#307: How Much Does a Health Coach Make?

Hello there, health coaches. Real quick before we get into it today, I've got to remind you that our audience attraction virtual retreat starts very soon, and we have hundreds and hundreds of health coaches signed up for this thing. It's going to be the biggest health coach event of the year. So I want you to go grab your ticket right now. It's at healthcoachpower.com/audience. 100% free. There is nothing to buy. There will be nothing sold. This is purely a community event. Again, that is health coach power.com/audience. Now, just before I hit record, I was letting y'all know in our Facebook group, that group, I'm actually dog sitting this week. It's been a very busy week. Everyone always says that having a dog is like having a baby. And now I fully understand that this is not in my wheelhouse. I am not a dog person. I'm a cat person. I don't really know what I'm doing it all. However, my boyfriend is traveling for work and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for my kids and for me to spend some time with his adorable standard poodle who has taken a nap right over here. But if he wakes up, you'll know. Oh, you're going to know. Let's just say that this dog has some energy, right? He's six months old. So by noon on the past few days, I've already gone on four walks, I'm exhausted. This dog's just getting started. He just wants to play today. I took him for a very, very long walk and that's why he's napping. But anyway, it reminds me so much of when my boys were babies and my health coaching business was new and I would get 30 minutes of work done and then oops, somebody needs to be fed or changed or burped or put down for a nap.

For any of you in a situation like this, maybe with babies, maybe with other type of caretaking responsibilities, that has always been the beauty of this career, the flexibility. So when people ask, and you hear this a lot, and people are asking online, they're searching, and I know everyone kind of wonders, how much can a health coach really earn? It depends. So for example, are you working in 30 minute increments like I did with a baby and a toddler, and you're just barely getting your business off the ground? Or are you like, I don't know. Now in my business, working full-time, hiring help, getting really strategic about how you do business year after year after year? Or do you have a puppy that just wants to play all day long and that's what you're doing? I'm kidding. But it really doesn't have to do with how much you work.

I mean, that is one way to think about it. How much time are you spending? Are you putting all your resources against this business? Or is it kind of happening in the background? Of course, that's going to make a difference in your growth, but the salary that you'll earn as a health coach, it's really very simple. It comes down to two variables. First, your offers, meaning what are you selling and how much does it cost? So are you offering a $5,000 private coaching package or are you offering a $99 online course or both or something in between? I mean, there's no right or wrong answer here. Just what do you have for sale basically, or how can you get paid? And of course, it's really smart to have multiple streams of income, and I realize in the beginning, you may not. That's okay, you'll get there.

But still, how can you earn what avenues are available to you and how much is each sale worth? And then, so that's the first part of the equation. My older son is taking algebra for the first time, and every day he says, mom, look at this equation. Mom, look how I solve this. And I'm like, oh my God, it gives me flashbacks. But we are doing a little math equation today. So that's the first part of it. What do you have for sale then? How many people are you getting those offers in front of every day? So I want you to imagine your favorite store. Does anybody even shop in stores anymore? Actual stores? I know it's quite rare for me, but I love Auria when I go clothing shopping. Have you ever been there? I think I am the oldest person shopping there, but I just love it. Their clothes fit me really well. So they have jeans and they have tops, and they have dresses, and they have coats. They have so much good stuff for sale. But again, who really ever shops in a store these days? I very randomly one day walked past their store at the Westchester. That's a mall in White Plains near where I live. And if I hadn't done that, I never would've even heard about them. So if I didn't know about them, and if no one knew about these great clothes, the company's not going to make any money. It doesn't matter how great the clothes are. Same goes for health coaching. So this is the part we like to do. We like to spend all day writing up programs that we can offer to our clients. Maybe it's a private high-end program or a lower cost program. Maybe it's a membership.

I hear so many of you guys talking about wanting to start a membership. PS memberships are hard, really hard. We're going to talk about that another time, but just put a pin in that. So let's say that you're offering something very typical. You've got like a $1,200, let's say a $1,500, three month coaching package, and you sign two new clients per month. We've all done this math, right? That would be $36,000 per year if you had two new clients every month. In fact, if you're here live, tell me in the chat, what are you offering? If somebody walked up to you right now with a blank check and they were like, I want to be your client, what is it that you would sell them? Is it private coaching? Is it some kind of group? Just curious where you're all at. But like I said, it's very typical for health coaches to have some type of three month coaching package theee days. When I started 15 years ago, we all sold a six month package. But I suppose in a world of ever decreasing attention spans, the six month package has really turned into a more typical three month package. And I wouldn't be surprised if it got shorter and smaller over time, but that's what I see a lot of coaches doing. So that means you'd be making $36,000 selling this package to two new clients a month. But if you could get it in front of more people, just like if AIA could get more people to walk past their store and know about them, if you could make this offer to more people, if you could sell that package to five new clients per month, now you're going to make $90,000 per year.

So the question is, what's keeping health coaches from five new clients a month? I mean, five sounds like a fairly reasonable number. I'm not saying 500 new clients a month, just five, right? What's keeping us from that? Most of our health coaches are not signing five new clients a month. Mimi says she's currently offering private coaching six and 12 week packages. Oh, well, there you go, Mimi. You got the 12 week, that's your three month, and then you got something even shorter, right? That's where we're all going. It's like back when you'd get the seven minute abs, six minute abs, five minute AB video. We just want to keep making it shorter so that people don't get scared off by the commitment. But it is challenging for health coaches to find five new clients a month, even two new clients a month, maybe even one new client client a month.

And if it is challenging for you, that's likely because no one knows about you. No one is walking past your storefront, so to speak. They don't even know what health coaching is half the time. They're certainly not seeking it out. And if no one is seeking out what you have to offer or walking by and seeing what you have to offer, if no one knows about it, no one's buying it, right? Your business is going to earn deadly squat. There's just no other way around this math equation. So it doesn't matter what you're selling if you don't have the people. You see where I'm going with this, and this is where health coaches fall down the most by far. Like I said, we love dreaming up the programs. We want to help people. There are so many ways to do that, but we don't have a brick and mortar storefront with lots of foot traffic.

There's no one bringing those clients to your door. There's no one just even just walking people by introducing you. So a huge, huge part of health coaching. I'm going to tell you that in a successful health coaching practice I had when I was still in private practice, it's 50% making sure people know about you. It is an enormous part of this business. Building your audience in a very purposeful way. That is the only way to have enough clients. That's the only way for people to know about you, and you have to go out and make it happen. So just imagine one day right now, Mimi says she's offering this 12 week coaching package. Or like I said, most coaches are doing something like that. What if you could have something that was way more affordable? I know a lot of us worry about our services being accessible to the general population.

What if you could offer something that was very, very affordable, like some kind of super helpful online program? Maybe you only cost a hundred dollars or $200 or maybe even less. I don't know. And it's totally scalable, requiring very little of your hands on time, which is good if you have a puppy or a baby or anything else that you're taking care of. Now, if you had a big enough audience, I just want you to think about this math. If you had a big enough audience, you could sell 80 90 of these spots, a hundred of these spots in this $200 program every month. You could do it. You had enough people in front of you. You could make multiple six figures. So a bigger audience is the key to being able to lower your prices. Why can Walmart offer such low low prices? Because selling at huge scale and they can buy at huge scale.

I'm able to offer a lot of my courses much less than elsewhere because I have a big audience. This is how the math works. So you're able to make your services more accessible to more people and in the process, see a bigger salary for yourself. Do we like that? Just say love it in the comments. If that sounds like a good plan. I mean, in the beginning, it's the opposite. You have a small audience. Of course we all do. When we're first starting out, you have to sell a higher ticket course or program or whatever your package is. It has to be pretty substantial in price or else you're just going to be making 25 cents per hour. You really have to make it add up in order for it to be substantial. But just think to yourself, if I can grow my audience, that's all I have to do.

I just have to get more people to walk past my store. Then I can lower the cost, then I can help more people, then I can earn so much more. If everything I just said isn't making sense, just do the math for yourself. Imagine selling to 100 people a month instead of one or two or three or four or five. Donna says, love it. Donovan says, I'm stoked. Yeah, this is where I know I love to be in my business and a place where I can serve more people and feel like it really is pretty widely accessible and I'm benefiting. We're all benefiting. So here's the question. Why aren't we out there right now building our audiences? You guys? What are we doing? Why are you listening to me? Go? We all have to talk to more people. We have to get more people's eyeballs on us.

They have to know about what we're offering. That is the key to that kind of success we were just talking about. That's it. Incredibly simple. And everyone's like, well, how do I do that? It can be as easy as walking out your front door and talking to the first person you see on the street. That's a new person in your audience. How do you do it at scale? That's what we're going to be discussing during the Audience Attraction Retreat coming up later this month. So I've brought in some of my favorite people in the Health Coach world to share various ways that you can start attracting a larger audience. And these are tried and true methods. We want to talk about public speaking. I'm bringing in someone who's been public speaking for years, decades, right? My friend, Andrea Beaman. We want to talk about using LinkedIn.

I'm bringing in someone, Haley Rose coming in to talk about LinkedIn. You want to talk about how to get in front of people? Oh my gosh, we have so many topics coming up, getting in front of people with your blog or your podcast or your YouTube channel. Jana O's going to be with us to talk about that. These are all tried and true methods of getting more people to walk past your store. Kathy says, I'm so excited. So am I. I've never actually seen the Health Coach community come together like this, and this is what we really, really need to do, because hearkening back to Walmart, everybody knows about Walmart. Everyone because there's ads on TV and the radio and the internet. They spend so much money. The big brands do like McDonald's. Everybody knows about McDonald's, but we as health coaches do not have a multimillion dollar advertising budget.
I bet if all of us pitched in, we still would not have a multimillion dollar advertising budget. So we have to work differently, and this is how we do it. So if you have not already signed up, I want to encourage you to run on over to healthcoachpower.com/audience. It's completely free to join, and let's get more people looking at you and all of us collectively so that there is an audience that even knows that health coaching exists, first of all. And then for each of us individually, an audience of people who want to work with you, who are asking to work with you, who are walking past your proverbial storefront, going, Ooh, and doubling back and looking again. Yeah, I want to go in there. I want to talk to this. I want to talk to this person just like I am Atia. I want to try on that dress, right? This is how we're going to make a bigger impact. Okay? Promise, we can't do very much sitting at home, sending out an email. It's our mailing list about five people posting something on social media to our social media following of, again, like 12 people that's not doing very much in the world. If we're going to make an impact, I think we have to do it together. So one more time, healthcoachpower.com/audience. I'll see you there and I'll see you here next week. Take care, everybody.