Your Biggest Vision Ep. 19- When to Hire a Coach

When is the right time to hire a coach, and in what situation? Sometimes it can feel like you’re spending more money than you need, that you should be able to figure things out alone, or that it’s not a tangible result, so is it worth?

Trust me, I’ve told myself all these stories (and more) when it came time to hire a coach.

I’m not saying every investment is smart or necessary, but here is the background on when and why I chose to hire a coach myself, and what type of results I’ve seen from doing so.

This episode is for you if:

You’re considering hiring support in any type of transformation (health, business, money, etc.)

You’ve wondered when and if it’s actually worth it to hire a coach.

You’re curious about where and how to find the right mentor for you.

Podcast Episode

Facebook Live Replay on When to Hire a Coach

Transcript of Episode

So welcome back to the Your Biggest Vision show. I am your host, Leah Gervais. I am the founder of Urban 20 Something and I work with entrepreneurs to either start businesses around there, nine to five jobs or to scale businesses up to five figure months and beyond. I love what I do, and this podcast is designed to really focus on the vision that you have. Now, this isn’t for you just about business. This is also if you are in a nine to five job and you love that, or maybe you are just looking for some sort of transformation, whatever your version of your vision is, I’m here to support you in going for it because I know firsthand that a lot of times reality, other people, society, money, all these other things can really feel like they are standing in the way of it and that’s the last thing that we want. You can see that I have these tulips here with me just because it is April and I’m very excited about spring and warmer weather and I thought that these would be a good edition.

So, with that, let’s go ahead and move forward. A bit of background. So I started my business about three years ago and I did not hire anyone to really help me or pay for anything to help me for a while. And it is not a coincidence that things didn’t really take off for me during that time. I was a bit stubborn. I thought that entrepreneurship meant that you figure things out on your own and that you learn things on your own and you do things on your own. And if you’re learning from someone else, then it’s the same thing is going to school and you’re not really inventing your own thing, blah, blah, blah. I had all these things going on in my head, so I didn’t ever really, I was hesitant to even buy e-courses or take in-person courses. I just like wasn’t very good at expanding my own professional education when it came to expanding my business. And just as a spoiler alert, things could not look more different today as they did then. Now I have in my budget every single month room for continuing education, coaching, consulting, support, et Cetera, because the takeaways and the results I’ve seen from having done these kinds of investments are so massive and it is so clear that my business is completely different with it.

That it’s no longer an option for me to make sure that it’s part of it every single month. So when I was in sort of my resisting phase, maybe some of you can relate to this. I’d love to hear if you’re an entrepreneur, if you also have mentors that you look up to or if you also have people that are teaching you to do things, consultants, et Cetera, and what your experience is. But, beforehand I thought that, I mean, I had all these reasons why I didn’t need one. I thought, like I said, that being an entrepreneur meant you figured things on you’re out on your own. I also thought that I couldn’t see a clear return on the investment. I thought that if I was going to spend money, I would rather have spent it on a new computer, or a professional website, or web page design, or someone to help me with Facebook ads. Things that were very practical and that you could more often see a monetary return on, or even just a physical result from. So it was kind of like at the of my list and eventually I started realizing, you know, I wasn’t completely against it at one point. I just didn’t think it was a priority, but I started realizing that there was a part of my business that I wanted to expand that I didn’t know how to do on my own.

Specifically it was when I wanted to start doing more service based work, which for those of you that know me, you know that that’s almost all I do now. I don’t really sell that many products. But up until then I had really only sold product. So I had only really made easy courses and ebooks and things like that. So I knew I didn’t know how to sell any sort of service or anything like that. So I hired someone, I actually joined a year long program about coaching, about service based work and that is when things really started to take off for me. And that’s also when I really started to see the power of having support, having accountability and being in communities with people that are like minded and are inspiring and are doing similar things as you. And that’s one of the takeaways that I have from you know, a little over a year of having consistent support now.

So from then I got kind of hooked. I was like, oh my God, I want as much, I want to learn as much as I can. I want as much support as I can get, you know. And since then I have hired some, I have been part of that service based program. I had been part of a marketing and Facebook ads, yearlong mastermind. I’ve been part of two mini masterminds, which is just entrepreneurs getting on the phone together every week. I am currently part of a business finance six week coaching program. So I work with a CPA to help make sure that my business finances are in place. I’ve worked with a Facebook ads consultant, I’ve worked with the COO for businesses. The point is I like it couldn’t have more people involved now than I did beforehand. So here are, what I’m going to share with you today are the four takeaways, I actually was writing this for my newsletter tomorrow, and I realized I wanted to talk about it because it’s so important to me. The four takeaways I have from really getting people on board, advising me, helping me, supporting me and why I think it can be helpful for you too if you’re considering doing this.

I then I’m also wanting to share how I found people and how I still find people and how you might find someone because I think a lot of people think that getting into some sort of mastermind sounds great, but they don’t know where to look. And then maybe some things that I should have known before, some kind of mistakes that have happened along the way. I will do question and answers here about halfway through. So for anyone that’s on, if you have a question, then please let me know and I will come back to it after. So I will come right back to you.

So here are my four takeaways for working with people in a good way. Someone said some are scams, some are scams and we talk about that in a second. But here are the critical takeaways that have really helped me grow my business and the best things that have happened. The first thing I realized from working with mentors, coaches, masterminds, et Cetera, are that shortcuts are essential in our modern day life. We do not have time to learn things on our own. Even if you can learn things on your own, even if you can do things on your own for that matter, you don’t have time to slow pace it. You only have time to do things as fast as you possibly can, pretty much. It’s a little bit stressful, but it doesn’t need to be if you have help and you have people supporting you. So I started to realize that a lot of times when I was in those earlier days when I was feeling stubborn, when I was wanting to be that entrepreneur that figured everything out on her own, I probably could have done it. I probably could have.

But if I would have taken that route, if I wouldn’t have let other people’s experience or expertise influence me and my business, it’s still be at my nine to five job. I still would not be making as much money as I am now. I wouldn’t be able to do this full time and I wouldn’t know as much and therefore I wouldn’t be able to help my own clients as much. So, I don’t have time and neither do you to figure things out on your own. So when people get nervous about spending money with mentors or coaches or ecourses or masterminds or anything else like that, you have to remember that though money is a valuable commodity, time is far more valuable. You can always make more money. I mean, I’m living proof of that. I have made back every investment that I have spent in my business time and time again, especially when it comes to service based investments like coaching. But if I would have done it the slow way, then maybe I would have not spent as much money, but I wouldn’t have made as much money and I would have lost all that time. I already can see the years that I lost and didn’t get to grow during those first couple of years because I was so resistant to investing in myself and in my business. So shortcuts are critical. You’re not suppose to figure everything out on your own and I don’t recommend that you do.

The second takeaway that I’ve gotten from working with high quality coaches and mentors is that your energy is critical when it comes to your business growth and your business success. I think we all logically know that and I knew that, you know, I’ve always been very aware of my positivity and positive thinking, et cetera. But I didn’t realize how much higher of an energy I could have and how much better of energy I could have when I was more often surrounded with people who either were doing what I wanted to do, had done what I wanted to do, or we’re also on a similar path to what I wanted to do. So you can be the most positive person in the world, but at the end of the day, if your day to day life is spent with people in your corporate office or even with your family, but they don’t understand what you’re doing to be an entrepreneur or any transformation you’re going through. Even if your friends want to understand, they might not. So when I started putting myself in, in, in masterminds, in communities, and even just in correspondence in connection with people that were in that more optimistic, motivated, possibility oriented thinking, I couldn’t believe how much things shifted for me internally and how much that made me more motivated and made me less afraid. It made me so much more willing to go for things and that’s when I started going for more things, and that’s when my business really started to take off.

The next thing I’ve learned is that you don’t need to do this alone. So really, this was a huge slap in my own face and a big change in my own pride because I had thought that, like I said, I thought that being an entrepreneur meant that you do everything alone. You figure everything out alone. The people that I looked up to, the entrepreneurs I looked up to, I really thought, you know, because you hear these stories of them, like they were in Starbucks for 18 hours a day and they had nothing but ramen and everyone thought they were crazy and they didn’t have any friends for 10 years because they were… like, whatever. So I thought… what I took from those stories was that they did everything by themselves. Well, two things. One, I have no clue how they did things. I have no clue how much they went into things knowing I don’t know who did what for them. I don’t know who helped them, you know, and it’s not worth my time to try to decipher it, and it’s not worth yours either. Yes, you should have mentors that you look up to and there’s stories that you can admire, but trying to figure out exactly how they did things from the outside so that you do it exactly the same way. It’s a waste of your time. Instead, hire someone that you know, knows how to do what you want to do and have them just teach you. Because even if they did do it all alone, I don’t have to and neither do you. So why would we put ourselves through that? Why would we waste time when we could be earning more money and not, you know, flushing away the precious time that we have, which is our biggest commodity.

The final big lesson that I’ve learned in investing in my own, support, mentorship, coaching, et Cetera, is that investments are investments. It’s not like I was going out and spending $4,000 on a Chanel bag that’s just sitting in my closet collecting dust. You know, you go out and spend $4,000 so that you learn how to make four, five, six, seven, eight up to $20,000 back. It is not about flushing money down a drain. It is truly about it coming back to you. I don’t really know why we forget that so easily. But so often we do, and I’m guilty of that too. It’s sometimes not the, you know, doesn’t totally connect in our head that there is a difference between spending money on a commodity, which is fine. And there’s a difference between that and spending money on your business, which is an investment, which means you get it back by definition, that means you get it back and then some, right? You get interest on it. Like it pays itself back several times over again. So that, that’s what I’ve seen be true in my own life and in my own business working with my own mentors.

Now let’s address some of the negative parts and some of the, um, potential dangers or anything like that that could come up with this. So someone asked how, how do you know when to join? Because some of them are scams. So there’s a couple of things you can do. If you think is a scam, then, please feel free to answer this if you want below, but let me know why you think it’s a scam. So there’s a couple of things you can do if you think that it’s a well known scam of sorts, you can just Google it and I’m sure you’ll find information on that. You also should reach out to people that are alumni of working with this person. Usually people have, you know, testimonials on their contact page or something like that so you can reach out to them and you can ask people what their experience was with them. You also can talk to the person themselves and really get a feel for it. There is no replacement for your intuition and for your own judgment. But if you’re considering buying something from someone and you don’t trust them, then you probably shouldn’t buy from them. You know, we all make sales so complicated and we all are looking for this sort of secret formula or key or magic equation to make more sales. But at the end of the day, sales are not about an effective Facebook funnel or a great email that you send or, a perfect pitch on Facebook live or a perfect sales call or anything like that. Sales, at the end of the day is always, has always been and will always be, a matter of someone trusting you and then you selling them something and them trusting that you’re going to get them results. Trust is the bottom line. So, you know this, I’m not going to get into a sales training, but if you’re wondering why you’re not making more sales, ask if you’re providing free value for people to get to know you and trust you. And if you’re not, then you need to do that first because they’re not, and they shouldn’t buy from you if they don’t trust you. So to answer your question, if you think something’s a scam that tells me you probably don’t trust the person.

So I would ask yourself, why don’t you trust them? Have they not proven their trust to you? Because if so, you can either try to ask that out or find someone that has. Or if they have proven their trust to you and you’re just skeptical or you are not thinking that, you know, it might be, it might be too good to be true. That could be more of a mindset shift on your part. Like I actually am thinking of this as kind of an interesting story to bring up. I wasn’t planning on it, but it matches your question. So there’s a life coach that I know of and she’s pretty well known and she, you know, has been doing this for a long time. And there are forums and forums online about how she is a scam artist, how she, is a con artist, how she will just take your money and you know, not really give you any results, et cetera. So there is information out there about her like that. And I personally know and have seen that there’s lots of people that have had tons of successful results from her. They have loved working with her. Their lives have changed from working with her. So even if you do find something that’s a scam, just remember that you get out of anything what you put into it. So my hunch is that some of those people that wrote those reviews, um, maybe we’re expecting things to be easier than they were and they didn’t get results because they didn’t work or maybe they were, I don’t know, maybe not in the right place to do all the work. I don’t really know. And it’s, you know, it’s not actually important. But all the, all this is to say, just remember that anything is what you make of it.

So if you like the idea of signing up for something, but you think it might be too good to be true, or it might sound too simple or it might sound like the results are too good, remember that you make your own results. You get to decide how much you want to get out of this program. You get to decide how much you want to get out of this mentorship opportunity. You get to make your own investment back. It’s not up to other people to do that for you. So I hope that makes sense. It’s obviously important to not fall into a scam and you do want to make sure you trust the person. And at the same time, it’s important to remember that you have the ultimate responsibility in this relationship. And so if you want results it’s not up to the other person, the coach, the mentor, et Cetera, to get your results, it’s up to you to do so. So there’s kind of two schools of thought there.

In terms of how much money I’ve spent, I would say that about half of my business budget every month goes to some sort of support, which is quite a bit. Maybe right now, a little bit less. You know, sometimes there’ll be ebb and flows and sometimes one month I’ll spend a lot on something that is for like a 90 day or six month duration. So that can be a big lump sum one month, and then I don’t really need to spend money. But the majority of my business spend goes to this type of work and support. I think you get to a point, you know, coming back to that point of trust and remembering how important trust is in sales and your business. I think in the beginning you really need to work on how you can build trust with your audience. And that’s where having guidance on things like social media, email marketing, Facebook ads, opt-ins, your website, where you have guidance on that, that can really be helpful in the beginning because you do want to make sure you’re building trust with your audience and you might not know how. It’s not because you’re not trustworthy, it’s just because you’ve probably never done this before and this is new to you and you want to make sure that you’re marketing yourself in an authentic way that’s completely normal. But I think you do get to a threshold at some point where you no longer need so much support around the technical parts of building trust with your audience. Now you need to work more on trusting yourself and trusting your gut and trusting that you’re capable to move forward. You know, you probably know the basics of Facebook ads at that point, you probably know the basics of email marketing at that point.

So you might be really holding yourself back when it comes to raising your prices, doing something new, investing further in yourself, sort of those next levels steps. And so I have found, and what I try to offer within my own business is in the earlier days, focusing on supporting people in building trust with their audience and then as their income grows and as their business grows, supporting them and more internal personal development and to help them trust themselves and more so that they can move forward more. I hope that makes sense. I will say that in the beginning I spent more on coaching and mentorship than I do now because I was in a very quick paced frame of mind. I was in sort of like a sprint. I wanted things to move really quickly. I wanted to quit my nine to five job. I wanted to get my income up to five figures a month. I had a very clear goal and I was willing to pretty much do whatever, learn whatever, work with whoever in order to get there. Now that I’m there, now that I got there, you know, things are more of a marathon and I don’t need to be in that very accelerated way of, of living like I did. But if you have a specific goal, you know, go full throttle, don’t let anything stop you, make it happen. Do what it takes. And that’s the frame of mind that I was in. I hope that answers your question. If anyone else has any questions on investing in their business, investing in coaches, good experiences I’ve had, bad, et Cetera, then please let me know.

But the one last thing I want to make sure I share is how to find coaches, mentors, et Cetera, for, anything, any transformation you’re looking at. So you know, this show, Your Biggest Vision Show. I do talk about business a lot because I love business and I’m an entrepreneur, but I try to purposely bring people on here that have undergone different types of transformations as well. Dylan Ferris, one of our guests who I think was episode, maybe 16, talked about how he transformed his health by losing over a hundred pounds. We have people talk about how they just changed career paths. Not necessarily started their own businesses, but my point is, if you are looking for any transformation in your life, in order to reach your biggest vision, then you should get help. You should get support. You don’t have to do this alone and you shouldn’t. You can have all those benefits I listed. You can do it with shortcuts. You don’t have to be lonely. You can be in a better mood and in a better energy and you will make your investment back. Even if your investment is like, you know, you’re investing your time and money and you want to get healthier. That is still a return on your investment.

So three places I recommend looking if you’re wondering how to start finding someone like that. So, the first place I would look is just two people you look up to. So if you have, you know, entrepreneurs, you look up to, if you have healthy people you look up to, authors you look up to, anyone who’s done one thing that you want to do and you’re trying to do, just reach out to them. You never know if they offer that sort of mentorship and they may be, might not publicize it that much. Like for instance, for me, I offer occasionally one on one coaching packages for four months for people wanting to get to five figures. But I don’t really publicly advertise it because it’s not really a public thing. You know, I usually will just reach out to someone individually if I think that they would be a good fit for that. But it’s not something that I really plaster all over my social media or website. So, reach out to someone that might have achieved what you want and just ask them either if they do any sort of coaching or mentorship or if they recommend anyone that does. This would be applicable in any industry, not just entrepreneurship, but if you are in fashion and you want to maybe make a different move within the fashion industry, reach out to someone, see if they do mentorship or see if they recommend a career mentor or something of sorts. So the first tip is to just reach out to people that have achieved what you want.

The second thing is to listen to your favorite podcasters or books. So if you have, you know, authors that you really love or podcasters that you really love, then just shoot them an email and say, do you have any mentors or do you mentor people? That’s what I really love about podcasts and books and just the day we live in, is people are closer than ever. So if you have someone that you really resonated with, especially like with a personal development book, for instance, I’m getting a little sidetracked here, but for instance, one of my girlfriends, Carla, she is also engaged and she read this great book about being a bride and being a conscious bride and really thinking about how you’re merging your life with someone else. And you know, some of the complexities that come with the more modern bride, which means we’re a bit older, we also have lives that we’ve kind of established on our own. Whereas, you know, back in the day people got married when they were closer to 18. You get the idea. She loved the book so much and it helped her so much that she reached out to the author. I don’t know if the author did coaching beforehand, but the author agreed to be her coach for a little while and do a couple of sessions with her and talk through the process of her becoming a bride in a really conscious way with her. So that’s what I’m talking about. Just reach out to people with books and podcasts. That would be my second tip.

Then my third tip is use Instagram. So you can go into the search feature in Instagram and search things like health coach, mindset coach, money coach, business coach, whatever. And you know, see what comes up and he and follow them for a little while, see if you like them, maybe try to message with them, interact with them, and then see what they have to offer. So these people are all around you. There is no excuse and not to get support in making your biggest vision happen sooner, faster now. There’s all the unlimited ways that people are just waiting out there ready to help make your dream come true because they probably already done it for themselves. It goes both ways, if you’re listening to this and you are a coach, or mentor, or consultant or anything like that, just remember people are out there waiting for you. They want this result. That’s why you need to put yourself out there and then if you are trying to get a result, this is why you need to be active and find people that have done it in the same way.

So that is the low down on how coaching, consulting, mentors, et Cetera have changed my life and business. I love mentoring others now. I love coaching other people now because I’ve seen all the huge benefits and if you have been waiting for a sign or any sort of nudge that it’s time to move forward and get support in your own growth. If you are sick of saying one day, hopefully one day I’m saving money for one day, I’m waiting until I have more time, one day, et cetera. Like cutting that out of your vocabulary. Today’s the day we are 25% of the way through the year people. We’re a fourth of the way through. It is not new years anymore. If you have something that you want to happen this year, start today, today, today, today, today. There’s no excuse. I’m getting very, very into this. I should probably see myself out. But thank you guys for tuning in and well thanks so much. I hope this was helpful for you and I’d love to hear if you guys have had any monumental coaches or mentors or anyone that’s really changed your life or your business, let me know below or direct message me. And as always here is to your biggest vision.