How Much It COST to Start My 6-Figure Coaching Business 😵 (REAL figures 💸)

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome back to my channel in today's video I want to share with you real figures of how much it costs me to start my online coaching business now for those who don't know I'm not just a youtuber that posts about social media I also have a coaching business in which YouTube actually drives a lot of traffic - like I mentioned in my previous video right here now I'm not gonna talk so so much about myself in this video but if you want to learn more about my journey then definitely check out this video right here as well that being said guys if you are interested in starting your own online coaching business but you're unsure about the investment or you're just curious to know how much I've spent so far on my business then keep on watching now to make this video easy for you to follow what I've done is I've split my business costs in five categories the first is training and education how much money have I spent on mentorship programs and courses the second one is software and Technology how much money do I spend a month and what types of software do I use in order to keep my business running the third is legal how much money did I spend on incorporating my business my lawyers the contracts that I've done all that stuff and then the fourth one is accounting anything related to finances really how much do I pay my accountant how much do I pay my bookkeepers what type of software I use for that and then last but not least hiring how much money have I spent on outsourcing especially here someone who is thinking about maybe outsourcing or thinking about you know really scaling your business I really wanted to include this as a category as well on a final note before we dive right in how I choose to spend my money is my business and no one else's and the same principle applies to you that's why every time I'll share a real figure I'm also going to try my very best to recommend either a more affordable or free option so that anyone any level does not feel threatened or feel intimidated to invest in starting their own business the last thing I want is for people to feel intimidated or feel scared off by starting their own business so I really want to just at least to put that out there now diving right in the first category that we have is education and training so here's this story when I had the idea of starting my online business I had a lot of fears that were preventing me from taking action and for a very long time I was so stubborn I was trying to do the DIY route which means that you just try to figure everything out on your own and that was a total fail I had a lot of things that were keeping me stuck and that's what I knew I needed to a mentor so the first thing that I invested in was a $4,000 one-on-one mentorship program now regardless if you are someone who wants to start your own coaching business or a different type of business I personally believe that having a mentor was one of the best investments that I ever made if you want to learn more about mentorship definitely check out this video that I have right here now I personally think that depending on your budget having a mentor either free or paid or even joining a course of our program is one of the best investments that you'll ever make in your business so I definitely consider this as a non-negotiable and the reason why I say this is because yes you could definitely try to figure out everything on your own but at that point in your business time is actually a lot more valuable than money imagine the amount of time that you would have to spend DIY trying to figure out and try to piece things together when you can actually invest in someone else who's already done the things that you want to do and actually give you the entire framework and coach you through it so I highly recommend that with any stage of your business always have a mentor that has your back and really is someone that is a soundboard and that will keep you accountable throughout this journey the second bigger investment that I made in my business in terms of education and training with my neuro-linguistic programming practitioner training now at that point in my business I was still starting out and I really wanted to level up my coaching skills that's why I was super drawn to learning NLP and becoming a practitioner in it now if you are someone who has no idea what NLP is I personally think that project life mastery does a really great explanation in his video right here so I highly recommend that you check it out now before I move on I'm gonna be a mind reader here I know a lot of people are now freaking out being like oh my gosh do I need to drop $2,000 on a certification as well well my answer is no not really I personally think that if you're starting out the best possible investment of your time is going to be working with real clients paid or free if you actually spent more time working with real people getting them results versus spending all your time having analysis process on what certification to get I promise you just the act of working with clients is going to help you narrow down what type of certification you really need at the end of the day trainings and certifications are little boosters that you can add to fill the gaps within your skill set but unless you actually take those existing skills you have to the test you're never really going to know which certification or types of trainings you really need if you need any at all on that note though if you are someone who does want to level up your skills but you don't have to thousand dollars to drop in one go just for one training and one certification a really great alternative is buying courses in terms of real figures I've probably spent $2,000 total in buying a lot of different courses so my money actually was able to buy me tons and tons of courses and learn from different types of mentors I've been a student of Sonny Leonard uzi amy porterfield russell brunson just to name a couple of amazing entrepreneurs that I've learned from so I highly recommend that courses are a really great way to at least get some extra learning for a cheaper price point and being able to learn from a lot more people because of how affordable some courses really are so with that being said within the education and training category in total I've spent about eight thousand dollars now this number is obviously going to increase I already have a lot of ideas and plans on investing in more mentorship more courses and more programs as a business owner this is one of the most important investments that you can make because the more that you invest in yourself the more you invest in your skills and the more you invest in your learning your business will exponentially grow faster and bigger over time so this is definitely a category that you don't want to keep out on and it's super crucial in terms of building the foundation of yourself and your business moving on to the second category and this is a major category and that is software and technology now software is one of the major things that you need to have in your business to ensure that you can conduct business day to day this includes your email marketing software how are you communicate with your clients how you invoice your clients there are so many different pieces of software that even when I started my business I didn't even know I need it now because I am giving you all of my real figures I do have to rely on my phone because I have all my notes there but the very first thing that any business owner regardless if you're a coach that you need is your website so when I first started I got my domain wwsz leuco off GoDaddy it was a one-time fee of $15 but every year I have to renew that domain so that actually cost me about sixty-five dollars a year not only this with websites you're also going to need a web host for me I use SiteGround and that costs me about a hundred and fifty dollars a year to host which equates to about like 1250 a month not only this a question that I always get about my website is if I use Squarespace WordPress Wix what do I use personally for me I use wordpress.org and on top of WordPress I actually have a plugin that I bought and it's called Elementor Elementor is essentially a drag-and-drop page builder that WordPress offers and it's a really great plugin there's a free version and there's also a paid version I personally have the paid version so I pay about $50 a year for that which equates to like four dollars a month which is not bad on the topic of websites once someone goes to your website they're going to need to have a way to contact you now for a lot of people who are on a budget you could easily just use your regular gmail account or hotmail account or whatever you want but if you want to maintain a level of professionalism I highly recommend actually having an email that ends with your business name for instance for my email it's support at Vanessa loco for my customer service in order to get this I actually invested in G suite and that cost about $15 a month and not only this on the topic of emails if you're running a business you're definitely going to also need an email marketing software for me I use convertkit and convertkit for me cost around two hundred and fifty dollars a month and the reason why it's so expensive for me is because I do have an email list of like almost 30,000 people so that's why it's so costly for me now if you are on a budget I highly also recommend MailChimp if you're just starting out and you don't have enough money to invest in email marketing software but of course as you grow in your business MailChimp is not going to be enough and you are going to need to upgrade to things like convertkit activecampaign drip all these other email marketing providers so already within the website / email side of software I spent around two hundred and eighty seven dollars a month on this stuff alone not only this within software you also have to think about the software you need in order to maintain your relationship with your clients or your potential clients for example one piece of software that's super common in the coaching world is a calendar booking system you need to have a booking system that allows your potential prospects or your current clients to book you for meetings for me I use calendly and that cost me about fifteen dollars a month now if you are on a budget you could certainly do the back and forth with your clients your potential clients and just book things manually through your Google Calendar that is absolutely fine but if you really want to be professional and have things booked really quickly for you then I highly recommend using something like Conley or even accuity another really important piece of software that you're also going to need to invest in in your coaching business is a video messaging software you need to have a platform where you can host your meetings not just with your clients but your prospective clients as a really great platform that I use and that a lot of coaches use is called zoom I pay about $15 a month for it and the reason why I love it is because each of my clients have their own private line I have a lot of functionalities with it like recording calls and all these things you can always check out the website I'll put the link in the comments section below or the description section below now if you are someone who is on a budget and you don't really have the money to invest in something like this yet don't worry you can always use Skype or Google Hangouts as well now something that you need to know when it comes to having a coaching business is outside of having one-on-one calls with your clients or your prospects you're also going to need to have some sort of communication platform that allows you to keep in touch with your clients offline personally for me I don't really like it when my clients DME or private message me on my social media accounts when they want to talk about business that's why I have a private platform called slack that I invest in I pay about fifteen dollars a month because I pay per head and all of my clients are there in order to ask me any questions related to their business now if you don't have that type of money a really great alternative is boxer boxer is something that a lot of coaches use it's absolutely free and I highly recommend that you use it especially if you are on a budget since we're still on the topic of clients there are two other pieces of software that I want to mention the first is an invoicing software how are you going to actually charge your clients for your services for me I use a free software called wave it's absolutely amazing all of my invoices are done through there so I highly recommend it and not only this I also use a software called DocuSign DocuSign is a piece of software that allows me to get my clients to sign contracts super fast it really eliminates a lot of the back-and-forth now I pay about fifteen dollars a month for DocuSign but there is a free version the only thing with the free version is I think that you are limited with the amount of contracts that you can send now if you wanted to do it the other way and you don't want to pay for something like this the only issue is is that you're gonna have to have a lot of back-and-forth with your clients in terms of getting your contract signed versus if you use a software like DocuSign I'm able to just with a click of the button that the moment a client says that they want to work with me I send through the contract they read it they fill out the form and that's it and on my end I'm also able to see if that client has viewed it if they've opened it if they signed it so in terms of the follow up it's a lot more seamless now is it absolutely necessary in your business when you're starting out not really but it does really speed up the process and for you to close those clients as you can see from our current tally I spent about 55 dollars a month alone just on client upkeep now when it comes to software there is one more that I need to mention and that is a membership platform as a coach whether it's now or in the future you're probably going to want to create courses at some point for me I use the membership site called kajabi it cost me about two hundred and sixty dollars a month with the growth plan now this is really expensive for a membership platform I admit that but I really really love kajabi now if you don't have that type of budget which a lot of people might not you can also use a platform called teachable based on my research teachable is one of the most affordable membership platforms so I highly recommend that too if you are starting out and if you don't have the money to invest yet in a more robust piece of software so when it comes to software the email the web the client upkeep the course platform and all of that in total per month I pay five hundred dollars which leads us to the next category and that is legal now when it comes to legal affairs a common question is oh my goodness do I need to invest in a lawyer do I need to incorporate do I need to do all these things get a business license and all of that well my answer to you is when I started I didn't do any of this until I started making money on the business because at the time I was broke I didn't have the amount of money to spend on contracts to spend on lawyers and to spend on incorporation so this wasn't something I did until I really started to get my first few clients and started to actually make real money with that being said though investing in this aspect of your business is one of the most important things that you need to do that's why the moment I made money I reinvested it right back into my legal affairs because I didn't want to put my business at risk I wanted to make sure that everything was set up properly and that my business was protected full on so the very first thing that I invested in when it comes to legal affairs was incorporating my business now I know that the lingo is really different for you guys in the state so you definitely want to do your research but for me I incorporated my business with a real lawyer and that costed me about one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars now of course if you are on a budget and you don't have the means to do it with a lawyer you can certainly do it yourself at least that's what it's like in Canada and generally if you do it yourself it'll cost way less than a thousand dollars however for me I wanted to make sure that it was done right because I really didn't myself to do this and also it wasn't my area of expertise and I had a feeling that if I ever messed up it would actually cost me more to fix it which is why I would rather just straight-up invest in an expert to do it for me another thing that I also relied on experts to do aka lawyers to do were my contracts now when I first started I definitely had no money to invest in paying lawyers to do my contracts for me so I actually use contracts that I found online which is really dangerous because you never know how things are drafted and how things could be used against you especially if this is in your area of expertise so it's not necessarily advice that I would give but I did pass with some contracts that I found online however the moment I started making more money in my business I definitely invested in getting contracts of my own on the topic of contracts something that I also want to say is you do not want to steal other people's contracts and copy it word-for-word because that is copyright infringement and you can get sued if you get caught so please be careful when you're doing this that's why I highly recommend that one of the first investments that you make is protecting yourself and your business by creating your own contracts with real lawyers for me I spent $3,000 total with all of my contracts and specifically these are the contracts that I invested in terms and conditions privacy policy earnings disclaimer a one-on-one coaching agreement so this is the agreement that I sent to my clients one-on-one a group coaching agreement so a contract that I would actually send out if I ever did group coaching programs an online course agreement so this is the terms and conditions that I have for my courses and also an independent contractor agreement as well and this is for people who I hire and I need to make sure that they're following the rules within my business and that everything is all good so these are the specific contracts that I personally invested in I got a package with a lawyer and it costed me $3,000 for all of it speaking of lawyers something that I also invest in with having my lawyers on retainer what this means is that if I ever got sued or my business Scott sued instead of getting but you got served mail sent directly to my home it automatically gets sent to my lawyers law firm and because they have me on file they're going to be able to act on it right away take action on it and act on my behalf if I didn't have them on retainer that means that it increases the chances of me missing that mail and creating more problems in my business so that's why I personally think it's really important to have a lawyer on retainer so that you can have someone already act on your behalf immediately without any delay if you ever got into any legal issues so all in all when it comes to legal affairs in total I've spent about four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars to protect my business moving on to the fourth category and that is accounting and just finance management in general now when it comes to business one of the first things that you're gonna learn is that you need to keep your business expenses and your personal expenses separate so that's why immediately what I did was actually open a business banking account for me I do all of my business in u.s. dollars so I have a u.s. banking account and that cost me about six dollars a month to have not only this within your business one of the most important people that you're going to need to hire or at least seek out is going to be an accountant especially during tax season but beyond that even just for regular maintenance and check-ins you want to have an accountant by your side specifically a tax accountant to make sure that you're making the best decisions within your business not only this is something that you also want to be aware of is that if you are someone who is unsure of what type of corporation you should have S Corp LLC sole proprietorship or incorporation the first person that you're going to need to talk to is an accountant do not go to a lawyer first you need to talk to an accountant about that stuff and they're going to be able to figure out how to organize your business that makes sense for your personal situation on top of that general consulting that accountants do for you one of the major things that they're going to help you on is your taxes and your tax planning so specifically for my annual tax return for my corporation and also my general tax planning I pay my accountant two thousand two hundred dollars not only there's something that you also need to be aware of is that an accountant and a bookkeeper is completely separate and different accountants help you with the strategic side of your business whereas bookkeepers are the ones that are helping you with your expenses and managing your books for me when I was first starting out I obviously didn't have the money to hire a real bookkeeper so what I use was the app called waive that I mentioned before and this is where you kind of reconcile all of your accounts and you plug everything in and you kind of do it manually which is absolutely fine but eventually I grew my business to six figures and I realized that this was something I heavily needed to invest in because I didn't have the time or capacity or the desire to do this type of stuff myself so I use a software or I use a service called bench now bench is a really great software that I'm using basically instead of me DIY it it's actual real bookkeepers on the other end that are helping me with my stuff I meet with them once a month and they give me a financial report and at the end of my corporate year I'm able to actually take all this information that real bookkeepers and professionals have done for me to give it to my accountant and actually have a real accurate depiction of what's going out of my business and what's coming in with that being said obviously with bench it's a little bit of a step up between using a DIY software like WAV or fresh books or QuickBooks so I pay about two thousand two hundred dollars a year just to have that service of having real experts do my bookkeeping for me that being said as you can see from the tally with the amount of money that I'm spending on my business account on my accountant and my bookkeepers I spend about four thousand four hundred and seventy two dollars a year on my business finances alone now moving on to the very last category in my business expenses and that is hiring and outsourcing now I didn't start hiring people in my business until very recently when I started to hit a really big ceiling in terms of the amount of things that I could do and also when I got to the next level in terms of the income that I was making now a really great question that I get a lot is Vanessa how do I know when to hire people how do I know when to outsource a really great piece of advice that I've gotten from other entrepreneurs is that the moment you start making silly mistakes in your business is when you know that you're kind of burnt out and you really need the help so I definitely noticed in my own business that I was making a lot of silly mistakes I was missing emails I was just a mess and that's what I knew I really needed help now at this stage in my business I have two beautiful amazing humans that work under me on one hand I have one person who really helps me with basically a lot of things she I treat as a right-hand woman she takes a lot of the small but important things off my plate and her position is very much so versatile and I could not honestly be in business without her she is so so helpful in my business she kind of does a lot of like administrative / community management work she is just a huge blessing that I have not only this on the other hand I've recently hired a video editor so you'll notice a lot of my videos have really upped it's like quality game and it's really thanks to her her name is Elena I'll link all of her information here if you are someone who's interested in hiring a video editor as well that being said I feel like it's super inappropriate to disclose how much I pay these two amazing women but let's just ballpark and say at minimum I pay $3,000 a month which equates to around $36,000 a year with everything said and done let's just recap all five categories now I've split it up into two parts the first part is my son cause so these are all the things that I've already paid for I cannot recover these costs and that is $8,000 for education and training four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars from my legal affairs and then four thousand four hundred and seventy two dollars for like my financial management so in total my son costs aka the money that I cannot get back is seventeen thousand two hundred and twenty two dollars now when it comes to my reoccurring cost aka my monthly cost let's just multiply all my monthly costs by twelve months so we get the full-year picture now I pay five hundred dollars per month on software and then I also pay three thousand dollars a month on like outsourcing so in total that is $42,000 per year which was Wow so if I were to add all my costs together my son cost and my variable cost my total cost would be fifty nine thousand two hundred and twenty-two dollars now I know a lot of you guys who are watching this are probably freaked out that it basically cost me sixty thousand dollars to run my six-figure business but at the end of the day you also have to realize that not every single thing that I mentioned is going to be applicable to you you don't have to spend the things that I've spent on you can choose the alternatives that I mentioned and all of that stuff you can skip a couple steps it does not matter please do not be discouraged but at the end of the day something that I do want to highlight is that revenue does not equal profit I think there's a huge misconception that a lot of people have is that the moment I make six figures in my business or the moment I hit seven figures I am rich I am suddenly basking in money and I'm you know driving a Ferrari and buying a house and all of that but what I've learned in my own journey is even though I've made multiple six figures in my business I still pretty much broke I have a lot of bills to pay and as your business grows your expenses grow that's just naturally like that and on top of that you also want to add on the taxes that you have to pay as well which is also a lot of money especially when you hit this certain tax bracket now I know that this video was so overwhelming there were so many different types of things to consider so to help you out in the description box below every piece of software that I mentioned is going to be in the description box not only this I've also included a freebie for you to download that's really a recap of everything that I mentioned in this video today and a little bit more as well not only this if you are interested in more about having a coaching business or business in general make sure you like this video or at least comment below to let me know if you want more of this type of topic on my channel now if you want to learn more of a business life and just social media or anything like that in general make sure you also look at these two videos I have right here as always guys I appreciate you I hope you guys have a great day a great week and a great life and I'll see you in the next one bye guys