What Business Owners Are Asking For with Terri Levine

Business owners are screaming out for help and are seeking a way to be unique in their marketplace. Whenever I speak with business owners and ask them what result they want they typically tell me that they want more customers. Somehow they think that more customers mean they will make more money.

Many business coaches simply work on getting more clients for their customers. I don’t advocate this and believe this is a mistake. What they’re asking for is not actually what they need. More customers are not the answer. So what is?

I encourage business owners to focus on increasing their profits because without having enough qualified prospects they literally don’t have a sustainable business. I remember a time when I was first enrolled in a coach training program several decades ago and I had gotten my first client that was a corporation paying me $275,000.

The teleclass leader from the coaching school who was teaching a class I was on asked all the students how many clients we had. I said I had one (2 days after starting my training). He said, “Oh, that’s a shame you only have one customer.” As the other students spoke up on the call a few had three or four customers yet were only making about $250 per client.

I didn’t think it was a shame that I only had one customer. I understood that I needed to have adequate profits and that sometimes more customers translate into more profits… but not always. I still think $275,000 for one client is good money.

Imagine if you have 5 highly qualified clients each paying you $25,000 as their business coach. You don’t have a lot of overhead or expense. You have a lot of profit and you now have a great business model.

Instead of having a lot of clients I decided over a decade ago I would only work with a few clients each year for $25,000 to $50,000 per client. This allows me to have a freedom lifestyle as a business coach and lets money flow in as well as profits.

I don’t have to worry about spending a lot of time and money trying to attract a large number of clients. I can simply focus my time and energy on finding a handful of perfect clients to work with and I make a huge profit per client and get to give all my attention to getting real outcomes for my client family members.

Very often more customers actually cost a business more money through increased overhead, staff, delivery mechanisms and many other things that you need to take into account to service more and more customers.

When I first started coaching 22 years ago, I had a lot of clients and needed a team of assistants to manage all my client appointments, billing and client communication, etc. The first year I earned one million as a coach, I only took home $50,000! How sad. I had my eye on the wrong ball.

I was hunting for more and more clients. I also didn’t have much of a life as I was so busy servicing a huge number of clients. I learned my lesson and now share this lesson with my clients and fellow business coaches.

As a business coach, you want to focus your clients on the right goal which is growing their profits. Profits are name of the game. Having the most money left after paying your expenses salaries and bills is what makes a business stable.

Profits enable a company to grow and to stay in business long term and also gives the company the ability to service more people. Profits also allow the company owner to have a better lifestyle with more income flowing in.

With some of the businesses that you coach, increasing profits might be as simple as restructuring some internal processes… and then untapped profits can flow in.

Understand that as a business coach you will find many clients who are business owners overlooking the great opportunities to grow their business because they’re too busy working in their business and not working on it. That means they’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

It’s important that you help your clients focus on only marketing to their best prospects. Then, once they get those qualified prospects to engage and to become client family members, then the coach must do a great job of servicing those prospects. Otherwise, you spent your time, money and energy getting clients just to lose them to someone else.

To position yourself as an expert business coach you must understand what business owners don’t understand. I know that if you survey business owners they will tell you that they want more customers. What does that mean? It means that you now have an opportunity to educate them on the fact that it’s not just about more customers, and their focus needs to be the bottom line.

Using your background in business, marketing, management, accounting or whatever else, you can now help other business owners earn substantial financial satisfaction and rewards.

You now understand the really important problem that business owners face which just isn’t getting more customers, it’s actually growing their revenue and keeping their profits. You can now go out as a qualified expert and establish your credibility.

A real expert coach actually explains how to do things. I believe as a business coach you have a very serious responsibility to help qualified prospects get the information they need and then to create the systems and processes that will help them profit.

Go ask 10 business owners what one thing you can help them with and see if they actually say “getting more customers.” Then simply educate them how profits are more important than customers and I believe you’ll have some very interested folks to speak with!