Did you ever feel stuck with a revenue level that simply doesn’t increase?
The thing is, there are a lot of moving parts to it. Some are sprint strategies that you can apply and start getting clients today and some are marathon strategies that will take time but will truly ensure your long term success.
In this video, join me on a hike, and let’s discuss one of the marathon strategies.
This is the first part in a series of videos about various ways to increase your revenue. We’ll start by building your expertise.
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About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you’re at the right place!
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program’s primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you’re willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year – 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
How To Make Money As A Life Coach
Hi. This is Sasha Raskin from the Six Figure Practice. This is the first video of what I believe will be a very important series of videos in the area of increasing your revenues as a helper. If you’re a counselor or a coach, a consultant, you must serve, whatever it is – you’re helping people. You’re probably wondering can I be helping people and also not struggle myself in my business? So the answer is yes, definitely.
It does require some important conversation about theory, the theory of revenues and the psychology behind it, as well as some strategies.
And why do I think it’s important? Because this is not something that’s been taught in counseling schools, masters programs or coaching schools sadly. The whole idea of if you want to have your own practice you also need business skills, you need to understand marketing, you need to know how to run a business. So hopefully this series of videos will take care of a lot of those gaps in knowledge.
The strategy will talk about today in terms of increasing your revenues is the most basic one – expertise. I know that you’re here not because you want just to make money. That’s usually not what drives helpers. What drives helpers is the desire to help others, to change their lives. And that can actually be a curse in disguise because many times our brains will go into this dichotomy of, “It’s either I’m helping people and it’s all about my clients or it’s just all about me and then I don’t care about my clients.” And it can actually be both.
And expertise, becoming an expert as a place to come from not a place to get to, there’s always more you can learn, is a great way to bridge this gap between being as helpful as you possibly can and that actually being a multiplier of your revenue.
So you have to create a plan at least with the intention of constantly improving your helping skills. That means your counseling education doesn’t stop with your counseling masters program, your coaching training doesn’t start with your coaching program. There is such an incredible amount of experts in the world that you can reach out to when you want to start specializing in something more specific.
I’ll give you an example. Transforming ADHD has been an incredibly helpful book in my life. I have ADHD and I used a lot of those concepts with the clients I worked with, helping them with their ADHD struggles. And I went through a training by Greg Cosby, I seek out the two days training. And later on I reached out to him and asked him, “Hey, can you be a supervisor/mentor for me?” He agreed and we had phone calls and I brought up different cases. And he provided some great feedback.
So the opportunities are out there. And that was a hybrid, right? I read the book, I went to his structured training and I reached out informally asking him, “Can you do this one-on-one mentorship?” And that was a great combination.
So as you probably saw in one of the other blogs sometimes I mention … isn’t this a beautiful view? That’s my ADHD talking here. So going back to what we were talking about before. By the way, I’m trying this new thing to go out, so if the camera shakes, moves, if you lose me please bear with me.
So back to what we were talking about. It’s an incredible time where with the ease of internet you can reach out to amazing experts. And going back to what I was saying before, in many of my blog posts I mentioned the need to have a menu, all various services that you can provide to your clients or when you’re choosing a niche you don’t need to get stuck only with one niche.
There was a biker here, I’m going to let him pass. All right, that’s an excited person right there. I don’t know if you can see it.
All right, so the need to have services, multiple services, helps you with figuring out this situation where counselors and coaches get stuck at which is, “I need to specialize. I need to have only one niche.” And that’s being such a common trap. You actually don’t have to have one niche, and you can have let’s say up to three, that would be a good one.
Where you do have to be most specialized? Basically figuring out who are your perfect clients, who do you actually enjoy working with. And if it’s relationships that you are really good with helping your clients navigating then even if you’re a coach, if you’re helping people with romantic relationships you can go and attend counseling trainings to get some more information from those modalities. Of course, you can’t call yourself a therapist while doing so.
A lot of bikers right now.
So of course, not calling you a therapist if you’re not a therapist. I’m just saying there is so much value for coaches to learn from counselors and from counseling and honestly from coaches as well.
So the various ways of gaining more specialized knowledge. Books, audio books, using all that commute time, training your brain to retain information. And faster listening skills, you can train your brain to listen up to x2 or x3 in audio books. And if an average book is four hours you can finish a book in two hours. That’s very cool.
So if you’re a business coach you can go and read business coaching books. You can read business development books, marketing books, sales books. And there are so many great information sources that your clients don’t have the time to read, so in many ways, and as counselors you probably know the term psycho education – when you provide information that is helpful for your clients. Same with coaches – your clients don’t have time to read or they might not be as motivated as you are, so what you can do for them and for yourself is start gathering all this knowledge.
Another one is attend in-person trainings in the areas that you want to build your expertise in, basically in those three niches or three services that you chose. Of course, in the time of the pandemic when this video is being filmed it’s more difficult.
Online trainings and programs, hybrid trainings and programs which I really enjoy where you have both video content and online live group calls. You’ve probably seen the Six Figure Practice program accelerator, that’s the same format we use in our program to help you build your private practice. And you can learn more through the link.
So beyond books, courses, in-person online courses, hybrid courses, you have various longer certification programs as well. So if you went, for example, for a coaching school. It took one year. No reason why you can’t with time attend additional coaching trainings. The more skills you get the better.
So the best marketing for you, one of the best marketing strategies, is for your clients to feel that you’re providing so much value for them that it’s kind of a no-brainer for them to pay you even more than to the other coaches/counselors in your area. Of course, it’s up to you whatever fees you choose, right? You might not want to raise your fees, that’s totally up to you. But even when you want to provide lower fees you still need people to choose to work with you over others in your area.
So that expertise, this knowledge, will come out during your work with them when you will be providing them with great information. It will be helping you with your confidence, you know what you’re talking about. The more books and more information you read you will start seeing more patterns that repeat themselves in the situations, in the lives of your clients and in those pieces of information.
The more tools you have, and small things like the diplomas on your wall, whether it’s a Zoom call or in-person in your office, it surely helps your clients feel they’re in good hands.
In my mind one of the best thing about gaining more and more knowledge is the synthesis that you’ll be able to create. Basically creating your own voice, your own modality. One of the supervision models that I learned in my PhD program of counseling education and supervision is that counselors, and I bet it applies to coaches or any helpers as well, the trajectory is like this – learn, learn, learn and then start unlearning, unlearning, unlearning.
So in a way you gain this critical mass of skills and information that is very structured in your training and you practice it as it is. For example, a classical coaching structure would be the first session is an introduction session, the client tells you about themselves and their values. Second one you set a vision, what they would like their life to be like. Third session you do the goal for your let’s say 12 coaching package. All the other sessions you do mini goal at the beginning and you work on that specific mini goal during the session. And then the 12th session is summary, celebration session, when you go over how was it.
So that’s one of the models that’s being taught in many coaching programs. And it’s so wonderful to have this route when you’re beginning. Or when you’re a counselor learning those basic counseling skills, right? Like, paraphrasing, reframing, minimal encouragements and all that good stuff.
So you reach that critical mass and as you gain more and more advanced information as well as experience, especially when you’re probably getting your first 1,000 hours of working with clients you actually start to let go of things, unlearning. Many of the structures that you learned or the techniques, skills, interventions you will feel like they’re no longer needed or they’re too [unclear 16:51]. And then there’s the ability to improvise. And it would become like jazz improvisation, jazz musicians know really well music theory so it’s easier for them to break the rules very consciously.
So I think I’m going to turn around now, it’s getting darker. Once again I’m filming this on my daily trail walk.
So this is it. The more your clients feel like they’re in good hands they will keep on coming back to you, referring their friends and family members to you, leave good reviews. And it will apply to your own transformation as well, in your perception of yourself and your work. You will see measurable, better results with your clients. And you will feel that you know what you’re doing more and more and more. And still the impostor syndrome will be there always pretty much. So good luck with getting rid of this one. But the levels of confidence will rise.
Now a very important side note. This whole training idea can also be really crippling if taken too seriously as an excuse to avoid doing the actual work of helping. I met many counselors who buy training after training to become better helpers and delay them starting their private practice, for example. Or gaining the needed knowledge in running their business. Or procrastinating with putting in the effort into marketing their private practice.
So probably the best way to learn and to increase your expertise is with coaching your ass off or doing as much counseling as you possibly can. You will learn the most by actually doing it.
Of course, it would be very helpful for you if it’s in your private practice to have help both in your clinical work with your counselor, so have a supervision, have a supervision group, even if you’re licensed, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re a coach you can apply the same thing that’s done in counseling, basically having another coach to supervise you even after you’re done with your training. Probably especially when you’re done with your training, because during your training you have this wonderful structure that supports you. And it’s just great to have someone that helps you when you get stuck with specific cases and you learn so much more with that.
So having that support will give you the confidence boost to offer as much coaching and counseling as you possibly can.
And the second thing is to get all the needed skills and start taking action to actually build your business so that you could gain those first hundreds of client hours, because it will take you time to become better and better, but you don’t want it to be a catch-22 as well. You don’t want to magically become good enough from all those trainings and books without actually doing the work, right? So the best way is to learn something and then try and apply it with your client during that same week, and then it becomes a part of you.
So I hope it’s been helpful. In the next videos we’ll talk about many other ways you can increase your revenue. And I hope that so far it’s clear for you that even though we’re talking about revenue, remember it’s just being a function of you really helping people to create measurable positive changes in their lives. If that’s not happening revenues are not going to go up, that’s for sure. So make sure that you keep on doing.
And if you feel you lack those business skills definitely sign up for the free crash course, in just 40 minutes I’ll show you pretty much all the marketing strategies you need to build your practice. And check out the Six Figure Practice program accelerator where we help you implement everything you need to have to grow your private practice. Take care.