The Dark Side of “Personal Coaching” Part 1

I’m seeing more and more "personal coaching" offers in the internet marketing arena and most of the deals I’m seeing are bad for both parties involved.

Most coaching offers I see are included with the purchase of some product where the seller is advertising coaching as a bonus with purchase of the main product. Sometimes this is in the outright form of "personal coaching". Other times there may be language such as, "I will be personally answer your questions about making money online."

Look, the "big guns" charge thousands of dollars per month. If I were to offer coaching I would do the same as well. Why? Simple math…my business generates hundreds of thousands of dollars so why should I take MY valuable time to coach YOU simply because you spent $30 with me?

It doesn’t make sense.

A lot of these sellers have good intentions, they really do. Some of them offer really effective support to their customers, but how long can it last? The problem is for $30 (or$50 or even $100) how financially feasible is it for you to offer coaching to potentially hundreds of customers?

Most likely what will happen is that at first you will very efficiently care for and coach your customers. Over time as more and more customers pile in you will hit a breaking point where there is simply not enough time in the day to run your business AND coach existing customers.

All businesses should be scalable, if selling 10 ebooks a day makes you $300 per day then you should want to sell 100 ebooks a day for $3,000 per day. But 100 ebooks per day means 36,500 customers that will want coaching.

If each customer asks one question that takes 20 minutes of the seller’s time…that’s a little over 12,000 hours of coaching time…or 507 days per year! (obviously a problem seeing as a year has 142 days LESS than that AND you need to like sleep and eat and stuff…at least those of us who are non-robots)

It’s pretty simple to see why offering coaching like this is a losing proposition. Pretty soon the "coaches" will be spending hours per day answering questions and will never be able to keep up. Their quality will suffer and customers will get angry. And really, they were promised coaching so it’s understandable. This is a recipe for disaster.

Tomorrow I will post why customers also lose with "personal coaching" and how you can boost sales by offering "coaching" without giving up all your free time and profits to do it.

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