How To Raise Your Fees While Reducing Your Working Hours: The Leveraged Coaching Model
A way to package your services that increases value to the client while reducing the hours you work
A way to package your services that increases value to your clients while reducing your working hours
Why was a glass case filled with three million dollars cash? And why were passersby dared to break that glass?
This was a publicity stunt set up by employees of the 3M corporation. They covered the glass with a special film that protected it from damage. Anyone who could break the glass would get the money inside. Although many tried, no one broke through. This stunt cost the company very little yet garnered quite a bit of publicity.
Five television stations covered this stunt. And stories about the event appeared in newspapers around the globe. 3M received an estimated 1 million dollars in free publicity. Videos of people trying to break the glass from 2005 still circulate on the internet today.
From a rather small expense, 3M created a stunt whose legend proves the value of their product a decade and a half later. This is the power of leverage — making a small effort to get big results. To get traction coaches and consultants also need to think in terms of leverage. Instead of working more hours to raise our incomes, we need to think in terms of getting our clients the same results with less time. We can do this with the leveraged coaching model
What is the leveraged coaching model?
Leveraged coaching is when you take parts of the work you do and turn it into materials that guide your clients. If there’s something you teach every client, you turn that into a video, audio, or text that does the same thing. So they still get the same results and you charge the same fees even though you use less of your time.
What are the advantages of leveraged coaching?
You can think of it as creating a course that’s designed for one person but which comes with personal one-on-one time with you. This gives your offer more value than either coaching or a course would have alone. You can charge the same but you may start to hear that your prices are lower than expected because your offer will feel more valuable to your clients. And it is more valuable because creating this kind of offer forces you to be more systematic and this gets your clients better results.
How do you create a leveraged offer?
First, you identify a result you can offer. That result can be in terms of developing a skill, completing a project, or attaining an outcome.
Second, you connect that result to a problem.
Third, you identify the steps and create materials to teach those steps. That’s your system.
For example, in the past, I tutored students in preparing for the SAT Essay. Through research, I learned that 400-word essays got the highest score. The students had just 25 minutes to write the essay. So the result I promised is that students could write a high-quality 400-word essay in 25 minutes.
The problem students had was not knowing what to write. They would waste several minutes just figuring out what to say.
My system involved 4 steps:
1. Prompt dissection. A quick way to interpret the prompt that lets you start writing right away.
2. Thesis simplification. You learn there are only two types of theses and how to choose one in seconds.
3. Example selection. How to use just about anything you’ve learned in school to support your thesis.
4. Body paragraph construction. You discover how to use clear logic and reasoning to make your examples prove your thesis.
5. Compelling conclusions. You learn how to end with an analogy or story that impresses graders.
I put my system into learning materials that spanned 85 pages. When I taught students one-on-one, I gave them feedback on their essays but the real teaching was done when they read my materials. As a result, I gave my students results while spending much less time than others who taught the SAT Essay.
Leveraged coaching doesn’t have to be in writing though. It can easily be in the form of audio or video as well.
One coach in the San Francisco area had a system for helping people become more confident that involved changing limiting beliefs. He had trained coaches over the years but felt he wasn’t able to make the impact he wanted that way. So he decided to create a video program to guide people through his process for developing confidence. It seemed odd to many people to put such a personalized process into a video format but it worked. He went from helping a small number of clients each year to helping thousands since the program was created.
And that reveals another advantage of leveraged coaching — scale. The same program you create to help your clients one-on-one can be sold as a self-guided program or as a course you guide groups through. The materials you create give you great flexibility in how you work.
But I’m not sure I know how to create materials from what I teach
Here’s a simple solution. Get permission from your clients to record some of your coaching sessions. Then use those recordings as teaching materials for your clients. I found it hard to teach how to handle objections since I tend to come up with my responses intuitively. So I had one client give me the objections she experienced regularly and I responded to them. We recorded that session and I’ve used it as a teaching tool for other clients ever since.
Summary
Leveraged coaching is when you take parts of what you do when coaching and turn it into materials that do some of the coaching for you. This reduces the time you spend with a client while giving them the same results.
You create a leveraged offer by solving a problem, defining a result, and designing a system to deliver the result.
If you’re not sure how to create materials based on your coaching, try recording yourself coaching someone (with your client’s permission) to see if you can turn those recordings into training materials.
By the way, the name of the product 3M demonstrated with the glass case is Scotch. It can cover any glass structure and make it stronger. So anyone who wants the power of this material doesn’t have to buy new glass. They can just coat existing glass.
The same is true when you create a leveraged coaching offer. You don’t have to create something entirely new. You are only adding something that makes your coaching stronger and gives you more time to build your business and live your life.