Raven: Coaching has become a very big business. How did Terri get started in coaching?

Terri: I was measurable in my j-o-b in corporate America, and I was literally dreaming that there was something that I could do to serve people, and I wanted to work from home, but I had no idea what that was. So, I’m sitting on an airplane traveling to business, and there’s a woman sitting next to me. It’s a short flight, and we get in a conversation, and of course she says, “What do you do?” I say, “What do you do?” She says, “I’m a coach.” To this day, I’m still embarrassed to share this, but I go, “Oh, what kind of sport do you coach?” She explains to me that she’s a life and business coach, and she goes on to describe it. I know literally in my heart and soul instantly that’s what I was meant to do. Three days later, I started coach training, and not even as month later, I quit my j-o-b, and became a full-time coach. I just knew instantly that that’s what I was sent to do.

Raven: People nowadays really want their time freedom, and they want to be able to be their own boss, and making the money from home is the key these days.

Terri: It is, Raven. I just want to add what it really gives you is the opportunity to have more freedom in your life, and to have more time with your family and friends, and the things that are really important to having an abundant quality of life.

Raven: Are there special qualifications people are going to have to have?

Terri: In terms of becoming a coach?

Raven: Yes.

Terri: Great question. Here’s a big mistake that people are making. Coaching has become one of the most booming businesses in the United States. It’s the number one home based business. It is also the number one money-making business. So, people are flocking into coaching. Here’s the mistake. People think, “Well, I can just call myself a coach.” Your mistake is you don’t know the skills of coaching. There are core coaching competencies that you need to master. So, before you just plunge out there and say, “I’m a coach,” you want to go through coach training. You want to make sure that you know the core coaching competencies, that you have the skills and the tools and the resources. Otherwise, you’re not serving clients. First of all, they won’t stay around. Second of all, people won’t pay you, and third of all, you don’t want to be unethical in working a profession where you’re not certified or accredited.

Raven: You spoke about skills, and we both know how important that is. Can you kind of throw out maybe your top ones that come to mind?

Terri: Absolutely. There’s three that I will start with, and they’re called powerful requests, powerful observations, and powerful questions. These are three coaching tools that we use all the time. We ask people. We make a request of them to do something that is bigger than what they would normally do. That’s a little bit outside of themselves, that makes them stretch, and that’s how we help people grow. We make a powerful observation by holding up the mirror and sharing something. People haven’t quite looked it yet. You’ve got a pimple on your face, and you try to ignore it. A coach is going to magnify it and say, “Look here.” Then, we ask powerful questions, questions that have our clients go deep within their heart and soul searching for their answers, and that’s where they find their authentic self. I’ll give you one other skill that is absolutely critical in coaching, and it is learning the three kinds of truths. So, there’s your truth which is based on what you believe and how you were raised. There’s my truth based on what I believe, how I was raised and our perspectives of the world. Yours is going to be different than mine, and then there’s the truth, like it’s 22 degrees outside. That’s the factual truth. So, in coaching, we teach both coach and client how to learn to understand all three so they listen and hear in a different way.

Raven: You said a key thing when you said listen.

Terri: In fact, it’s the number one skill. We call it tuning in, and you’re busy. Your kids come home from school. You’re still multi-tasking, making dinner, talking on the phone, thinking about something you have to do that evening. Your kid tells you something, and you’re like, “Aha, yeah, that’s nice.” You have no idea what it was. You’re missing valuable human connections that you can never get back. So, listening or what we call deeply tuning in is connecting heart to heart. It’s putting everything else out down, everything else aside and being there fully for the person that you are with, fully connected, heart to heart, soul to soul, caring, loving, non-judging and just being. It’s the way we set our society up that we’re very busy, and we try to do this, this, this and this, and we’re involved in so many things, even our brains are functioning all over the place. So, it’s something you really have to learn, and it’s skill that we usually lose by three years old. So, everybody, I would tell people whether you want to be a coach part time or full time or not at all, you should go through coach training because you need to learn these key core coaching skills.

Raven: In your opinion, can a coaching business be done from home using your telephone, or do they have to get out and set up an office for their clients to come to?

Terri: I can hardly wait to answer this question. Okay, this is my belief and how I’ve trained over 4,000 coaches to do it, and how I do it myself. Here’s what you want to do. You want to coach by phone primarily. As soon as you get face to face with someone, it brings up a lot of their fears. They look at your eyes. They’re afraid you’re judging them. Let’s just say when you listen as a coach, squint. The client sees that and thinks, “Oh my gosh, maybe they think what I’m saying is bad.” So, instead of having this relationship where the client is truly free to speak whatever they want because they’re speaking into a phone, you’ve now added distraction into the coaching relationship, and you never in my experience get as deep. I will also say that if you want to do corporate work, you’re going to do some of that in person because most corporations will at least want the beginning work face to face, and then I certainly teach people to move that to telephone. A great advantage to you as a coach, you make a lot more money. You’re not driving from place to place. You don’t have the money of an office and rent and all of that jazz, and you can do what I do. I’m wearing a pair of sweatpants. I literally finish my workout, take a shower, and come sit in my office. I’m in my sweatpants, being at home, loving what I do, doing what I love.

Raven: When they’re coaching from home, Terri, at they coaching one or one, or one on many?

Terri: One on one coaching has been the most popular. I’m teaching a very different model. I’m really on the cutting edge of coaching, and I want people to understand that you can make a fine living coaching one to one on the phone, but you’re going to work forty hours a week to make $100-$150 grand. Personally, to me, that sounds like you’re getting back into a j-o-b. Second of all, clients when they are in groups have much more synergy, and to me in my experience, they learn faster and grow quicker because they’ll be on a group coaching call and somebody will bring up an issue, and they’ll think, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got that in my life, too. So, they’re getting lots and lots of coaching in groups. So, I’m teaching coaches to use group coaching, and/or telephone classes as a different form of coaching where you can have ten or twelve people on and easily make a thousand dollars in an hour. I teach them how to create a coaching scheme and how to create coaching classes from the scheme. So, for example, one of my clients is doing the whole weight loss thing, just all about losing weight and maintaining health and well-being, and what they’ve done is they’ve set up groups. So, they have like twelve people in a group that they do at one o’clock, and they’ve got a four o’clock group, but they have two groups every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Each group has ten or twelve people, and each person in the group is paying $100 per month. Just start doing the match. You’ve got twelve people times three times a week, so you’ve got 36 people times $100. Now, if they want to work more, they can. This person just wants to do this very part-time because they also do fitness training on the side.

Raven: Now, are you finding people are coaching locally, state to state, or globally.

Terri: I’m changing that. People were trying to get clients locally, and I said to people, “You’re on the phone. You don’t need a small geography. You want to think locally, sure get local clients. If you want to think nationally, but even more you want to think internationally, global.” There’s no reason that you can’t coach people from different cultures and different parts of the time zones so that you can coach different hours that work for you. So, I coach people in Israel, Turkey, England, Australia and Japan right now. You can coach people whenever, wherever you want, but think of it this way. You have the whole world as your audience because you have a huge market, and there aren’t many coaches. There’s a small number of coaches trying to serves millions of people. So, if someone is smart, they’re going to get into this business quickly because we are at the boom of the coaching business. Hi, this is Raven Blair-Davis reporting for Michael Senoff’s

Raven: So, how would you someone listening be able to begin their coaching business?

Terri: Here’s what you do, and it’s really fun. Just take a piece of paper, open a Word document, and start writing down every single thing that you have an interest down. I don’t care if it is baking cookies or going fishing, just every single thing – things about yourself, maybe you’re really good at organizing. Maybe you’re really good at make-up application. Maybe you’re really good at sales. Maybe you’re really good at leading people. Maybe you’re a motivator. Maybe you can teach people how to dress. Maybe people have said to you before, “You are just so good at arranging things in my home.” Whatever it is, just start jotting down anything and everything that either you’re good at or that you enjoy doing. Then, you go through and say, “Which ones really excite me? Which ones resonate? Which ones do I look at and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I am really good at that’?” Circle your top five. Those are going to be your top five coaching niches because you can not be a generalist in any business. Nobody can treat everybody and help everybody. You are going to pick five areas. Can I give you an example? I have one of the most exciting coaching graduates. He’s graduated the program. When he came to us as a student, he was a reverend. Now, he does spiritual coaching. The second thing that he did was a technique called EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique which is a tapping technique which is very, very popular. I use that. I use it in my own life. It made a great deal of difference in my sinuses and things like that. He does that kind of coaching. The third thing that he found was that women for years as a minister were coming to him and talking to him about their marital struggles and difficulties and what wasn’t quite right. So, he coaches women to improve their marriages. He’s got three coaching niches, which keeps him plenty busy, and he makes a great living, and coming from his ministry background, he knew what he was really good at.

Raven: How would someone determine if them becoming a coach is the right thing for their particular business?

Terri: Here’s the way I look at it. First of all, learning coaching skills helps anybody at any age anywhere. So, I don’t care what business you’re in, I personally have coached people in over 200 different businesses from the CEO of a company that makes airplanes to the CEO of a company that makes toys to a stay at home mom who part-time has a baking business. It could be anything. In your business, if you understand how to listen better, how to communicate better, how to ask the right questions, you will accomplish more, get things done, be more productive, have higher profits. So, the bottom line to me, Raven is if you own a small business, medium sized or big business, coaching needs to be integrated into your business. A great friend of mine is a massage therapist, and truthfully, she’s like the world’s best massage therapist. I have never met anybody like her. She is amazing. So, she decided maybe three years ago that she wanted to go through the program to add coaching to her business. Now, she’s getting close to like mid-forties age. She’s starting to get aches and pains doing massages all day, and she knows that in her fifties and here sixties, most likely, she’s not going to be able to be over somebody’s body eight hours a day. It’s just not physically possible. So, what she’s incorporated into her business now is coaching people. So, when they’re on the table, stuff comes up. Then, she’ll offer them a coaching package where you get your massage and then a coaching session that goes with it. So, she is integrating the coaching into her business, and when she chooses later to do less massage, she’ll amp up the coaching. I have a great story about that one, one of my favorite. He actually wrote his story in one of my books, but this gentleman worked for a large corporation whose name I’m not allowed to mention, but believe me, everybody has something from this company in your home. You just have to. His office, his regional office was like number 52 in the company. It was at the bottom, and so I started to go in and train all of his people who were out in the field doing inside and outside sales, on five coaching topics, five very simple but very important things that sales people absolutely need to know. I can speak to that because I’ve been a sales trainer for twenty some odd years. I know the whole thing. I can do it and I can play it. I just don’t choose to, but I went and taught them just five coaching techniques, and I asked them to forget anything that they’ve ever learned about sales before. Forget their manuals, their forms, throw them in the garbage, forget everything. In one year, his office went from number 52 to number three, and in the second year which was after the book came out, his office went to number one. It’s just by his sales people learning these five steps that are proprietary coaching process. As soon as they got those five steps, they loved doing sales. They weren’t looking at a sales anymore. There was no manipulation. They were coaching people to do what people love to do, which is buy. I ask people to convince themselves not as a salesperson, but as a coach to help somebody make a decision, is it right for you? Is it not?

Raven: Someone starting from scratch, what would be the best direction that you could point them to, to get them going faster rather than slower?

Terri: I’m going to take two scenarios. I’m going to take an actual coaching student who’s been a stay at home mom for I don’t even know, a very long time, at least eighteen years and maybe a little bit longer, and she had kids pretty early. So, she was only in the workforce – she was a bookkeeper – for a couple of years, and then did not work at all for all of these years, now her kids were gone and grown, and she was ready to work. So, she didn’t want a bookkeeper. It had not interested her then. It didn’t now, and so when she made her list of what she’s good at, she was like, “I just really am good at running a household. That’s what I’m really good at.” I said, “Why don’t you be a coach to moms who are starting to run a household and don’t know what the heck they’re doing? There’s plenty of new moms who just have a baby, and they find themselves at home, and they’re trying to perhaps take care of the house and take care of the baby, or they just had a second kid. They have a seven year old and a baby. They’re running one kid to soccer. Why don’t you just coach moms on how to run a better household? She became a mommy coach. That’s actually what she calls herself. She’s helping moms distress. She’s helping to connect moms. She’s giving them resources and tools. She’s teaching them how to organize their day, how to structure their lives, how to lose weight, everything that a mom could ask for. She has a phenomenal business, launching a new website, got a book, all kinds of cool stuff, and every time I read what she puts out, I’m like, “Wow, what value. What great value.” I have a guy, a gentleman that comes to mind who was “retired early.” At first, he went through about a two year period of devastation almost to the point of depression, and finally one day, he said, “I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to do something. I’m not feeling good about myself,” and so we went ahead and we looked at his skill set, and he comes from running an operations division at a chocolate plant where they made candy, etc. He just wasn’t interested in that. So, it was like, “Well, what are you interested in?” He’s like, “When I’m home, I love to work in the garden, and what I also really love to do is I love to set up things like systems for our taxes and filing and our house.” So, we looked at different things. He’s doing several things. One is he’s coaching people to keep their finances in check, not like a financial planner, but, “Okay, here’s what you do. The bills come in. You have a file folder. You’ve got tickler file with days 1-31. The bill has to be paid on the seventh. You put it on the folder for the seventh.” So, he’s teaching these what I call financial organization systems. That’s what he’s coaching, but he is also coaching gardening, his hobby, his passion of gardening. There’s twelve people on the phone, and they’re coaching about how to fit time in for gardening, how to enjoy gardening more, how to be more focused in your garden, how to create more beauty inside and outside your home – all of these various aspects, and it just comes from tapping in and saying, “Heck, if I could do anything, what would I do.” I tell people, Raven, be wild and crazy. I’ve got a person who coaches farmers. We’ve got another person who coaches gay people to come out of the closet. You just pick a topic and if it really resonates with you at your core, you’ve a burning passion to do it, you exude passion, people will hire you. I could probably coach you on how to collect butterflies if you and I both shared a passion about butterflies, and I have to say when you’re passionate, you just get up, and you do what you love because you want to do that. Raven, I think that’s what we’re on the planet for. I think whoever created us said, “Go forth and have fun and great joy,” and not, “Go to a job that you hate and hope some day that you live long enough to retire and do what you love.” No, work is a part of your life. It’s part of who you are. You express yourself. You make your contribution through your work, so be passionate about what you do. Okay, step number one, I said it earlier, and I definitely will reiterate again, training. Don’t just hang out a shingle and get a business card. Get training as a coach. That’s step one. Step two is to create this list of what you love, what you’re passionate about, and then to identify three to five areas that you want to focus your business on. Step three is to set up a one page website, and that website should have something in the headlines that mentions the pain that people feel who would hire you. So, for example, let’s say that you’re a weight loss coach. You may have in the headline, “Overweight? Hate to walk by mirrors?” So, if somebody reads that-

Raven: They’re going to stop.

Terri: Right. Then, you have an offering, “Free Special Report. Free ebook. Free mp3,” whatever it is, and people simply fill out their name and their email. So, you do what’s called lead capture to build your database. Step number four, and we teach you this process, but it’s too get Google Adwords like crazy for that website. Then, you do another one for the other niche of your business. So, the other niche is relationship coaching, before you get a divorce, read this. So, then you’re going to have your three to five niches each supported by Google Adwords. Listen to me really carefully. Do not do what coach training schools were teaching for years which is why coaches were struggling, which is go after friends and family. They’re going to run away from you. You won’t be invited to the Christmas party. Your friends and family, leave them alone. You’ve got a universe of people. The way we teach the websites and the Google Adwords, you’ll have about a thousand people in your pipeline. Now, you get all these names of people, let’s say who are interested in weight loss. Let’s make it a hundred of them. They all got my free ebook. Now, I set a date and time to do a teleclass for them for free to teach them some secrets or some tips, which they’re pretty interested in. I call them and I say, “Hey, Raven, this is Terri and you downloaded my free report on how to create your ideal body. I just want to make sure it got to you because sometimes stuff doesn’t get through the email. Did you get it?” You say, “Yes.” I say, “And, tomorrow night, I’m doing a free teleclass at seven p.m. I want to give you the phone number so you can call because I’m going to be coaching people on XYZ, eating less, losing five inches,” whatever, and each person that you invite, usually a third of them will show up. You do this great teleclass. At the end of the teleclass, you then offer them the opportunity to call you back immediately to get into this coaching program that you’re doing and get a fifty percent discount if they call your right then. We teach you it word for word for word. It’s a no spot process. It’s a system. It works. It works. It works, and I just gave it away.

Raven: A lot of people are so confused with Google Adwords.

Terri: We give you a quick, easy education. It’s a no-brainer, and we also give you the ability to find an assistant for a dollar an hour to do it for you if you don’t even want to do it.

Raven: Now, we’re going to find out how you can go from being just a good coach to a great coach. Is there a secret to that Terri?

Terri: Yes, actually there truly is, and it’s practice. I don’t mean practicing for free. What I mean is coaching a lot of people. In fact, I’ll talk about this later. You absolutely have to do a lot of coaching. When I started out, I had no confidence, none. It was like I wasn’t sure if I was going to say or what to do. Now, coaching is so stick in me, I don’t think about it. Things just come from within me. You’ve got to do a lot of coaching to become a great coach. So, just coach, coach, coach, coach.

Raven: What are the top five coaching topics for businesses that you feel have the best chance in being successful?

Terri: One of the biggest ones is leadership coaching, which is working with organizations and helping people be more effective at leadership really by teaching them coaching skills. Another area is financial coaching. So, it could be teaching someone to get their finances in order to do a business start-up, or it could be helping people create financial goals and abundance, prosperity. Then, health and wellness coaching, particularly to boomers, which I am one. We’re really concerned about that. We want longevity. We want to look and feel our best as long as we possibly can. We’re not interested in nursing homes and home health care. So, health and wellness coaching right now is one of the largest niches in all of coaching. The money that people spend on health and wellness, it just makes sense and boomers have the money. Well, the next one’s not going to surprise you, weight loss. We’re an obese society. We’re not just an overweight. We’re an overfat society, and fat is what leads to disease. The other one is sales coaching. If you think about how many people there are doing sales, just in the United States alone, it’s a huge industry, and they need and want help. They’re open to help, and their companies are willing to pay for that kind of help.

Raven: Other than the traditional coaching, the one on one or like you said the one on many, and teleseminars, are there any other ways a person can generate income using their phone and coaching together as a tool.

Terri: Absolutely. We taught teleseminars and group coaching, but you can also do training. You know thing sin your life and work experience you can train people on. For example, how to listen, you go through coaching, and you can learn that skill, you can teach it to somebody else. You can teach people truths. So, you can take the coaching curriculum that you’ve learned, and you can teach from that curriculum. The other thing that you can do and be paid for is run mastermind groups. If you haven’t read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, you’ve been under a rock. So, come out from under there. Everybody, in my experience, needs to read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It is a brilliant book, and it teaches the power of masterminding. Most people read it. They don’t understand it. They don’t get it. They need a coach to facilitate it. Coaches should be starting mastermind groups.

Raven: So, what do you feel is the biggest mistake coaches make starting out? If you don’t mind being totally transparent with us, maybe even one of the biggest mistakes you started out with.

Terri: This is a huge craw for me. It just gets under my skin and drives me nuts. Coaching schools have been teaching for years to do free coaching. So, free, you get charged nothing. You ask for nothing. I started out this way, too. Here’s the mistake. A-we’re supposed to be professionals who are credible. So, Raven, when I went to school initially as a speech language pathologist, many, many years ago, while I was in graduate school, I started to treat patients, and they charged for my service what a full speech language pathologist would have charged. A – I wasn’t as competent, and B – we’re talking about a situation where I could actually have injured and/or killed somebody because one of the things that we do in speech language pathology is we work with stroke patients and help them to swallow. So, if you mess up, and they’re incapable of swallowing, they can aspirate and die. So, I want people to get this. Coaching is not killing anyone. There’s nothing you’re going to say or do because you’re not giving advice that’s going to hurt anyone. You’re going to be an ear which is going to help everyone. Charge for your services. You don’t go to an intern or a resident in a hospital, and they don’t say, “Well, you don’t have to pay because I’m new and I’m just sort of learning how to do this surgery. It’s ridiculous. You wouldn’t open a restaurant and invite people and say, “Well, I’m kind of a new cook. So, I’m not going to charge you.” Come on! You have got to charge. Here’s what happens. I have study after study that will show you that the clients you coach for free never, ever, ever convert to paying clients. One in 1500 something, 1511 or something the study said, would convert to a paying client, and would only last about three months. Do not coach for free. You are a confident professional, and you will never build up a coaching business coaching for free. We lack confidence, and so we’re like, “Well, maybe nobody should pay me for this.” You know way more than the other person knows. I have somebody who fixes my computer. I don’t know how much more they know than I know, but they know enough more to fix it. So, I pay them. They’re brand new. I don’t care. You’ve got to step up, and I hope everybody can hear my passion and my sincerity and stop doing whatever you’re doing for free. Once you make a lot of money and you’re prosperous and abundant, go ahead and tithe. Go ahead and support charities. Start your own foundation. Go ahead and do some free coaching on the side, but not as a way to start your business.

Raven: So, thirty minutes to an hour coaching session, can you kind of throw in an example as to what kind of money they even offer?

Terri: I can tell you that on average, we recommend you start at about a hundred dollars an hour. When you get a little bit more confident, you bump it up to $150. You continue to build it from there. I’m at almost a thousand dollars per hour now. You don’t have to be there. You can be wherever you want, but $100- $150 makes sense.

Raven: Now, how does someone transition from let’s say they’re selling a product, Terri, and maybe an hour comes with the home study course for whatever they’re selling. How do they transition from that into coaching?

Terri: What they basically do is they explain the difference in coaching. The difference is the one on one deep tuning in, the listening. The coaching is really a different format, a different way of connecting, a different way of getting to the authentic answers and the real passion and the real person, etc. So, you just look it as sort of a different service line with a different pricing.