How to Build a Profitable Business Coaching Practice – In Just 7 Minutes with BJ O’Neal

Resources/Links:

• Want an overview of what done-for-you means to solve those three areas that you got to solve in coaching? Click here: businesscoachmastery.com

Summary

Finding it hard to turn your business expertise into a profitable coaching practice? Many seasoned professionals feel overwhelmed by the lack of structure and direction needed to launch and sustain a successful coaching business.

BJ O’Neal is featured in Forbes, also a founding partner with the renowned Maxwell Leadership team as a speaker, trainer, and coach. Today, he leads Business Coach Mastery, a network of nearly 70 coaches across the US. His passion is empowering people to build a profitable business coaching practice, allowing them to live life on their own terms. He provides a done-for-you approach, equipping them with the tools and support needed to succeed.

In this episode, BJ shares his proven “done-for-you” approach, emphasizing the importance of building systems for lead generation, client conversion, and coaching delivery, enabling you to achieve freedom and profitability on your own terms.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 02:13 – BJ’s ideal Client: Ideal client for us would be men who are seasoned.
• 02:37 – The problem he helps them solve: They want to do it, but they don’t know how to.
• 03:23 – Symptoms of his client’s problem: The bigger portion of all this is that they want freedom.
• 04:58 – Mistakes client makes before reaching out to him: Just going out there and just trying it with zero process, zero structure, zero strategy to it.
• 05:59 – BJ’s Valuable Free Action [VFA]: Build the three processes that’s going to do everything in coaching: Where do I get leads and prospects? How do I convert those leads and prospects into ongoing high paying monthly clients? And then how do I coach them to get simplicity?
• 07:30 – His Valuable Free Resource [VFR]: Want an overview of what done-for-you means to solve those three areas that you got to solve in coaching? Click here: businesscoachmastery.com
• 08:01 – Q: Why does someone fail at business coaching? A: No systems, no process and no structure.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“You have to have a structure that absolutely builds a relationship that matters, that you become the hunted. That's the goal.” -BJ O'Neal Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Welcome everyone to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. I’m Tom Poland, beaming out to you from the Sunshine Coast here in Australia. Joined today by BJ O’Neal. BJ, warm good day from down under. Where are you hanging out?

BJ O’Neal 00:22
Nashville, Tennessee. Some call it Nash Vegas.

Tom Poland 00:25
That’s right. Why is that? Is that casinos or what? Or is it dry?

BJ O’Neal 00:28
No, so, downtown Nashville, Broadway Street, lots of restaurants, bars, tons of music. It’s music to the USA lined with LED lights, lots of bright lights. So that’s why they sometimes call it Nash Vegas. It kind of, not really the…

Tom Poland 00:43
Fun Friday night to me. Yeah.

BJ O’Neal 00:45
Like it could be.

Tom Poland 00:46
Music capital of the US. Nothing to not like about that. Folks, BJ has been featured in Forbes Magazine, which is pretty prestigious. He’s also a founding partner of the renowned Maxwell Leadership team, which is globally renowned, speaker, trainer, coach. He leads Business Coach Mastery Network of nearly 70 coaches across the US, is passionate about empowering people to build profitable business coaching practices, allowing them to live life on their own terms. And BJ, I think we should also feature the fact that your real specialty is helping Christian business coaches, but what we’re going to share is going to be applicable to pretty much everyone. Is that correct?

BJ O’Neal 01:23
That’s correct.

Tom Poland 01:24
Okay, cool. So one of the things I like about what BJ is doing, folks, is rather than say this clients, well here’s a bunch of stuff, go get it, tiger. He’s really focused on a done-for-you approach. So you get equipped with tools, support everything that you need to be successful. And I think, busy lives that we have these days, but it’s easy to get lost and in minutiae it’s great to have that sort of ethos behind a service where you’re going to get everything you need in a done-for-you methodology. But enough of that, this is primarily an interview to pick your brain BJ, so I’ll get on with that. Title today is, How to Build a Profitable Business Coaching Practice. Our Time’s going to start now, Sir. Question number one, who’s your ideal client?

BJ O’Neal 02:13
Yeah, the ideal client for us would be men who are seasoned. What we mean by that is somebody who is, they’ve maybe led a business or owned a business, sold a business, they’ve been a CEO, COO, or whatever. Somebody who has, they’ve been around the business since and they’re now looking to begin to help others to make an investment to help them grow their profits and revenues.

Tom Poland 02:33
Perfect. Thank you for that. And what’s the problem you solve for them?

BJ O’Neal 02:37
They want to do it, but they don’t know how to, right? And they have this burning desire, they just don’t know how to launch. They don’t know how to get started, what’s the structure, what’s the process? And that we hear it all the time. They go by year after year after year wanting to figure this out and they just don’t know how to do it.

Tom Poland 02:50
Right. And so are you working with both the value delivery as well as the marketing?

BJ O’Neal 02:55
Absolutely.

Tom Poland 02:56
Okay, cool. So you got two wings with the same bird, and the bird’s fly pretty wonky if they don’t have both wings on. Question three is typical symptoms that your ideal client is experiencing before they find your solution. And we talked about the fact that they have the vision, they have the passion to help people, they’ve got a lot of experience, you just said seasoned. Is there anything else other than that kind of feeling, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’ Is there anything else that’s going on in their business that would give them a heads up? They need to be reaching out to you?

BJ O’Neal 03:23
Well, yeah, the bigger portion of all this is that they want freedom. They want to be able to live life on their terms. They want flexibility. A lot of them have, a lot of guys who have been in corporate America, they’re tired of the nine to five. They’re like, you know what, on the back night of life, I want to be able to do it my way kind of thing. But that’s what gives them so much angst and challenge of like, I really want to do this, I’m just not sure how to do it. But the bigger issue is they want to do it their way on their terms, work where they want to work, live where they want to live.

Tom Poland 03:50
And I guess also in addition to that, they tried a bunch of stuff and probably bought a bunch of courses. And hired a bunch of courses and it really hasn’t worked as well as they’d hoped.

BJ O’Neal 03:59
That’s exactly right. Because in this industry, as far as I’m concerned, you need guidance to really do this, doing it on your own, it’s just hard to do.

Tom Poland 04:06
Well the other thing about this industry that we are both in is there’s a lot of people selling stuff that don’t actually know what they’re talking about, right? So it’s difficult for people to know who’s who.

BJ O’Neal 04:18
Yeah, from my perspective, of course this doesn’t cut it anymore for this type of building a legitimate business practice where you’re going out physically and building a relationship with a business owner who owns a dry cleaner as a roofing company or whatever it is. And there’s a lot there and that’s where we come in to help.

Tom Poland 04:33
I agree a hundred percent. That’s where the provider really needs to be hands on and getting into the weeds that’s with the client. So let’s talk about one of the common mistakes. We’ve got four minutes left, plenty of time. Well one of the common mistakes is getting advice from people who aren’t really qualified to give it. What else would you say that they’ve done on their journey before they get to you that you’d look at and that can’t be thinking, well, I know that was a mistake now, but that’s the benefit of hindsight.

BJ O’Neal 04:58
Yeah, just going out there and just trying it with zero process, zero structure, zero strategy to it. I mean, you cannot, what I call you cannot professionally wing it, or at least you can’t do it anymore. You can get away with it 20 years ago, you just can’t do it today. So, you must have a really strong structure and process to make it work, as well as we don’t want to sell coaching services. What I mean by that is we want to build relationships that are legitimate. You’ve heard the term, they need to know you, like you, and trust you. Well, authenticity comes into play there. And you can’t just do that by just going out there, hodgepodge willy-nilly. I often say if you dabble in it, you’re going to get dabble like results and we don’t want to do that.

Tom Poland 05:38
Right. Random acts of marketing, random acts, or random results.

BJ O’Neal 05:41
That’s right.

Tom Poland 05:41
So let’s flip it. We’ve told people some bunch of things that probably cause them a little bit of pain, memories of what hasn’t worked, what they’ve tried, et cetera. Give us a top tip. What’s one thing that someone could do? They could sit down without hiring you. Going any further, Just give them one thing that might take them a step in the right direction if you like.

BJ O’Neal 05:59
Yeah. Build the three processes that’s going to do everything in coaching. Where do I get leads and prospects? How do I convert those leads and prospects into ongoing high paying monthly clients? And then how do I coach them to get simplicity? When you build those pillars and then everything from there, it’ll be absolutely game changing in how you process what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Then when it comes to leads and prospects, choose no more than two strategies, workshops or networking or creating partnerships or whatever. Stop being all over the place. It’s not going to work very specifically on your strategy and your structure and then walk yourself through that. When you start to build a plan like that, it’s much easier to do than just going out there and just trying to figure it out, you know, and just crack yourself through. It’s just hard to do.

Tom Poland 06:46
That’s very sound advice folks. BJ, repeat those three areas again, please. We need to build a process…

BJ O’Neal 06:52
Yep. Where do I get leads and prospects? How do I convert those leads and prospects into ongoing high paying monthly clients? And the third, how do I coach that client to get results with simplicity? When you can solve those three, that’s the magic.

Tom Poland 07:09
Yeah. And folks, I hope you listened up because BJ gave you a couple of very specific examples for the first one there. So that would be enough to get the ball rolling. But, like I always say to folks, the map is not the territory, so, therefore, let’s give folks a place they can go to find out a bit more about your services, one valuable free resource we can direct people to, please.

BJ O’Neal 07:30
Yeah, businesscoachmastery.com. We have an entire overview of what the word done-for-you means to solve those three areas that you got to solve in coaching, businesscoachmastery.com.

Tom Poland 07:44
Businesscoachmastery.com. Amazing URL and folks on the homepage there you’ll see: Yes. Send me the done-for-you overview. So go get that because it’s going to help you on your journey towards process and scaling and better results and more freedom. 37 seconds left, Sir. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

BJ O’Neal 08:01
Why does someone fail at business coaching? And this is going to shock you. No systems, no process and no structure. Meaning that you can’t just go out there and just sell the service, if you will, and give people five reasons why they need to hire a business coach. No one really cares, to be quite frank. You have to have a structure that absolutely builds a relationship that matters that you become the hunted, that’s the goal.

Tom Poland 08:26
Beautiful. Well said, ‘you become the hunted.’ BJ, thanks so much for your time and your insights. Cheers!

BJ O’Neal 08:30
Hey, thanks for having me.

Tom Poland 08:32
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.