Are you still trading hours for dollars? You and I both know, that at the end of the day, there is a limited amount of time that you can offer. You only have so many “billable” hours in a day so you have to figure out how to make the most of your time, while still offering a good product and service to your clients.
Playing “hard to get” (or creating scarcity) is a strategy that marketers use to create urgency and help people along to a buying decision. You've seen limited time offers, sold out products, and limited memberships before. The reason is, creating scarcity works! It works so well that it is a very common marketing strategy used by everyone from big companies like Coca-Cola to Internet marketers and everyone in between.
Why you don’t need to create scarcity.
The thing is, in a coaching practice there already is scarcity because time is limited already. A lot of coaches over estimate the amount of time that they will have actual billable hours. A billable hour is a working hour that you can actually bill someone for. In every business these hours are limited far more than one might expect. Most people think they'll have forty hours a week in which to bill and that is how they set their hourly rate. This is a mistake. A good guideline for coaching is very best case, you can bill 30% of your week. You’ll spend another 60% on marketing and 10% on admin tasks (if and only if you have an amazing team).
Why most coaches don’t make money.
Once my clients get this, they realize they have a real problem because it is unlikely that they will be able to work enough hours to make real money in their businesses.
Once you figure out this problem you can start figuring out how to fill in the hours with multiple offerings rather than simply one on one coaching. You can create email coaching programs that are automated, automated drip membership sites, an inner circle and the ultimate prize, the cherry on top of the cream, your one-on-one coaching service. As your client moves across each level the number of people allowed to participate gets lower, and the price for entry gets higher.
The theme of my next event, Take Action Get Profits in Houston this September is figuring out how to get more clients to pay you more money. You can learn more about that at http://takeactiongetprofits.com
