years. That's a lot of conversations. I have sometimes heard about health coaches successfully being hired by a doctor or a functional medicine practice. And I say that not to dissuade you, but just to set your expectations.

It's not super easy to make happen. I think it's much, much easier to do everything that we've talked about so far, find your own clients, run your own groups, run workshops, luxuries, have a paid speaking engagement, get a job supporting another coach. All these things I think are far and beyond easier to make happen. And it's interesting because it's not that doctors and functional medicine teams don't want health coaches, they do, but it's, it's like mix. In some ways it's mixing oil and water because their model can be very, very different from our model. And there are logistics that keep it from happening. There are logistics that keep health coaches from meeting the right doctors and from doctors being able to find the right health coaches. It just has. I have seen that it is difficult to make that connection work, but that said, it does happen.

So, if you can work that angle, getting hired through doctor or another practice is certainly another way that health coaches are making money. I'm also going to say they're generally not making as much money as if they're working for themselves, but on the other side, the clients are getting handed to them versus them having to go out and find the clients. Okay, what else can you think of? How else are health coaches making money? I have another big one for you and then I'm going to tell you what all of these have in common, what you're going to need to do to make any of these work. Kathy says, I work for a large healthcare system in an outpatient integrative medicine practice. I'm also an rn and this practice only hired health coaches who were also RNs. Yes. Thank you for sharing that, Kathy. Certainly if you have other credentials and licensure that's going to open more doors for you.

The one I was thinking of, the one I was just saying, another big one to share about today is corporate wellness. Getting hired at the corporate level to coach employees inside the company to design and deliver programs for a corporation. There's good money in this. I mean, corporate wellness programs have a budget. They have a budget. Sometimes it's like, I got to spend this. All HR people are like, I got to spend this money before the end of the year. There are companies putting a lot of money into corporate wellness. The trick, it's kind of like the trick with the doctors and the functional medicine practices and the integrative medicine practices is finding the right match. I'm going to say this is actually easier though because in this case, we're not asking the corporation to hire us necessarily put us on payroll, but rather we're going to go in with a price tag and a package and they're going to pay us like a contractor.

And then you get to go in, not only make the money from the corporation, but then the opportunity to connect with each of the employees and potentially turn them into individually paying clients as well. So there is definitely money to be made in corporate wellness, but again, can you find the right company? Do you have inroads? Do they have a reason to trust you? It really helps if they know you or you have a mutual friend or somebody that can introduce you. If you know the CEO of a company, go there first. If you know the HR person, talk to HR people first. People tend to want to hire people that they know, right? If you're a known quantity, they're not going to just look online and find a health coach's website and call you and be like, can you come in and provide coaching to our 5,000 person organization?

No, they're just not going to do that because that's too much of a risk. So start, if you're interested in corporate wellness, you want to start with who in the corporate world. All right, what else do you guys got for me? Tell me in the chat if you can think of other streams of income ways that coaches are making money. And while you do that, here's what all these income streams have in common, and this is sort of the bottom line for today to be successful with just about anything that we've talked about so far, you're going to need to go out there and find the clients that's marketing. You're going to have to need to go out there and find that corporation that wants a wellness program that's marketing. You're going to have to find the doctor who wants to hire a health coach.

You're going to have to find people who need help with their health and sell them your coaching, sell them your online course or sell them your product. And this is different. If you think about other professions, it's very, very different. And I feel you like this can be the painful part because we wish sometimes that we were like my boyfriend. My boyfriend is a C P A, right? He's an accountant. His clients tend to just stay with him year after year after year. In fact, he took over his father's business so all his father's clients know his clients just like that. You love that. If somebody just handed you a roster full of clients in your health coaching practice and those clients stay for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, he doesn't really need to find new clients. And when he does get a new client, it's almost always through a referral.

Somebody finds him, and that's just how it works. That is the life of a CPA. Now, it's kind of similar when I think what I think I know about being a dentist, I'm not entirely sure, I've never been a dentist, but I see how the dentist's office runs. They're always very busy and everybody knows that they need to go to the dentist twice a year. So what do we do? We look up dentists in our area. We search our insurance company's database to see which dentists are covered, or we get a referral from a friend like we are seeking out the dentist. We do the legwork to find the dentist. Dentists generally, as far as I know, they're not really out there networking, trying to find people who have cavities and need them to be filled. They're not podcasting, trying to bring more people into their office.

They're not holding workshops in order to find clients. The dentist just does the dentistry every day and people find their way into that chair. So that's a dentist's life. But as a health coach, here's the thing, for better or for worse, you are going to need to put yourself out there in order to get your business going and to get that income flowing. And it does not mean spending all day on social media. That is important to know, but you are going to have to do the outreach, go to the clients, find the people, offer your services. They are not going to just come find you.

That is a very, very, very rare scenario for health coaches. So how do we do this? I have a brand new workshop around this concept. It's called Get Your Business Off the Ground in the next six weeks, and I want you to run and go get it now. If you haven't already, it's at health coach power.com/off the ground. And in a mere 25 minutes, you're going to better understand how to approach putting yourself out there and what it takes to find those clients. So again, that's healthcoachpower.com/offtheground. I can't recommend it enough, especially if you are going after your own clients, especially if you liked what I said about starting with one-on-one clients and building from there. There's so much to learn about how to properly put yourself out there so that your efforts provide a return. Posting to Instagram every day, probably not going to do it, probably not going to fill your practice. You need a different plan, and I'm going to help you get there so that you too can be making money as a health coach. Thanks for joining me today. Let's go make some money. I want you all to stay in business. I will see you next week. Thanks for being here. Bye-bye.