Coaching and Mentorships Part I
The Cost of Coaching is an Investment in Your Future
Hi all! What’s going on? Want to share a little with you about coaching, and what our coaching experiences and mentors have meant to me and Jake, and the impact it has had on our company. Coaches and mentors are distinctly different, and we have quite a bit to share about each. So we’re breaking this up into two parts and in this post, we’ll focus on the value we get from coaching.
When you first get starting in thus business, you have to be careful early on to understand when it’s the right time to spend the money for professional support. Because let’s face it, it’s very expensive to get really good coaching.
For our business, we were about six months into building our wholesale business before we took the plunge to spend money on a coached workshop. These are small group settings led by one or more coaches who present their insights and then work with individual attendees in breakout sessions. I recall that experience was nearly $4,000 for us which, at that time, was an enormous amount of money. But our mindset then, as it still is today, is that this is absolutely an investment. Jake and I don’t view coaching and mentorships as an expense.
We attended a few more workshops before we hired our first private coach. That was a six-month engagement that provided us with weekly meetings, several in-house events and a regular dissecting of our business. It was a $15,000 investment, but we gained so much from that experience and insight that I’m not sure our business would have even survived had we not made that investment. We were a floundering start up running around with our heads chopped off, and our coach was doing $3M in wholesale fees annually.
Sure, we had built a bank of cold callers, we had a process for list pulling, we were sending mailers and we were just getting started with social media. But we had no idea what we were doing and whether anything we were doing was being done correctly. And what our coach taught us over that six months was that (thankfully) we were doing some things pretty well, but there was so much we were missing that resulted in our efforts being extremely inefficient. Within a matter of weeks we were able to recalibrate and revise and change things that made a massive difference in our results.
So expense or investment? We conservatively estimate that we saved more than 4X the cost of that first coaching engagement in opportunity and effectiveness. Could we have figured out how to make the changes we made on our own? Perhaps; Jake and I are two pretty smart guys. But what we were able to do is skip those steps. We paid money then to save money in the future. So sure, you could go it alone and learn by trial and error, but we think that’s a great way to go out of business.
As you determine when the time is right to attend a coaching workshop or secure a private coaching engagement, finding the right people to help you achieve your goals is equally as important as the timing of that decision. If you’re a wholesaler, obviously you want to work with those that have expertise in wholesaling. If you want to buy and hold, find workshops and coaches that can specialize in building a book of rental properties.
For Jake and me, specifically, we went even a few steps further than that to find coaches that were wholesaling, in Ohio, using a virtual support services model. And what we learned from them was literally how to build our company: from the systems we should use for pulling lists, to insights on how we need to be hiring employees, to advice on structuring each specific department to have a competent manager, to setting up and preparing for walkthroughs, to building an effective sales process. And I could go on even more. All that early coaching helped us to structure the very foundation of our company, and we would truly be lost today without that direction.
Now, as we learn and go forward, we obviously can’t be spending $20,000 every time we hear someone promise that we can 10X that investment. But you can be damn certain that we’ll continue to invest in coaching and mentorships. Because you should always want to talk to the people that are five years ahead of you and there’s always something more you can learn. And we love being able to skips steps.