Why Your Sports Coaching Business Isn't Profitable (And How to Fix It)

Coach, what's going on? It's Ben Neighbors. In today's video, I'm going to answer a direct question that I got on Instagram from a private basketball trainer that sent me this message. He said, Hey Ben, I'm booked with 40 plus private clients and I'm still not making real money. What am I doing wrong? Now I'm going to be very blunt in this video because a lot of coaches that have like 40 to 60 or even 40 to 70 clients are not doing this as a full-time income. They have really hit or miss types of months in their business. And so what I want to do here is I want to just be very direct and show you what the issue is and how to fix it. All right. So anytime someone tells me they have like 40 plus clients and they're still not making real money, I always look at first, how much are they charging? Because if this guy was a client of mine, he would be charging probably between like 2,000 for six months of training up to like 5,000 or 7,000 for 12 months of training. So if you charge like 2K, let me just use this as an example. If you charge $2,000 and you have 30 clients, that's less, that's 10 less than 40. That's $60,000 every six months, as long as you have 30 clients in your program that have paid $2,000 for six months training. So when I look at that, that's a six figure per year business, as long as you have 30 clients that are paying 2K every six months. So if we even go higher than that, if you have 40 clients that are paying 2K every six months, that's $80,000. That's $160,000 of revenue in your business. So most of the time when coaches tell me like, Hey, I'm not making real money. I have like 40 to 60 clients. The first thing I always look at is the money. Like how much are they actually charging? 99% of the time, I see that coaches are charging way too little. And the only way they can make more money is if they run more sessions and get more kids. So that's the first problem. The way you fix that is you repackage and you resell how you do what you do. Like you sell an actual program. You are not just selling your time. And that's why coaches that I work with are able to sell packages of like 2,000 up to, at this point, the highest package that I've ever seen in this industry is $40,000. And again, that's like an elite type of coach who has 20 plus years of experience. And I'm not saying you're going to do that, but I am saying that that is possible. So you got to be charging more than what you're at right now if you have 40 clients and you're not making a living. So that's just straight up the first thing. The second thing is the model. Most of the time when coaches tell me they have 40 or 50 clients, I know that these clients are not on a contract. I know that these clients are not paying monthly or they are not paying upfront. I know that these clients aren't even showing up every week. And 99% of the time, you only get paid when they show up. So the model is broken if you run your business that way. And it's not going to matter to me if you have 40 clients or 200 clients. I've talked to coaches that have literally 250 clients. They tell me they have 250 clients and they're making like $20,000 a month. There's coaches that I work with right now that have a hundred clients that are making like 30, $40,000 per month. So the model is typically broken. So the way that you fix it is you treat this like a real business. You don't treat it like this thing where it's like, I'm free this week on this day and this day, and I'm going to text everyone and see when they want to come train with me. And then I'm going to make money when someone shows up to the session. If that's the case, you're going to be broke even if you have a hundred clients, because you don't have a consistent model that really protects you and the business. So that's the second thing. Now, the third thing, this is, in my opinion, the biggest difference maker if you can nail down the first two. So if you can nail down the pricing and you don't nail down the model, the third is the leverage that you have with communication. And I'm not talking about how you text clients and how you email clients. I'm talking about how you actually coach your clients. Because right now, if you're running like 40 one-on-one sessions per week, I mean, if you do that Monday through Friday, that's like eight sessions per day. Most 20 to 35 or 25 to 50-year-old guys or girls, you're not going to have the energy to sustain that long-term. What happens is you get so into the weeds of what you're doing and you think that's the best way of doing it, and you haven't given yourself time to back away from what you're doing to evaluate, how is this actually going? How much energy do I have? Could I change the model? And if I step up my communication in my training sessions, I'm going to be able to have more leverage. So let me give you this example. I can take someone that has 40-plus clients, let's just say 40 clients, and they're doing everything one-on-one. And within 60 days, we could change the whole business to where all of the clients are doing group training. And you could have groups of six. And if you do the math, that would be literally seven groups. So you could go from 40 sessions per week to seven sessions per week if you're training groups of six. You could train groups of 10. And you can go higher and higher on that scale. It comes down to your level of communication. So if your communication is really good, you have way more leverage in this business versus someone who just gets stuck with one-on-one training. And I'm not saying one-on-one training is bad. I started with that model at the very beginning, and I ran that into the ground. I ran it as hard as I possibly could. I even hired other coaches who ran that model. But the second we turned on group training, it was like our calendar got collapsed. It's like you have way more energy at your sessions, way easier to manage too with the business because everyone's funneling into separate groups that you have, set days, set times. At the end of the day, the leverage comes from how good you are at communicating, how good you are at teaching, how good you are at showing in your session. And that's where you can go from making let's say you make $100 per hour for one-on-one training. Well, if you do that, you can make $500 or even $1,000 per hour with group training, camps, clinics, because you're training way more kids in a smaller amount of time. And what I've seen 100% of the time with the coaches that I work with that go from one-on-one to groups or small groups to larger groups, they have way more energy. They have way more time to market themselves because they're not day-to-day just training kids all day long. And it's just easier for them to grow their business. And on the financial side, they're not selling individual stuff anymore. They're selling a six or a 12 month type of program that parents are committing to. And the key thing I want you to look at is over six months, if you can price what you have between $1,500 and $3,000 for your price for six months, you're in a really good spot if you can get up to 40 clients. You have more than a six-figure per year business if you can land on numbers in between that. If you don't, then you're kind of trapped with the price. And the only way to really make more money if you're trapped with price is if you take on more clients. That's not the ideal situation to put yourself in if you're the business owner. And it's going to be hard too to scale your business with assistant coaches if you have that model. So again, got to look at your price. That has to be fixed. Got to look at the model. How is that set up? Private training or group training? And again, you find all of the leverage when you become a better communicator with coaching. And that's where you can train way more kids per hour. You can go from eight sessions per day to one session per day. And you can honestly be making more money with that model. So now if you are watching this and you're like, Hey, I want to put that together. I don't want you to just take my word for it, but I'd want you to do a couple of things. First, go on my YouTube channel, click on playlist and look at the client case study videos that I have, the interviews that I have. You'll see examples of coaches that have hundreds of customers and it's all group training. You'll see examples from people that have like 50 clients. They have a profitable, really profitable six figure per year business. So it's not going to come down to you needing a million clients. You need the right clients, the ones that take you serious, the ones that are committed and invested into your program. And if you are watching this and you want to learn more, go watch more of my YouTube videos, go look at my playlist, look at the proof that I already have there. And if you're seriously interested in getting my one-on-one help, this is all I do. So all you do is you go down, you can book a call with me. I'll text you. I'll ask you some questions and see if you're a good fit. I'll tell you everything you need to know about my program before you even take a call with me. And at that point, when we chat, I'm going to learn more about your business, look at your situation and see if you're a good candidate to work with me. I'm very picky with who I work with. I don't take on every single coach. I typically work with like 20 to 30 coaches, one-on-one per year. And that's it. So you're want more of my personal help, go book the call with me. It's free. You have nothing to lose.