How To Start A Coaching Business In 2026 That Makes $1,000,000

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1:20brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app.legal.podcast. So you just click the play button right now to find out if it's possible to make a million dollars with a coaching business. And if so, how? And I get it. A million dollars does sound massive to some of you until you actually do the math. And this episode is not about hype. It's actually breaking down exactly how you can pull this off. And I'm telling you right now, it's not about being an influencer or being some sort of big name guru. I know a lot of successful coaches that make eight figures a year in revenue that have very small social media followings.

1:59And it's definitely not about grinding yourself to the ground. This is about working smarter with your coaching business. It's about building a real business that can generate a million dollars. Yes, a million dollars a year using group coaching, leverage, and a simple system that I want to share with you that has worked for me so that it can work for you in 2026.

2:26Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Let's work backwards. So I ran a coaching program for many years inside the$100 MBA.

3:06It was like a higher level elite coaching program. And everything I learned in that process, I'm going to be sharing with you today. And I also am friends with a lot of coaches and creators, and I've pulled some things that works for them for you in this episode. Now, full disclosure, I don't offer coaching anymore. I just have limited time and it's not something that I'm pursuing. But if I was starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do. And I would start with step number one, which is doing the math. Most people never actually do this part. It's actually pretty crazy. And that's why they kind of stay stuck.

3:43So what we want to do is we want to look at three different pricing options Let's start with option number one and that's the two thousand dollar per month option Let's say you offer high-level coaching for two thousand dollars a month for 12 months. That's twenty four thousand dollars per client per year I'm gonna stop right here because many of you are like two thousand dollars a month Who's gonna pay that plenty of people? I've paid more than that every single month for coaching because it helped my business help me grow help me make more money I got a return on investment. And at the end of the day, as long as your client gets a return on investment, then they're willing to pay.

4:15So if you go back to the math for option number one, and we want to make a million dollars a year charging$24 ,000 per client per year, let's divide a million dollars into$24 ,000. That equals 42 clients. That's it. 42 clients is all you need to hit a million dollars if you are charging$24 ,000 a year per client. And this is why I start with this option, because when you start with a higher priced product, you don't need as many customers and it's easier for you to hit your goal throughout the year. What about option number two? $1 ,000 per month. You charge$1 ,000 per month for your coaching and that will equal$12 ,000 per year per client.

4:58You know the math now. It's a double 84 clients. You need 84 clients in your program to make a million dollars a year. Still very manageable, especially in a group format. And it's still very manageable in terms of getting that many clients. Last but not least, option number three,$500 per month. Full transparency, this is where I started in my coaching career, where I charged$500 per month. That meant I need 167 clients to get to that million dollar in revenue a year mark. Now, that's a lot of clients for some of you. And the reason why we're doing this exercise is you could see that pricing really makes a big difference in terms of hitting that million dollar goal.

5:37So the takeaway here is the higher your prices, the fewer customers you need, the simpler your business can be. This is why getting clarity on how many clients you actually need to get to your goal really matters. It helps you understand which pricing model you should go with. Let's move on to the next step. Step two in building your coaching business, what people actually pay for. I want you to listen to me very closely because these are the reasons why people fail at coaching businesses. They don't understand what people are paying for. People don't pay for coaching calls. They don't pay you for your time.

6:15They don't pay you for how passionate you are about the topic. None of this. They pay you for outcomes. Full stop, that's it. They want an outcome. They want a transformation. And high demand outcomes usually fall into a few categories. I'm going to give you those categories so that you know what to go after. So you can make your life easier when you're building your coaching business. Here are the categories. Making more money. So this is a very easy and straightforward thing where you coach them to help them grow the revenue. So they see the return on investment in your program. So like if I pay you money, you're going to help me make more money.

6:51Very simple. The other category is saving time. People value their time. You may not know a lot of people like this, but they exist and they're plentiful where they really value their time and they want to save time and they're willing to spend money to save time. They also will pay in the category of career advancement. They feel like you can help them move up in their career. And this is kind of like a pseudo making more money, but it also adds prestige and adds fulfillment. But they feel like you can help them advance in their career, move up in their career in some way, move up to management in their company.

7:24Then they're willing to invest. People are also willing to invest in health and confidence. So this could be personal fitness. This could be a mental health. This could be feeling more confident in front of the camera, for example, stage presence. People will pay money to feel more healthy and more confident. And the last category I'm going to throw in here is reducing stress or complexity. If you can make things easier for people, less stressful for people, more convenient for people, then people will pay. This is why people pay for business class, because it's convenient. It reduces stress. They get to sit in a nice, beautiful, luxurious lounge before their flight, and then they get to board first, and they get to put their luggage without having to wrestle and fight for space in the overhead compartment.

8:11They have a very comfortable journey. They get served with dignity and a nice drink and nice meals. You get the point. People will pay more to feel less stress and have more convenience. Now, the reason why I talk about this is because I want you to package at your programs and the way you present them in a way that actually allows people to sign up and feel like it's a compelling offer. So don't call your coaching mindset coaching. What is that mindset coaching going to get them? What's the actual result? Is it going to save them time? Is it going to make more money? Is it going to reduce stress?

8:41Talk about that, the outcome. Don't talk about business mentoring. What is that business mentoring going to get them? What's the outcome? Maybe it's as simple as getting their first 10 high paying clients. If somebody can come across your coaching program and they could say to themselves, if this works out, if this actually works for me, my life can change in some way. If that happens, you don't need to convince them. You don't need to sell. They understand the value immediately. And that's what you need to do is make it clear enough for them to say, hey, if this works, then I see the change it could do in my life.

9:13Full transparency. I was on a sales call before I was recording this episode on somebody introducing a coaching program for me. I'm always looking for ways to improve. This one in particular will help me with my presentation skills. And I thought he did an excellent job. And the reason why he did an excellent job is because I immediately in the first few minutes of him presenting could see what my life could be like after I was coached. I could see the result. I could see how this can help me in my business. And immediately I started to see the benefits. I needed to see the return on investment.

9:48So when it came for him to pitch me his program or his one-on-one coaching or whatever it might be, and he shares his prices, I'm not so concerned about the price so much. I'm just excited to get started. I'm already kind of sold already. And as long as the price is reasonable, then I'm happy to pay. All because I quickly understood the value. I quickly understood the return on investment I would get, how this would help me in my life and business. Tell me if this sounds familiar. Try to learn another language before maybe Spanish in high school, or you learned a few phrases before a trip. But when it's time to actually use those skills, you realize that knowing a few words isn't the same as a real conversation.

10:30That's why we're so happy to have Rosetta Stone as a longtime sponsor. Rosetta Stone Sapphire is a major new release in language learning, combining Rosetta Stone's trusted immersion method with the latest innovations in education technology to help you go from knowing phrases to speaking confidently about the topics you care about. I've been using Rosetta Stone for years for two reasons. Number one, we love going to Italy. We go about every year and I love ordering my pasta, ordering my pizza in Italian and just seeing the expression on the faces of the waiters as the words come out of my mouth.

11:02Number two, Nicole's family is Italian and we go over her mom's house for dinner. I like to hear what she says when she thinks I'm not listening. Spoiler alert, she's an absolute darling and it's all positive. But all of this wouldn't be possible to have the confidence to speak, to understand without Rosetta Stone. If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. The$100 MBA show listeners can get 20 % off their Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. You'll get unlimited access to all 25 Rosetta Stone languages, plus all the new Sapphire learning tools.

11:34Visit rosettastone.com slash MBA to redeem your 20 % off. That's rosettastone.com slash MBA and start learning a language for real. One of the biggest growth hacks is realizing you don't have to do it all yourself. That's how you can scale your business. This is why I'm so excited to have Upwork as a sponsor because I've been using Upwork for over a decade. Why? because it makes it easy to bring in the right freelancer when you need them so you can stay focused on what you do best. Upwork is a one-stop shop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more.

12:20I've made some of the best hires in our company through Upwork. I'm talking about people that have changed the trajectory of our entire business. It's free to sign up to Upwork and And posting a job is super simple and easy. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 categories. It makes it simple for you to just fill in those skill gaps, to launch projects faster, and scale your support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. And let me tell you about Business Plus. It's a game changer. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork.

12:56And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top town ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. Step three in building your million-dollar coaching business is leverage. Specifically, group coaching is a form of leverage, right? You want to coach many people at one time. And I'm telling you right now, group coaching is actually better than one-on-one coaching in many ways, not only for your business, but for the actual clients.

13:38Let me tell you why. The first thing is you help more people. This is no small thing because you're able to multiply your revenue quickly when you're in a group setting, when you're on the Zoom call and helping several people instead of one person. But this also means that you're able to get more case studies. You can learn more about your customers, learn more about what they're struggling with, and get better at coaching because you're helping more people. Secondly, you're protecting your time. You spend one hour and you help 50 people, for example, versus one hour and only helping one person.

14:10So you're leveraging your time in a better way. You're also building momentum. You're getting more wins out in one hour, meaning when you help 50 people at one shot, 50 people are learning and having the penny drop and sharing their, you know, aha moments and praising you for the help that you're making. And they're sharing this with everybody else. And then lastly, you deliver better results through the community. What do I mean by that is when you're in a group setting and you are a student, you're not only learning from the coach and learning from the advice that coach is giving you personally, but you're also learning when they're coaching somebody else.

14:48What I learned in business is that there are no unique problems. Most of us either encounter the same problems or will encounter the same problems. So if you're on a coaching call and you're the student and the coach is helping somebody else out, just paying attention to that and learning from their coaching example, you can understand how you could do better in your own life, in your own business. So you're actually giving your students some more with group coaching than one-on-one. So how do you structure this? Well, actually you can create a simple structure very easily. You can do a weekly live group call, and this could be on Zoom or whatever live video software you want to use.

15:24You can have a clear 8 to 12-week roadmap where you say, hey, this is where we're going to learn these things in the next weeks, 8 to 12 weeks. You can have a community for accountability. This could be a Facebook group. This could be a WhatsApp group. It could be a Slack channel so people can ask questions or maybe cheer people on or share wins throughout the week when you're not on the call. Then you're going to be sharing templates. You're going to share maybe some frameworks, some examples on the call and off the call. And then you can also have an optional one-on-one upgrade. A lot of coaches do this where it's like, hey, if you want to do a quick 30-minute call with me one-on-one, it's going to cost X amount of dollars and it's just like a one-off charge.

16:02Here's the thing. A lot of people think they need a huge, massive course library. They don't. Some of the best coaching programs I was a part of as a student, they didn't have a lot of videos in the library. They had a few. And then guess what? Every week you do a call, you add this to your library, becomes part of the library. And this is where an EA really comes into place. You should have your EA on the call because sometimes people are going to ask questions and you're going to answer them, but maybe you covered it more in depth or gave, you know, more information on in a previous call and you can just refer to that call in the library and your EA can kind of pull it up and put the link in the chat and allow people to dive into that old recording.

16:41And in my opinion, when you're part of a coaching program, the value is the live, is being coached live in the live sessions and getting out of the community what you signed up for. So most people are not so interested in this library of stuff that they never watch. It's good to have if you're referring to something that they need to kind of dig into. And that's when I gave that example of like a past recording. So you always have that. So make sure you record your calls. So that way you have a library as you're doing your calls. Step four, how do you actually get the clients? Let's get really practical.

17:16I believe that if you're going to coach people, this is the product, a coaching program, then you should get your clients through coaching. Why? Because it's the easiest way to sell your program because they're going to see you in action. And the best way to do this is through webinars is to do a one-off live webinar, whether it's an hour or 90 minutes or whatever it might be. This is a great way for you to help people, whether it's for free or maybe it's a low ticket item. And at the same time, a chance for them to see what it's like to be coached by you. This is like a test drive. And the reason why I recommend webinars is not because they're flashy.

17:52It's actually the opposite. They're easy. They're easy to do. And they actually build trust really fast. They let you teach and show your stuff where you start pitching and selling. It allows you to handle objections really in a live fashion. So when people have questions about why they should buy or if some people have very simple questions like, do you take Amex or, you know, do you have a payment plan? And you can easily handle those objections. So they're not kind of like festering and lingering in their head. They just saw you on a sales page. So that's what's great about webinars as well.

18:21You can handle objections live. You can scale your efforts and sell to many people at one shot with a webinar. So here's a simple funnel that you can use, a simple webinar funnel to make it super simple. Number one, you want to just create a call on Zoom, a free webinar. You want to teach one painful problem that your audience has on that webinar. You want to share your method, share your framework on that problem and how to solve it. And you want to invite them to apply to your coaching program at the end. Very simple, right? And what a lot of people do is they like to answer questions, of course, not only about the program, but about what you taught throughout so that you can be able to handle objections and get people interested in your program as you're going through the webinar.

19:05This is not pushing. This is guiding. And frankly, you could just simply say, if I helped you on the webinar today, then you're probably going to get a lot out of my coaching program because I'll be helping you out throughout the year or in the next whatever how long your program is. By the way, as you're growing your business, whether it's a coaching business or a service business or a software business, you're going to want to learn how to scale your business beyond your first few customers. And we have an upcoming episode that I recorded that I want to let you know about. It's a Q &A Wednesday episode where I answer the question, how do I go from freelancer to agency?

19:36How do I scale that kind of business? But the lessons I teach will apply to any kind of business. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss that episode. Step five is getting over your own mental barrier. You know what I'm talking about. Many of you have this question in your head right now that say, who am I to be a coach? Who am I to help other people? I'm no expert. And I'm here to tell you, you don't need to be the world's best to help other people. You're actually better off not being the best in the world. It's actually better to be just a few steps ahead of whoever you're coaching.

20:08You want to be able to tell people, I just went through the journey you went through and I can show you the way. You're clear about the process. You know, a lot of people ask me, how do I start a podcast? And my answer immediately is, I started my podcast almost 12 years ago. It's really hard for me to give advice on how to start a podcast versus growing a podcast because it's been so long. And then lastly, it's okay to be honest with your experience and say, hey, I'm not the biggest guru in the world. I'm not an expert. I'm not a New York Times bestselling author on this topic. but I've achieved what you want to achieve.

20:45And let me share with you how I did it. There are so many things you can leverage that you have at your disposal. Your career, your mistakes, your wins, your lived experience, your perspective is probably a unique one that many other people may not have. People don't buy perfection. Again, they're buying an outcome. And if they can believe that you can help them with the outcome because you've shown them that you have the outcome or you've achieved the outcome before, then that's all you need. That brings us to step six, selling out every month. This one is an important lesson that I've learned from a good friend of mine, Taki Moore.

21:24If you don't know who Taki Moore is and you're in the coaching world, you should know who Taki Moore is. Taki Moore is like the coach of coaches, and he's helped so many coaching businesses make a million dollars a year. He's actually called the million dollar coach and he's one of the most honest, legit, good people to learn from. And I learned this from him. You don't need to sell all the time. You need to sell in cycles. For example, you should only sell a certain number of spots per month in your coaching program. So say, for example, every month they're going to open up 15 spots per month.

21:57Why are you doing this? Because you need to create boundaries. You need to create scarcity around your program, not only so that people can feel the urgency to buy, but also so you can serve your customers properly and kind of move into scale as you grow. So you're going to choose a number that you feel comfortable with, like a number of spots per month. You're going to tell them when the program starts. Let's say, for example, you can join the first of the month to join the cohort. And then once it's full, once those 15 spots are sold out, you close, you tell them there are no available spots, no exceptions.

22:34This works because scarcity is a real thing and it helps people make decisions. It also allows you to start all your clients at one shot, one cohort, so you know exactly where they are in their journey in the coaching program. It also allows the energy to stay high when everybody's starting at the same time. They have accountability, they have a group, they kind of have a class that they're all part of. It's also a way to help improve the results of the group because they're all kind of holding themselves accountable. And word of mouth kind of grows because, hey, we're in this group. We're going to talk to each other.

23:05They might be telling their friends and family, hey, you should join and join the next class. And what Taki taught me is that, hey, once the doors close and you say, hey, we're sold out and somebody's like, hey, I want to get in. Can I get in? You can say, yeah, you can get in. But for next month, go ahead and you can start selling the next month's program or the next month cohort so that they can put down a deposit, for example, and then pay the rest when it's time to start. So as you can see, building a million-dollar coaching business isn't built by just hustling your brains out or posting more on social media or being louder online.

23:38It's built by having a clear outcome, a simple offer, a repeatable system to get customers in through webinars, for example, and the courage to charge properly for what you are offering. A powerful and really important outcome for your clients. When your clients feel like, this is important, I need this, then they will pay. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If people already ask you for advice, if you've helped others, even informally, with advice over the years, if you've been sitting on some experience that you've had, you're probably closer than you think. You're probably selling yourself short.