I’ve been a coach and consultant now for 8 years. It’s the longest consistent job I’ve ever had in my life. My business is closing in on 8 figures in annual revenue and I have no plans of stopping there. My entire career, I’ve focused on hiring other coaches and consultants who have been down the road I’m traveling and are able to advise me from first hand experience. 

I’m not gonna lie, hitting my first million in 12 months was the hardest. It took me 6 years. While I crushed 6 figures my first year in business, it took a lot of pivoting and adapting to hit 7 figures. After all, to go from 6 to 7, you must put in 10X the revenue. Scaling a business is no joke. The delicate balance of hiring operations to balance out sales and marketing is not easy. Although you can hire people who’ve been there and done that to tell you how, you still must do the work.

My first coach was Frank Kern. He’s most famous for being the first guy to sell $1M in digital products in less than 24 hours. What he did was basically set the 4 minute mile for the internet marketing industry. I knew he had the answers on how I could follow in his footsteps so I hired him and have been a client for 7 years now. He’s helped me leverage effective advertising strategies to hit multi 7 figures in annual sales in my business. 

Like I said, that first million dollar year was tough, but once I hit that mark, hitting the 2 and 4 million per year mark was actually pretty easy. You see, I bootstrapped my coaching business from $25 to the multi-million dollar operation it is today. 

I set goals to hit but never limitations. What I mean by that, is when I hit my goals, I just set even bigger goals. I never plan on hitting a certain goal and just staying there happy. I refuse to put limits on my life or my business. 

My friend and fellow consultant Ali Awad, who’s a lawyer out of Atlanta Georgia has taken his business from 5 figures a year to multi 6 figure days, has also had to find that balance. For him, it’s been the right mix of new clients and staff to support them. Not just paralegals either, he has an amazing network of doctors, referrals partners and financial backers to help him take on clients cases on contingency. In less than 24 months he’s scaled from 5 figure years to 6 figure days. 

Another friend of mine Ed Mylett has taken his financial advising business from scratch, to having a network of over $400M. He has no debt and pretty much lives the dream life. He started out in the financial world driving a kit car that looked like a Mercedes Benz. Now he owns multiple jets and pretty much every exotic car you can imagine. He scaled from nothing to 9 figures. 

So what separates these seemingly normal folks who make it big time, from the coaches we see faking success on social media but struggling in real life? 

First they didn’t give up. They didn’t say “well, the money I’m making right now is my limit and I’m happy.” Instead they believed the sky is the limit and that they deserved everything they worked for. Same goes for me, I kept working despite the odds, despite the tough times and despite the haters. 

We coaches and consultants endure a lot of criticism. Matter of fact, the #1 thing we hear people say is “those who can’t, coach” which is not always the case. To me, I think that we are called to be coaches. I know Frank, Ali, Ed and I could go sell roofs, real estate, mortgages or anything else and be financially successful, but we chose to use our experience and intelligence to help others while we work a traditional job too. I can speak for all 3 of us when I say it feels better when our clients win than we win.

So what’s it take to make the scale from 6-9 figures?

First, you must not grow too fast. If you sprout up overnight and take on more clients than you can service, you will be ran out of business. You must add support staff that can handle the back end and service to your clients. You may not have to advice or coach them direct, you but definitely need to hire people who can fill the holes you don’t have time to fill. 

Second, you must learn to delegate. You can’t do it all. Even Tony Robbins doesn’t coach all his clients. He hires coaches to coach his clients so he can focus on what he does best, live events. You need to learn to hire and manager a sales team, marketing department and an operations staff. Most coaches try to run their entire operation all by themselves and that’s a sure formula to be overworked and underpaid. Learn to hire well and hire quick so you can keep the balance of clients to staff scaling properly. 

Third, never be satisfied. Every year write down new, huge, goals that require you to level up and become the person that’s bold enough to hit the goals you set for yourself. Once you nail one goal, set another one and scale to it accordingly. Your job is not to hit a dollar amount and get comfortable, it’s to keep raising the bar higher and higher. 

Fourth, prepare for setbacks but work like they will never happen. Most businesses that crush 7, 8 and 9 figures annually eventually get some drama thrown their way. Things like large tax bills, audits, haters, upset clients and bad reviews. It’s just a part of being big time and having a broad range of clients. You can’t make everyone happy and you can’t always have good days. Prepare and work like a setback is around every corner but do everything you can to avoid one. 

If you’re consistently making the same number of sales every year, over and over and again and you’re stuck, take the above advice and press forward harder than before. You’re going to have to hire, you can’t do it all alone forever. 

In the coaching world, the sky is the limit and we all know that the sky never ends, it just turns into outer space. So push every day like you wan to win and you eventually will. None of the people I mentioned in this article scaled past 7 figures by themselves, they set goals and hired people who could help those goals become a reality. The blueprint is right here, all you have to do is follow it.