Why More Sales Calls Won't Scale Your Coaching Business

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Are you trapped in the coaching hustle cycle? That feeling where every new client brings both excitement and dread as your calendar fills up with more sales calls, DM sessions, and delivery obligations?

This episode shatters the myth that's keeping talented coaches stuck at 5-20K months while burning themselves out completely. Gary explains why "more effort" is not the answer to sustainable growth, and breaks down a transformative framework that allows coaches to scale without sacrificing their freedom.

At the heart of this approach is a complete reimagining of your business model through three critical elements.

First, restructuring your offers away from time-intensive one-to-one work toward leveraged approaches like memberships and cohorts.

Second, shifting from exhausting outbound tactics to magnetic inbound strategies that attract ideal clients through content and email rather than endless sales calls. Finally, creating delivery mechanisms that work without your constant attention.

The distinction between achievement entrepreneurship (building to exit) versus lifestyle entrepreneurship (building for freedom now) puts everything into perspective.

By optimizing for both profit and time from the beginning, coaches can create sustainable businesses that fund their desired lifestyle without the common burnout cycle.

Ready to stop pushing harder and start scaling smarter? This episode provides the exact blueprint needed to break through income plateaus without sacrificing your wellbeing in the process.

Whether you're feeling the early signs of burnout or completely overwhelmed by your current business model, these strategies will help you reclaim control and build a coaching business that serves your life, rather than consuming it.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Podcast Break Notice

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you're learning how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. All right, so today I want to talk about actually, before I jump into that, I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, starting from next week, so there won't be any episodes. I'm taking a break from everything, pretty much, including content production. I was going to try and rush and record episodes and stuff like that, but it doesn't feel annoying to what I want to do, so I'm just going to leave this episode with you guys for a couple of weeks to think about and sit on, and I'll be back then at the start of July. So I want to talk today about why more sales calls won't scale your coaching business. So this is something that I had recent experience with as well. But if you're and I'll dive into my own perspective inside the episode but if you're a coach doing 10 to 20k a month or 5 to 20k a month, I would say, and you feel like every client you sign just adds more pressure, then this episode is for you. Okay, because I want to break a myth that keeps a lot of great coaches stuck at this level, and that is figuring out the systems for scalability. Okay, so scaling your business does not mean taking more sales calls, spending more time in the dms or hiring some random setter to pitch strangers. That's the path that burns people out, and I want to show you in this episode what actually works if you want to grow and have a life. Because here's the trap that most coaches fall into once they start making consistent money, they confuse growth with more effort. So if they think that they can get to 5k a month or 10k a month from just hustling in the DMs and selling one or two people a week and kind of keeping that going, and then usually that's what burns people out, okay, because if you end up starting to start booking 10 to 15 calls a week, messaging 50 people a day or jumping from tactic to tactic just trying to keep the cash coming in, okay and living in that reactive sort of mind frame, okay, but underneath that you end up exhausted. You end up always on and your business relies totally on manual effort, where if you don't hit your KPIs and you don't get your DM sent, your pipeline pretty quickly dries up. Okay, and then you end up secretly wondering why does this still feel like a job? Or, even worse, like a job would even give you a certain amount of relief once you clock off every day. But when you're running your own business and it's not going well, I think it's even worse than a job, to be honest, in my opinion. So if that's you, it's not your fault.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Okay, you were told in the model. The model that a lot of people have been traditionally doing has involved a lot of hustle, and you would think that more hustle equals more growth. Okay, but that equation breaks the moment that you want to trade in your hustle and trade in your growth for some freedom. Okay, not to trade in your growth, but trade in your hustle and have freedom and growth at the same time. So what actually? So here's what actually scales. When you want a business that grows without stealing your time and energy, okay, it's all about the business model. Okay, and the quicker you can transition to this type of model.

Speaker 1: 3:07

It's not necessarily for total beginners, because sometimes, if you're a beginner, getting scrappy in the DMs and just hustling people is the way to get started. And I found myself back there recently enough, but very quickly. What happened was, once I started to sign two or three clients immediately, I ran out of time to be hustling in the DMs and to be sending connection requests and to do all those things that need to be done in order to keep that manual pipeline going. It certainly works, but it does not scale Okay. So there's two ways to fix that problem is either to hire an appointment setter, or even possibly a closer, to deliver clients to your calendar or even into your program. Both of those people need to be paid and both of those people need to be managed. Okay.

Speaker 1: 3:46

So in my opinion, that's not the best way to scale a coaching business, particularly because you'll still have your client delivery, you'll still have to manage the people who are doing the acquisition and you'll still have all of your other admin work to do as well. So what you wanna do is try and build a business that actually aligns with your time and your energy, and the way to do that is to have the correct model. Now, in my opinion, the best way to describe the model that I would recommend that you run would be around three different things your offer, your acquisition and your delivery. So, in terms of your offer, I always prefer to create offers, and not always the case, but most of the time I will create offers that don't involve a one-to-one aspect, certainly not as my core offer, as my base offer. So what you want to do is come up with things, maybe like a cohort, or maybe it's a membership where you have a group call once a week, or a combination of both of those things. So a membership with a group support, or it's a cohort where you give people your time in a group setting on a one-to-many basis for a certain amount of weeks and then the cohort ends.

Speaker 1: 4:59

So, generally, the kind of the core offers that I've been seeing work well recently over the last certain year or two, as things change a lot in the industry has been a membership model with some videos but, most importantly, a one-to-many coaching call at least once per week. Another program that I'm actually a member of now, which is really cool, which seems to be like an evolution on this, is actually to build in AI tools to remove the need to watch a lot of videos and you can just train yourself and, um, you can just train yourself and get feedback from the coach through an AI and platform without actually having to get on the calls and actually having to watch any videos, okay. So that's, that's kind of a cool thing that I'm also looking at now I don't think I'm quite ready for that, but that kind of kind of model where it's one-to-many for your time. Your time is basically leveraged, okay, you're not spending one-to-one time with people and your energy and your time is spread across these people. Now, having said that, you still can offer one-to-one time if these people align, and these people align with what you want to do energetically, but also align with you know how much money they can afford to pay you. Okay. So you may still offer one-to-ones, but that will be a higher tier offer as part of your offer stack, okay. So, generally, I find that is a more scalable model than every single person who becomes a client gets a one-to-one call every single week. Okay, because it can just burn you out.

Speaker 1: 6:23

So the second thing, the second part of the model, then, after your offer, is going to be your acquisition strategy, okay. So, if you have to constantly do outbound. If you have to call, call, call email, okay. Those things are a very high energetic expenditure. What you generally wanna do in terms of your acquisition is to have people come to you based on your magnetism of your content and your messaging okay. So if you are clear on your customer avatar, you're clear on the offer that you want to sell to people and you're clear on the transformation that you offer, putting out content that resonates with your ideal client, that generates an engagement, that opens up opportunities for you to start conversations, is the way to go about it. Okay. Inbound is always better than outbound and, in my opinion, the top way of doing this is through email, okay.

Speaker 1: 7:14

So my recommendation for how you would acquire clients and this is the strategy I'm going to be doing when I get back from my vacation it's going to be produce my magnetic messaging content on LinkedIn, get people to engage, and when people do engage, I'm going to open up a conversation with them in the DMs. Dms are not necessarily a problem, but if people do engage, I think outbound DMs and hustling people is a problem, and then I'm gonna send them my offer without having a sales call, okay. So when we create content that gets people to engage and we can reach out to them and we can open up a conversation, but without ever having to have a sales call with them. We can just close them in the DMs. The other way I'm going to be using my content is to each call to action in the content not every time, but most of the time is going to direct to my lead magnet, which will get people to my email list.

Speaker 1: 8:03

So the most scalable client acquisition strategies that I've found is through email, because you don't need to run sales calls, you don't need to constantly send people messages. You just need to get people to engage with your emails, whether that's a reply you click on a link or joining a wait list or just simply buying. So the acquisition strategies that I've tried that aren't scalable are outbound DMs and they are called email. Okay, called email certainly probably is scalable, but it's not necessarily doesn't work too well for selling coaching, in my opinion, because people don't have a connection with your content and also sales calls okay. So outbound DMs called email, and sales calls are not things I'm going to be doing when I return and I haven't been doing for a long time. What I am doing is magnetic messaging content, a Google Doc offer which I'll talk about in a second and no sales calls.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Okay, and focusing on email. Okay. So after the offer and acquisition, let's talk about your mechanism. Okay, so what I'm talking about here is like a lot of people have their offer in their head. Okay, but what you generally wanna do in order to get clear on exactly what your offer is and who it's for, is to put it together into a Google Doc. Now, a lot of people do sales calls as an excuse or as a band-aid for having an unclear offer or having not made it clear why their offer is valuable, what's the path the person is going to be taking on and why they need to act now. Okay, so I recommend having your offer on a Google Doc and skipping the sales calls.

Speaker 1: 9:45

Okay, so, as I mentioned there on my previous my client acquisition strategy, my sales mechanism is going to be via Google Doc and or you can do a launch. Especially if you're running something like a cohort is to do like a launch with your email list, where you write a bunch of emails essentially teasing something, and you open the doors to your new cohort and then you close your send a lot of emails towards the end and then close the doors. Okay, now you might be wondering how do I run a cohort like? The thing about your offers and your mechanisms, guys, is you're always going to be probably selling something similar. You're going to be I'm always going to be helping someone to grow their business okay, grow their coaching business, or help them with their email, but there's always different sub angles and sub steps that can be part of your offer.

Speaker 1: 10:27

Okay, so what you can do is you can run a container on, like, for example. I can run a container or a cohort on just on list growth, okay, like, transferring your list from your social media audience, or just on email writing, or just on offer creation. Of course, my entire help that I offer would cover everything, but you can run like a cohort or even a workshop on some of these smaller pieces of the puzzle and you can launch them to your email list, okay. So if you don't have a scalable offer, scalable client acquisition and a scalable delivery mechanism, your business stays in hustle mode. Okay, and that's why most coaches plateau at five, 10, even 15 K a month. You're just capped by your own time, okay. So the moment things shift for shifted for me and for clients that I work with is when you stopped optimizing for more sales activity and started optimizing, and started and started optimizing systems and building systems that worked without you chasing people every day, and those are the types of systems that I help to build inside scalable coaches.

Speaker 1: 11:25

It's about designing your business around your freedom, not just your income. Okay, because so many, so much of my life, I kind of realized that, like I'm not really chasing money like I've launched these launch businesses, and I want of realized that, like I'm not really chasing money Like I've launched these launch businesses and want to work online, not because I want to have a Lamborghini, it's because I want to have the freedom to work when I want, where I want, how I want, and still have money in the bank and still go to a restaurant and be able to buy something without looking at the menu too much, okay. So like, if you, if that's you, if you there's two types of entrepreneurs. Very quick point before we finish up there's an achievement entrepreneur and there's a lifestyle entrepreneur Okay.

Speaker 1: 11:58

So if you're an achievement entrepreneur, you want to build it, you want to build a startup, you want to build a business that can be. You want to hustle for six, seven, eight, nine years and you want to sell the business at a big exit and you're't able to grow it any bigger and we never really got that big exit. I wouldn't say it was a waste of time. Obviously it led to a lot of other businesses, but we didn't. It's a risky strategy. Basically is what I'm trying to say, because you sacrifice a lot in the beginning in terms of salary, in terms of stress and health, in order to get the business off the ground, and if you pick the right business and you get your timing right with the market, you can sell it okay and you can get a big return. If you pick the wrong business or you don't time the market correctly, no matter how hard you work, you may never get that big exit. Okay.

Speaker 1: 12:43

Now, a lifestyle entrepreneur is a person who optimizes for profit and time. So they launch a business that fits in with their lifestyle and they sign up a certain amount of clients and get to a certain level of income that they want and they build systems and then they use that business to make profit from the beginning and throughout the time they run the business and then you can use that money to fund your lifestyle and also, if you're smart enough to invest in and get rich, get wealthy that way. So if you're at the point where you're making some money but it doesn't feel sustainable, I want this episode to shift that. So if you're at the point where you're making some money but it doesn't feel sustainable, I want this episode to shift that. Okay. So if you'd like to join me in my school community, as always, I'll put the link below and I'll go deeper into building scalable client acquisition offers and systems.

Speaker 1: 13:25

Or if you'd like to work with me directly, you can just send me an email, gary at garyredmondnet, with the word podcast, and I'll show you how we can work together. So either work together, so either way, stop thinking that the answer is more effort. Okay, you don't need to push harder, you just need to scale smarter. So that's it for this week, guys. I'll see you in the next episode in a couple of weeks. Um, I'm going away and hopefully gonna have a nice vacation and I will leave this with you for the next couple of weeks and I'll see you in july. So hope you have a good time. Hope you have a good week. Two weeks rest of your june and I will see you when I get back.