 Someone asked me what I think about paying $20,000 a year, US dollars a year for business coaching. Again, would you pay $20,000 US dollars per year for business coaching? I would be interested to see what you write below. You don't have to comment below if you don't want to. If you say yes, you'll probably get a bunch of spammers coming after you or legit business coaches who want to charge you $20,000 or $10,000 a year. And so here's my thought. I mean, you might expect that I would immediately say, no, you should not pay so much money. They're scamming you or something like that. But I don't think that's true. There are situations where, you know, people who, for example, already have an established business and I don't know, someone who makes a million dollars a year, let's say, and they're quite an established stable business and they want to expand their business in some ways or streamlining or something. And $20,000 a year for business coaching in that case is probably a good deal, especially if it is able to grow their profits by way more than that or cut their costs or streamline their work or whatever it may be. So it, of course, depends. But for the person, for most of you who are watching this, who don't make a million dollars a year, I would question the 20,000 or even $10,000 spending on business coaching or consulting or mentoring of any kind. So instead of just thinking about, okay, I've got a business coach here who wants to, he was promising me the sun, the moon and the stars to hire them to coach me. And I'm gonna be able to explode my business. And look, they tell me that they've been successful or they tell me that they've helped other people be successful. A lot of times they don't tell you the averages, they just tell you the hyped up smaller percentage of the stories. But anyway, instead of paying all this money to one person, I think it's just a better deal for you to divide up whatever budget you have for business coaching, consulting, mentoring, divide up your budget, whether it's 20,000 a year or 2000 a year or whatever it may be, divide it up and give the smaller amounts to different business coaches, you know, consultants, mentors, freelancers, trainers, teachers, et cetera. The reason is because how do you know one person is gonna save your life and save your business? This is a common, you know, like bias that a lot of us heart-based and visionary idealistic people have is we are influencable, we influence others but in many ways we're also influencable and it's easy to get sold by somebody who seems really credible, charming, persuasive and is promising you a lot to say, well, I'm just gonna give thousands of dollars to this person because they are supposed to get me to, but like, how do you know that one person is really the best hit for you? You don't until you start working with them, of course, then you know, right? So instead of paying a lot of money to one person, why don't you take the money you have or you're willing to spend? If you're already willing to spend a bunch of money on one person, stop, stop and then say, well, if I'm willing to spend 2000 or 5000 on this one person, why don't I just divide that up by five and give it to five business coaches so I can see what it's like. And guess what, I'm not the type of business coach to say, you must only listen to my strategies and everyone else is wrong. Now, sometimes in my videos, I know that I do critique other strategies but I also, hopefully I mentioned this enough, I love rebels and if you ever want to rebel against something I teach and try something that I don't say, I celebrate that if it works for you, if it's authentic to you. Like even in my own client group programs, I have clients and students who use different strategies than what I teach and sometimes even strategies that I critique but if they find it empowering for them and actually effective for their business, who am I to say that that's not right for them? Of course it's right for them. They have to decide that. So I'm just, please, please don't give all this money to any one person but divide it up, give it to five or seven different business coaches slash mentors so that you can really experience how each person guides you and what each person's structure is like because chances are the person who is really persuasive and charming, there's a trade-off, right? They spend their energies setting up marketing systems to be persuasive, charming and authoritative looking and all that energy spent with all that stuff means it's energy spent taken away from creating better client structures and accountability for their clients and better material for their clients, better education and modules and things like that. So I spend, I think I spend relatively little time on marketing energy wise. I mean, these videos are not edited, I kind of show up and I have some thoughts and I just, it's like takes me an hour a week to do this. And then I spend a lot of time on my client program structures and trying to make things better. So I don't know, I just think that it's smarter to split the money and try a bunch of different, like I said, especially ones whose marketing doesn't look great but you've heard good things, right? Like sometimes, like I said, like if you look at my marketing, you don't think I'm successful. Most people don't realize once they come to my programs, wow, God, he has a lot of people and people like love his program. It's like, you can't tell from the outside because I'm, I have a good word of mouth because I believe I have good programs. So you have to pay attention to, again, be doubtful, the more charming and persuasive a business coach or mentor is, the more you have to understand that they spend a lot of energy doing that. And so their energy is taken away from, like I said, client development. I mean, client support and client progress, you know, structuring their progress, et cetera. So, you know, divide your money, give it to people, spend it on people who you've heard good things from but even if they're marketing and branding is lackluster, this is important. But let me further explain what's actually, what you actually need to spend money on if you're thinking about buying some business coaching or mentoring or training, there are basically five, let me look at my notes here. There are five areas you should think about spending money on. It's not just on one business coach. I think that's not a wisest use of your money. So here are the five areas. Number one, I'll just give the five real quick and then I'll explain them more in depth. Knowledge, number one, accountability, number two. Number three is customization and troubleshooting. Number four is software for automating various business processes. And number five, outsourcing to freelancers to do certain technical or graphics or just save you some time. So instead of going, I have this chunk of money, I'm gonna hire a business coach and they can solve all my problems and you know, which is again, they're being persuasive and charming but chances are that's not the average that they're showing you. These five is what you need to spend money on, okay? So let me go ahead and explain these more. So number one, knowledge. Of course, you can find knowledge for free on YouTube, Google, you can read books, you can take really, really cheap courses on Udemy and other places. But I do believe it's a good spend of some of your money to buy specialized thoughtful courses put together by, you know, mentors that you trust that you've heard good things from. Because it'll save you dozens or hundreds of hours of trying to find the right information and it's all put into one place. So you'll save yourself dozens or hundreds of hours by buying a single course that, you know, whatever on whatever topic you're trying to learn. So I think it's a good idea. Hopefully you won't spend thousands on a course. Hundreds is okay. You know, my courses at the time this recording are $150 to $200 and I think it's reasonable for the kinds of the content that I painstakingly put together and the structure of going through it, implementing it. So knowledge is one thing that, you know, you should spend part of your money on, I do as well. Secondly is accountability. And accountability is so crucial because without human accountability, it's not as likely you're going to implement the knowledge that you have purchased or have researched. How many online courses have you bought or signed up for? How many webinars have you signed up for? And recordings that are waiting to be listened to, watched. For all of us, it's probably many. And what's the missing piece? The missing piece, there are two missing pieces. Well, that's the rest of my list here. Four missing pieces, right? Besides the knowledge, there's four other missing pieces. Accountability to actually apply, actually watch the material and apply it because otherwise there's nothing. I know the buying process is exciting. You have to understand that there's a bias that you probably have. It's fun to buy online courses for some of us, okay? It's fun. You're like, oh, I think I've got something done. You did not get anything done. You just spent some money. That's it. You have to be so aware of your mind patterns when you're buying. You're like, oh, it's so fun to buy. Oh, I'm gonna sign up for something. Nothing got done except you spent money. Now you need the accountability to say, well, let me do the hard work. It's harder than buying, right? It's harder even than watching. Watching is sometimes not that hard. It's somewhat pleasant to watch. Hopefully watch my courses, for example, or listen to them. But it's a whole other thing to go, okay, let me pause. And let me actually do what this person, this teacher is saying. Accountability helps a lot. To someone who you're gonna report back to and say, all right, yes, I watched the module one and this is what I did. This is what I tried. Okay, so that's accountability. And accountability, I'll tell you this, can be much cheaper than you would imagine. So let me give you the cheapest method for accountability. Now, I'm not talking about just asking a friend to keep you accountable because your friend, if you're not paying somebody, I mean, unless your friend is extremely reliable or very good at keeping you accountable, great, wonderful. Friend, family member, et cetera. That's great if you can find someone who is consistently going to ask you, even if you don't show up properly, they will keep asking you in a kind and loving way. So my recommendation is FocusMate. I use FocusMate several hours every single day because I need the accountability myself. I pay for FocusMate. FocusMate is cheap at the time of this recording. It's $5 a month, super cheap, super affordable. And you get on the FocusMate session, you tell somebody, listen, I have been putting off watching and implementing this course. So in this session, I'm pointing over here because I have my little cheap tablet, the cheapest tablet I could find. I bought it just to use FocusMate on. So you tell your FocusMate buddy, I'm going to finally watch lesson one and implement. I'm gonna watch lesson one, I'm gonna watch half an hour of lesson one and implement that. That's what I'm doing in this session. Please ask me about it later. And it's really helpful because you've told someone and they're gonna ask you about it and they're working on their own stuff too. So FocusMate is the cheapest accountability I think it's worth paying for, I do it myself. And then beyond that, I think you can find an accountability coach. Coach.me, it's a website, Coach.me. There's many, many websites out there now for freelancers. You can go on Fiverr to find accountability partner, accountability coach that will just charge you a few dozen dollars per session or maybe a few dozen dollars per month and just unlimited messaging with them to say, all right, listen, please ask me about this. I'm gonna try to apply the four modules this month. And that's my goal this month. Please, one module per week or whatever. So please get some accountability because it's gonna be so helpful instead of just accumulating a bunch of courses. That's not gonna be, that's you're just spending money and so accountability essential for applying courses in my opinion. That's what I need myself anyway. Third one is customization and troubleshooting because as you probably know, as you start applying your courses, you're gonna come across, well, I tried implementing this but there was a technical issue or I don't know how to apply this idea to my particular business. So it's really helpful to be able to bounce ideas with some knowledgeable person to help you shape the course to your own business, okay? So here's what I recommend. Again, instead of paying $20,000 of business coach who's supposed to supply all of this for you, which again, bad, I think not a wise budget idea, use a paid group to help with your troubleshooting and customization. Now sometimes you can get some of that in a paid course like my paid courses, $150 to $200. You can't expect a whole lot from me because I mean for $150 to $200, again, affiliates are taking part of it and then I'm left with a hundred bucks or whatever and you can't expect me to be answering your questions, a lot of your questions, maybe like one or two, right? But I try to answer quick questions in my courses but and I have my Q and A calls once a month that you can come and ask me but an ongoing group, you can join my group if you want to but there are many other groups you can join that help you to customize and troubleshoot when you're trying to apply an idea. So groups can be 50 bucks a month, $100 a month, $200 a month, but whatever you're paying, it's way cheaper than paying a single person. Like what's gonna give you better advice? One single person or a group of 50 people? A corporate 50 people have lots of smart people and they'll give you a variety of opinions that will then you can decide which is a good practice for you to self-determine among these opinions, I'm gonna choose that one and go for it. Now, the drawback again is if you get multiple opinions, you might be confused but hopefully the leader of the group or someone wise will say, well, based on what we know about you, this seems to be a better option for you, right? So customization and troubleshooting, please join some kind of group for that. If you are interested, of course, I have a group for that and in my Master Heart group, I have a forum, people ask questions, people like me and other smart people answer. And then I have three Q and A calls for the group, just for the group, every single week. Yeah, that's 12 Q and A opportunities with me every month just for the group members. You don't have to attend any of them but those opportunities are available. So yes, tons of customization, troubleshooting help in groups like mine and others. Let's see, other colleagues with groups, I recommend Caroline Leon, Caroline Leon, Caroline L-E-O-N, Caroline Leon, Kat Hargrave, marketingforhippies.com, Mark Silver, heartofbusiness.com and then there are other calls, sorry, I'm blanking on other groups that you can join but those, I interact with a lot. So sorry, if I missed somebody's group, you can comment below. So just not only my group, there's many options. Okay, so customization, troubleshooting, number three. Number four, software, software, you know, again, instead of paying all this money to a business coach, part of that money should go to paying for software. I mean, it saves you so much time, like for example, the most basic thing, booking software, right? Like booking appointments, instead of you going back and forth with clients, just have a calendar that they can choose, it's easier for the client too. Things like that, mailing list software, course delivery software, affiliate program software, CRM, way to track your clients' progress and keep track of the notes for them, things like that. You might know that the software I recommend that I use and I love and therefore recommend is Simplero. I'll put a link below this if you wanna use my affiliate link to get Simplero, it doesn't matter, but Simplero is awesome. It does all of what I've described, except for the booking, sorry. The booking I use, acuity scheduling, Calendly is just as good. There's many other good booking software, but besides booking, my mailing list, course delivery, client tracking, affiliate website, all of it is done on Simplero and I love it. Anyway, software is important. And then number five, outsourcing, because once you start learning business, you're gonna realize, oh, there are certain aspects that are more technical than my skills, I should hire some of it out. There are graphic design needs, there are just things I wanna save time, some kind of data processing, I'm gonna save time, someone can do it for me for cheap. Fiber, F-I-V-E-R-R, I go there all the time to get outsourced freelancers. So anyway, so basically instead of spent, and all of that, by the way, I should mention, accountability, course knowledge, customization, troubleshooting, software, outsourcing, all that can take just less than 10,000 a year, less than 10,000 a year. I mean, if you wanna join my group, that's $2,000 a year, I'll just, let me add up the numbers for you, okay? If you wanna join my group, which has all the courses that you probably, in my opinion, all the courses you need, and all the customization and troubleshooting and accountability that you need. So you already got three of those, five for $2,000 a year, right? And then you've got software outsourcing, I'm sorry, software, which I pay Simplero approximately $2,000 a year, but I have a big, I have a relatively big solar printer business. For you, Simplero will probably cost you less than 1,000 a year. So let's say $1,000 a year for software, right? Simplero plus some booking software. So that's total 3,000 a year, plus outsourcing. You know, outsourcing, I spend, I only spend for like technical stuff and freelancers, I spend less than 500 a month and my business is probably bigger than yours. You probably only need to spend 100, 200 a month for outsourcing. So I'm just gonna say $2,000 a year. So basically, two, two, one. So that's 5,000 a year, $5,000 a year for your business costs. And that's, instead of spending 20,000 a year on a business code, you spend 5,000 a year on everything. And you get way better, in my opinion, way better advice and actual support to implement. So I hope this gives you a sense of what not to spend money on and what to spend money on perhaps and always open to your own opinions and advice as well for others who are watching this comment below. Any any quick questions, I'll try to answer it. So thank you so much. I hope this is helpful.