Ep #10: What It Takes to Create $250,000 in Your Business

You are listening to episode 10 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where I share what it took to make $250,000 in 2019.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello my confident squad. How are my coach friends today? So I have a confession. So I was supposed to record this podcast episode before I left for Grand Cayman for my master coach training. I’m already certified as a life coach and I’m now a master coach candidate for The Life Coach School, and we’re in the Caymans for an entire week of intensive training.

But I got sick last week. I got sick before I left, and I attempted to record this podcast episode. I got through two half done versions, only to ditch them because the concepts and the ideas that I wanted to share with you today were just all over the place and I was not conveying what I wanted to and I decided that it was better to give myself that time to let my brain come back and that meant packing up my recording equipment.

So just a note, I’ve already forewarned Pavel, my podcast editor. The sound on this one I fully acknowledge might sound just a little bit different. That is because I am recording it in my hotel room as opposed to my office. And so if you’re okay with that, I’m okay with that because this episode is just too damn good, and I can already tell you that where my head is today versus last week, this thing is going to knock your socks off.

This is so much better than the half episodes that I kept dumping and walking away from, I promise you. It is worth it. So I am in Grand Cayman right now recording this episode, like right now. I am staring at the pool and the palm trees and the white sand beaches of Seven Mile Beach. It’s really not too shabby.

I’ve just finished up my first day of master coach training and I honestly cannot wait to process and decompress and share all of the amazing things that I’m learning. But that is not what we’re doing today, my friends.

Today, I’m going to share how I used my five steps to creating self-confidence to take my life coaching business from $100,000 in 2018 to $250,000 in 2019. Like for real, is that not the best thing ever? Okay, but before we dive in, let’s give a shout-out to Confident Coaches listener Hailey, who wrote this fabulous review of The Confident Coaches Podcast on Apple Podcasts.

This is what Hailey wrote. She said, “Amy’s podcast has provided so much value in just a few episodes. She has actionable and thoughtful advice on how to become a more confident coach. She is real and shares what she has learned so well. I already feel more confident as a coach just by listening. Highly recommend.”

And this, this my friends was the goal of my podcast. To give you lots of actionable content and giving you a little confidence boost on the side. So thank you Ms. Hailey. I appreciate you so much.

Okay so this week though, I want to share with you what it took to make two and a half times as much in 2019 as I did in 2018. Like, it’s crazy, right? My brain still kind of blows its own mind right now. But I really think it’s important that you guys get a little backstory here, that you understand that I did not wake up one day, just decide to be a life coach, set up shop, and then boom, six figures.

No, that is not my story. I mean, sure, it is possible and there are stories out there and those stories are so inspiring, but that is not my story. My story has history. It’s got years of history. I think it’s really important to hear different stories because there’s no one way to get to the successful coaching business of your dreams.

But there are so many different paths, and mine is just one of them and yours may be different, and here’s the key thing; they’re all perfect. So first and foremost, let’s not be arguing with the way that we get there. That is so much less important than the lessons you learn on your way there, and that’s what I’m sharing with you today are the lessons that I learned based around the five steps that I have already been sharing with you in this podcast.

So I actually became a coach seven years ago. I started a weight coaching business through a direct sales company called AdvaCare. The first week of January 2013, which means I coached people to lose weight by selling them a 24-day challenge and having coaching calls with them once a week.

So they didn’t pay me to coach them. They bought product from me and then I received a commission off of what they bought. That’s how I got paid. It was never do you want to work with me, thank you, give me some money. I worked diligently through that first year, but ultimately – and actually, this might be a story for another day how this all went down, but I found that I just didn’t really love the product part, but I loved the coaching part.

I really wanted to focus more on body love and body acceptance as a means of taking care of yourself, rather than that product-driven weight loss that was part of what I had bought into. Bottom line was I just didn’t really know how to do just coaching. I didn’t know how to just have someone pay me to coach them. I knew how to do the product but I didn’t know how to get them like, pay me money and I will talk to you for an hour every week.

And it would be honestly, the summer of 2015 before I found The Life Coach School Podcast and found the missing piece between where I was and what I wanted to accomplish. It’s not the first time that I heard that your thoughts create your feelings and your actions and results, but it’s the first time it clicked.

You know what I mean? You know how you can find out – thanks to Facebook memories, I now know that I was posting memes 10 years ago about this, but it didn’t click in my head until I was listening to the way that Brooke Castillo, my now mentor and now the woman who’s coaching me this week on how to be a master coach. It wasn’t until I discovered her podcast and heard how she explained it that it finally clicked into place.

So I attended The Life Coach School in April 2016. I certified in June 2016, and yet it would be 18 months later, October of 2017 before I started doing the very work that I am now presenting you in this podcast and in my confident coaches trainings and coaching.

So my income for the past seven years reflects the arc of that story, and my road to $250,000, it was not a straight one. No. So here are the details. Here are the actual facts and figures that I am sharing with you right now. So in 2013, that was my first year in AdvaCare. Actually in 2013 and 2014, I don’t even have a dollar amount to give you.

I know that I made money, but it wasn’t enough for me to have to report it. So that means it was probably less than $600. I was in business, but I didn’t have to report it to the IRS because it wasn’t enough to have to report. I remember having that conversation of like, I made money. They’re like yeah, that doesn’t count. It’s so small.

And I know for sure that the money I was making on commission, I was just putting it back into buying my own product because when you are a direct salesperson, you need to be using your products so that you can be an example of your product. You should be that way with your own coaching too. You want to be an example of your own product.

Well, that was the case there too. So 2013, I don’t even have a number. 2014, I don’t even have a number. 2015, I made $1200. I’m pretty sure that that was because I signed three clients at $400 each. That’s right. $400 for six months of weekly coaching. I know, I’m thinking it’s crazy too.

So $1200 in 2015. $6000 in 2016, $18,000 in 2017, $103,000 in 2018, and $254,000 in 2019. These numbers totally reflect where I was. What was going on in my head, and you can pinpoint the points because the bulk of that $18,000 in 2017, that came in the last three months of the year when I started doing the confidence work.

It’s not a coincidence. That’s when I started working on turning self-doubt into self-belief. That’s when I started working on turning self-loathing into self-love. That’s when I started learning to believe I could do something my brain had previously told me I can’t.

Drop all the I have to know how to, I need to know the how, I need somebody to tell me what actions I need to take, and now all of the good stuff that I now work on every single day that you’re finding in this podcast and that my mastermind clients and my one-on-one clients work with me on.

So I ended 2018 at $103,000 and that alone was huge. I mean, six figures in one year. That is the dream of all the life coaches, right? That happened in my sixth year as a coach. My third year as a full-time certified coach. So let’s now dive into how I created two and a half times that much just in 2019.

I ended the year at $254,000 as of December 31st of 2019. Here’s what I learned this past year, and how I used the five steps to creating self-confidence to create a quarter of a million dollars in one year. Alright, are we ready? Let’s dive in.

So first off, belief, my friends. You know it’s believing on purpose, right? Because let me tell you where I was when I started the year. I had one mentor telling me to shoot for 100K again, but this time with a smoother path. A more methodical, replicatable, systematic way of creating the same thing I had created the year before.

But I had another mentor who said, “Well, obviously if you made 103K last year, you can totally get 200K this year, right? So you should totally go for $300,000.” Just for the fun of it. I mean, why the fuck not? I actually can’t remember exactly the word she used, but that was totally the energy with which she coached me.

Go for it, it’s going to be fun, go out, drop all the rules. What would you create if there were no rules, Amy? Go do that thing. That like, fire in the belly, inspirational kind of shoot for the stars. So here’s what I did. I quietly set a goal of like, okay, my do goal is $200,000 and my BHAG, my impossible goal, we’ll make that one $250,000.

I played around with the numbers a little bit because I was pretty sure I could hit $200,000 and I was pretty sure I was not going to hit $250,000. I was going to have to fail really, really, really hard to hit that $250,000. So that became that BHAG, that impossible goal whereas I kind of was holding onto the $200,000 as the yeah, I’m pretty sure I can do that.

But here’s the thing; from January to the end of September, so nine months of 2019, I was at $106,000. Don’t get me wrong. I was crazy excited to have hit six figures in nine months instead of the 12 months. But with $106,000 in the bank in nine months, that $250,000 by December 31st, that was definitely feeling impossible, right?

And here is where step number one is so stinking important. We set our intentional beliefs that we can create the result that we want, we believe them on purpose, we make it our job to believe them so damn hard, and then we have to let go of them to have to happen by a certain time. And without losing the belief that it’s going to happen.

I never lost sight that I am a coach who makes $250,000. I totally had to let go of it happening by December 31st. So in September when I saw where I was, I didn’t drop my belief that it was going to happen, but I disengaged. I detached myself from the insistence that it had to happen by December 31st.

Because when I start thinking I have to hit it, I feel crazy anxious and scattered, and my actions in those moments where I was – when I got that kind of panicky energy, I had erratic actions and no clear thought and no clear plan. But when I let go of the need for it to have to be there by 12/31, instead just focused on of course I’m a $250,000 coach. I calmed the fuck down.

So think of it this way; if you’re currently making $10,000 and your goal is $100,000, are you going to see $83,000 as a fail? No. You’re totally a $100,000 coach. Period. So it’s just going to take another month or two for the actual evidence to hit the bank. It’s just logistics.

So you don’t have to drop the belief just because the results aren’t quite there. I believed I could create that money. I practiced and thought I am a coach who makes $250,000 a year. I am a CEO of my business. I have my own back. I talk a lot about a belief meter. It’s like a speedometer with zero belief on one end and 100% of belief on the other, and that needle kind of goes back and forth.

I could check in daily with my belief and I could see it moving back and forth on that belief meter, and always purposely bringing myself back to as close to 100% belief as I could by practicing sitting in belief. All that work that we did in episode two, right?

That, my friends, is believing on purpose. I did not stop believing that $250,000 could happen when I was only at $100,000 at the end of September. Even though I had no idea how I was going to make $150,000 in three months. Remember, it’s an impossible goal. It’s a BHAG. The fact that you’re going to fail at it and probably not make it is part of the deal. You don’t have to change your belief that you are that coach.

And when you release yourself from the outcome having to happen, guess what, it’s actually much more likely to happen. And on September too, can we talk about embracing discomfort? I want to make it really clear to anyone who thinks that learning to create confidence means never feeling uncomfortable again, um, no. I was uncomfortable the entire damn year, especially those last three months.

They don’t call it barf club for no reason. This month of October, holy cow, the sitting in the discomfort. And knowing, I kept having this thought that there’s too much to do and not enough time. And rather than push it away or try to positive think my way out of it, I just sat in the discomfort of that thought for two solid weeks without trying to fix it, and really just owning it and learning that I could still make forward progress, even while I felt the discomfort of it.

And that week that I sold my mastermind, mid-December, I mean, I lived discomfort. I breathed it. I was it. The thought, “I’m not good at selling this,” just kept coming up and rather than push it away or try to positive think that one, I just allowed it to be there. Like every moment, it just sat there by me. It just sat next to me. I allowed it to be there and I just kept going.

Here’s the thing; it’s totally okay that I was uncomfortable because that didn’t mean that anything was going wrong, and in fact, it was the opposite. It meant I was doing the most amazing things. It meant I was killing it and I was showing up at a level I did not the year before, and I could totally handle it all.

Because confidence is not knowing everything is going to be a winner. It’s knowing you can handle whatever comes your way. I had no idea how I was going to make $150,000 in three months and that’s okay. There’s no way to circumvent the need to feel and embrace discomfort on your way to signing clients in your big coaching business dreams. And it’s all good because learning how to feel discomfort, that’s just a skill that we learn around here, right?

So number three, I had to own my CEO energy. That first half of the year, I’ll be completely honest. I was totally depending on my coaching mentors to tell me what to do. What direction do they think I should take? What would they do here? It was so disempowering, right? I gave them all my power to decide what decisions to make for my business.

I mean, yes, I was in a mentorship on how to build a replicable, scalable $100,000 business. And then what I did was I totally abdicated responsibility for it all to them to tell me what to do, and that never works because it is so disempowering. There’s no power in they know what to do and I don’t. I am the student and I need to be teacher’s pet, I need to be the best student in the class, as opposed to I am the student who is here to learn what my mentors know, but I am the CEO of my business.

And remembering that my best mentor is still future me. Future you, that future version of you who has already created the big, hairy, audacious goal. Remember her? I had to get back in touch with future Amy. That is where the coach I worked with over the summer, Susan Hyatt, she was such a huge help to me because she reminded me that the only person whose opinion matters is mine.

That there are no rules and no one else knows what is best for my business but me. It also was a great reminder that we have to revisit our future selves. I had created 100K future Amy, but I had not created a 200K future Amy. When I set that goal, I didn’t set the future version of me who has that goal.

$100,000 Amy and quarter of a million-dollar Amy, those are two different women. Future you, it’s not one and done work. As you evolve, so will she. Never hesitate to revisit her on a regular basis and see if she’s grown. She knows things and she learns things, so stay in touch with her because she’s going to grow as you grow.

Alright, so number four, having your own back. This is just never going to be a thing that you get to let go. I made mistakes. I made big mistakes. I made mistakes other people know about. Public mistakes. I had two clients flat out fire me. And one client who resigned with me for a second coaching package, only to back out a couple of weeks later.

This means that I refunded over $15,000. And I had to also not beat myself up about not being as far ahead as I wanted to. When you’re not even halfway to your goal at nine months in, your brain is going to tell you some shit. I’m going to tell you that right now. They’re going to tell you why it’s never going to work, why everything that you’re doing is wrong.

I mean, of course it is. That’s how our brains are designed, right? You do not have to make it mean anything, that you don’t know what you’re doing or that you suck when your brain is telling you all these things. You don’t have to make it mean anything when your brain tells you those things. You also don’t have to walk around in that shame blanket when you aren’t halfway there and nine months in. All of that is optional. Have your own back, my friends.

And then number five, so I have say that in this experience, I would put – if I were to rank the five steps to creating self-confidence and what I relied on the most, I would say number five actually came in second. So the not letting go of the belief was the biggest thing, but knowing that I could reset at any time was a very close second on the most important things that I had to keep coming back to.

Because based on the first nine months of my year, I was not going to hit $200,000, much less $250,000. I mean, you just look at the math. If I were to give that math to someone else, maybe who wasn’t a life coach who didn’t know anything about these five steps, they’d be like, yeah, totally not going to happen on the trajectory that you’re at. You’re probably going to come in at $125,000 maybe, maybe $130,000.

So my ability to evaluate what was working and what was not working was critical. It was so important here. It was not working for me to keep asking my 100K mentors what I should be doing. I had to test new copy and new ads over and over again and then evaluate all of those. I had to test new concepts and see if these concepts resonated with people and then if they didn’t resonate with people, my willingness to let them go and try something else.

New concepts, new copy, new phrasing of things. I had to be willing to continuously put things out and see, do people resonate with what I’m saying? I had to test out new pricing and I had to test out new programs to see, is this somebody wants? I had to be willing to put ideas out there that I wasn’t sure I was going to run with, and then evaluate the response that I got and continuously improve how I talked about them.

Continually evaluating. What’s working and what’s not working. My ability to pause and assess when my belief meter was dropping low, when I needed to bring it back and I needed to regroup and I needed to remember future Amy and sit in the belief of her and her belief, that ability to hit that reset button and recalibrate at every time. I had to do that continuously throughout the year while purposefully believing so hard that I could still do it, even when the results nine months in were telling me otherwise.

So my friends, your work this week, what was your goal for this year? Are you willing to commit to it no matter what? Are you willing to bring yourself back to belief even though your belief is going to wane? Are you willing to keep believing it’s going to happen when you’re nine months in and only halfway there? Are you willing to allow discomfort to walk by your side as you do all of it?

Are you willing to stop asking others what you should do and trust yourself and future you that you can and you are willing to figure this out? Are you willing to love yourself even at your worst, when you make mistakes, when clients fire you? And are you willing to keep evaluating, keep hitting that reset button and make adaptations and adjustments along the way?

Because that is honestly your work at the level you’re at now and at every level ahead of you. Being able to look back at this year, I have to tell you, I’m so proud of what I created, but I know that without those five steps and my ability to continuously practice them, it would have been so much harder to get there. And now the level of confidence that I have, being able to see what I was able to create and what was possible for myself, even when the results were telling me it ain’t going to happen, I didn’t have to believe that.

I kept utilizing those five steps, I kept being able to show up for myself every day, and if I can do this, you can too. And I think it’s really important to realize that there’s nothing special about me. I mean, yes, I am a magical amazing unicorn. I’m fabulous and all of that. Aren’t we all? And yet not at all, right?

Like yes, we’re amazing individual human beings but there’s really nothing in me that doesn’t exist in you. I promise you that. So my friends, let’s go make those big, hairy, audacious goals a reality this year. I am right here alongside you, doing the work myself. I can’t wait to share with you at the end of 2020 what I’ve created. But you’re going to be with me the entire ride and learning with me the entire way. I invite you to do the same for yourself. Alright my friends, see you next week.

Hey friends, to celebrate the launch of this show, I am giving away some serious fabulousness. Four lucky listeners will win a $50 gift card to Amazon, while one lucky listener will win a free Apple watch. No joke. A series four 40-millimeter gold stainless steel with Milanese loop. Just like the one I wear. I love it.

And those are some seriously awesome goods to five lucky listeners who subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Of course, I hope you love the show, but it does not have to be a five-star review. Because I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides tons of value.

So go visit www.amylatta.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. Thanks friends.

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at www.amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.