Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2016. Earnings of 5,000 to 20,000 dollars a month (average 10,000) are as reported by Business Insider in 2016, and Jones’s business may have changed since.
In the summer of 2013, Sarah Jones finished her training as a coach. A year later, she decided to set up her own company in San Francisco, called Introverted Alpha, where she specialised in helping introverted men with dating, that is, getting these men to attract and seduce women naturally.
According to Business Insider, Sarah Jones earns between 5,000 and 20,000 dollars a month, with an average of 10,000 dollars a month.
Most of her clients are men with a good social standing who are shy when it comes to meeting a woman and sparking her interest.
Now that advice and the word “coach” are so fashionable, specialising in a specific area can, as in other branches of business, make it more “work” to land your first clients, but more profitable in the medium and long term if you manage to make a name for yourself.
See also: Amy Andersen: how to build a million-dollar business around offline dating
For people who want to develop their own business or career, especially in consulting or coaching, Jones has the following advice. In her view, you will need two fundamental things:
- First, gain confidence in your ability to help people. This isn’t just about creating the perception of confidence, but about believing in yourself and in your ability to help others.
Obvious as it may seem, the truth is that if you’re not convinced of your own ability to help, you will feel a lack of integrity when you are selling to your clients.
- The second thing you need is “business skills”. You can be very good at what you do but, as we’ve said before, you’re going to have to learn about sales and other soft skills in the business world.
In this case, focusing on coaches, the product is precisely you. Clients may buy your method or your techniques, but ultimately they are buying you as a professional.
So you need to make sure you acquire the skills you need to be able to help people, and then open your mind to learning from people who have succeeded in business, the people you admire and respect. You can have the best product or be the best in your field, but if you don’t know how to sell yourself, you really have next to nothing.
Finally, in business we need three things: a product, a market, and the ability to bring that product to market.
To that end, it’s worth reading an article we published a while ago, in which Tony Robbins talked about how hard it is for entrepreneurs to define what they do or what their business really sells.
Because when asked “What does Starbucks really sell?”, the answer is not “coffee” or those muffins with strange names. If Starbucks sold that, it would have gone bust by now.
Featured image: Daderot, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
