💸 How much should you spend on coaching / mentoring for your business and marketing? 🤔

Someone asked what I thought about paying $20,000 per year for a business coach…

Of course, it’s fine if you’re having a very worthwhile experience, and if you are gradually paying for it. My concern is when you’re paying a large sum and the coach is new to you, yet promising you the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Many of us idealistic business owners are easily taken by big promises from authoritative-looking coaches. We can end up wasting thousands… or tens of thousands of dollars.

The money you spend for business coaching should really be going towards these five areas:

1. Knowledge from someone whose experience and wisdom you respect.
2. Accountability to them (or someone else) for you to apply that knowledge.
3. Customization and troubleshooting to work through the inevitable challenges and unexpected situations as you try to apply the knowledge.
4. Software to automate some business processes, to save you time. However, to have an authentic business, you should refrain from automating some tasks such as the actual creation of your content and offers, and personal interaction with your audience.
5. Outsourcing to freelancers the processes that you can’t automate or that are too technical for you.

A good business coach might be able to deliver all of the above for you… but there are smarter ways to do this.

Rather than paying someone a lot of money up front, I recommend smaller amounts first. Test out their cheapest services/products, and then gradually pay more as they earn your trust and you experience for yourself how worthwhile their offerings are.

If you had a $20,000 budget for coaching, it would be better to segment that 20K and give 1K to 20 different coaches to experience a variety of personalities and modalities and see what fits you best.

Or give $500 to 10 different coaches ($5K total) before you invest more in the best three of those candidates. That way, you get a diversity of insight and methods, and you’ll be more likely to find something that works well for you.

Without experiencing a variety of ways that people coach you, how do you know what kind of business coaching fits you best?

As for the 5 deliverables I described above, there are more efficient ways that don’t require paying large sums to a coach:

1. Knowledge can be gotten through online courses, which are several hundred dollars, instead of thousands. I teach many courses for authentic solopreneurs.
2. Accountability can be done through focusmate. It’s very affordable.
3. Customization and troubleshooting can be accomplished through a coaching group that has many experienced peers to offer feedback. Instead of paying $20K, I charge about one-tenth of that for my coaching group: MasterHeart Business Group Coaching.
4. Software should be part of your budget, since it can save you so much time. Simplero is my top choice for an all-in-one platform to handle website, mailing list, course delivery, client management, and affiliate tracking.
5. Outsourcing can be done cheaply and effectively through Fiverr.

All of that combined can add up to less than $10,000 a year, saving you another $10K that you can put towards other types of services… or simply take a much needed vacation!