Bricks to Clicks and Back Again - Franchised and On-line Coaching
Developments in Coaching
This section briefly comments on two coaching trends. The first short one is about franchising, which has attracted entrants for business coaching but not yet (2010) for psychology-based executive coaching. The longer second one is about on-line (virtual) coaching. There half-a-dozen of the more prominent Internet gurus, who also offer coaching, are discussed. Interestingly on-line coaching reflects both the high ($ 5,000 per hour) and the low (perhaps less than $50 per hour) end of the fee spectrum.
I. Franchising: Bricks
The business model of franchising can also be applied to professional services firms. (Franchising is further discussed at "Franchise Facts and Fallacies" at Papers.) Two of the better-known franchises are:
a)The Growth Coach www.thegrowthcoach.com out of the U.S.
b)The Action Coach www.theactioncoach.com out of Australia
Both franchises offer business coaching aimed at SMBs as opposed to executive coaching. The distinction is that executive coaching is generally aimed at managers who, if they do not actually have an MBA, typically have business related education, such as in accounting, engineering, or law. Executive coaching is often psychology based and concerned with issues such as leadership (e.g. 3600 feedback, on-boarding), developing high potentials and retaining key employees. Business coaching is generally at a more "nuts and bolts" level, dealing with issues such as time management, cash flow and customer acquisition. Of course there is considerable overlap between the two coaching designations.
II. On-line (virtual) Coaching: from Clicks to Bricks
A new breed of Internet "coaching" entrepreneurs is taking the stage. A key driver for their businesses is to have a large E-Mail list, 100,000 people and up, to whom they can send offers. They generally follow the same basic business model, consisting of the following steps:
1) They advertise -- on the Internet -- that they will teach you how to make money on the Internet. (Click)
2) When you respond (by E-Mail), you receive free content, which is often solid. Usually the theme is that the best way to make money on the Internet is to offer programs to teach people on, you guessed it, how to make money on the Internet! (Click)
3) You are asked to upgrade to paid information: webinars, group coaching and private on-line or telephone coaching. (Click)
4) Finally, you are made an offer to attend a live seminar and/or receive face-to-face coaching. A weekend seminar may cost $2,000 and up (seems reasonable) and private coaching as much as $5,000 an hour, which does not. (Brick)
Another popular theme is to teach you Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The purpose is for you to go to small businesses in your community and help them with their website presence. The assumption is that a business really needs to land on page one of Google (and other search engines) for the website to attract customers. (This assumption is often legitimate.) Variations on this theme are offers to teach you how to teach others to use the social media, how to make money blogging, etc. These programs all start with free content, from which you upgrade to various levels of paid content, including group or one-on-one coaching.
Sometimes the coaching moves into psychological waters with inspirational and motivational content. The 800 lb. gorilla of the "inspirationists" is Anthony Robbins out of California. With a height of 6 ft. 7 in. (201 cm), this former high school janitor has been estimated to earn between $30 and $50 million a year. Clients for his personal coaching (lifestyle, work-life balance issues) have included a slew of celebrities, among them President Clinton. However he is not one of the major Internet gurus, rather making his money with huge "stage seminars" held in arenas.
There are a number of Internet entrepreneurs who offer coaching as a sideline to their other on-line offerings. There are, one presumes, several dozen more or less prominent Internet gurus. From the U.S. these include Brendon Buchard, Brad Fallon, Mike Filsaime, Eben Pagan, Howie Schwartz, and, in Australia, Yaro Starak. (In a blog he has made very credible comments on the real effort it takes to succeed on the Internet. These are quoted on the subpage devoted to him.)
To the preceding half-dozen another three are added. The first is a relative newcomer originally out of California, the stunning Katie Freiling. She is someone to observe rapidly growing her on-line business. The second is Brian Tracy, not an Internet guru per se, but of interest because he apparently offers high-end coaching. The third is Sean D´Souza out of New Zealand, who does not emphasize coaching, but whose interesting website content and newsletter warrant mention.
To round up the list to fifteen, Appendix I briefly discusses another six U.S. Internet gurus, followed by a sample list of another couple of dozen individuals active in Internete marketing.
Those with particularly good content are designated with an exclamation point: !
! Brendon Buchard, www.brendonburchard.com, a friend of a Anthony Robbins, is a young newcomer who combines business and motivational content very well. He is the author of an inspirational novel, Life´s Golden Ticket, and the founder of a training institute, cf. www.expertsacademy.com Allegedly he attracted 200 people at $5,000 each (i.e. a million dollars gross) for a weekend seminar, before he had become thirty. His personal website offers one-on-one coaching. For an annual fee (2010) of $35,000 you get to spend half a day with him, receive telephone and on-line coaching, and also get to attend his seminars and webinars at no additional charge. In the promotion for that program he states: "If you were to hire me to come in to your company and consult with you - You´d pay my standard rate of $5,000 an hour." The website states that the waiting list for the program is a year.
Brendon Buchard offers the rare combination of being an exceptional public speaker with solid content. (Anthony Robbins seminars represent Hollywood movie star caliber entertainment (generating corresponding revenues), but he does not offer much in the way of business content.) Originally from Montana, he has the hard-working ethic that is part of that culture.
Nevertheless he made a remarkable marketing blunder in an offering on May 11th, 2011 for Total Product Blueprint. One clicked on a link in the E-mail to get to the presentation, the first of three free videos. In it he states that 30% of his customers are from overseas, i.e. almost one third. He mentions that he earned $4.6 million in two years and now gets up to $50,000 for a keynote speech (one or two hours). One should submit a video following his format to participate in a contest. The grand prize for the winner is $1,200. There was NO free pass to one of his seminars, NO DVD or on-line training offered, the cost of which would be trivial to him. He didn´t think that after touting his fat earnings this prize would make him seem cheap?
It gets worse. One clicks on to the contest rules, and sees legal boilerplate that certainly cost more than the grand prize. You have to be a U.S. resident to participate! He makes an offer that frustrates and irritates almost one in three of his (potential) customers. Given the excellent quality of most of his content, this blunder is astonishing. Perhaps it reflects, not so much xenophobia, but rather that curious American attitude that the U.S. is the center of the known universe.
! Sean D´Souza, www.psychotactics.com, moved from India to New Zealand by way of Australia. Although he studied accounting, he started out as a computer savvy cartoonist and copywriter and moved into his own Internet business. His website, which has good to excellent free content, offers products about marketing and Internet marketing. An attractive feature of his "bricks and mortars" seminars is that he limits attendance to 25.
Unlike many of the Internet heavyweights, he has a major business website. It has extensive information about his on-line products, and substantial free content as well. Surprisingly there is very little information about his company or himself on it. In his case this omission is startling. He has disagreed with the position of some Internet gurus that one should reveal little about oneself. Being mysterious elicits respect from the customers. No, he argues, trust is what counts, and to be trusted you need to give information about yourself.
Brad Fallon, www.stompernet.com, in contrast to many other Internet entrepreneurs, does publicly admit where he was educated. If you go to www.stompernet.com/blog/ you will find there a brief CV mentioning a degree in economics from Claremont McKenna College (1990) and a law degree from the University of Florida College of Law (1997). He proceeds from those credible points of departure to claim first year (2004?) revenues of $1.2 million from on-line business, possible, growing to $32 million p.a. by 2006, i.e. in just two years, which seems a bit of a stretch. He continues with a claim of $12 million of sales of information products in the first 12 hours of launching Stompernet in October 2006! (A rock star at a concert or a heavyweight boxing champion defending his title can earn a $1,000,000 an hour, but an Internet guru? Perhaps.)
At the blog portion of his site (as given above) he also offers professional mentors, i.e. business coaching. The hype notwithstanding, his site does offer solid content.
Mike Filsaime, www.mikefilsaime.com, has the clean, professional website one would expect, but little information about his background. In 2010 the author telephoned his office on another matter and, curious, asked around a bit. Apparently Mike Filsaime was enrolled in business and computer science courses at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) from 1986 to 1988. (NYIT is a university with campuses in New York City and Long Island, and also abroad in the Middle East, China and Canada, with a total enrollment in 2010 of 15,000 students up to the Masters level.) He then worked for auto dealerships, becoming the sales manager for a Hyundai/Toyota dealership on Long Island. In 2004 he left that position to concentrate full time on Internet marketing, citing in his E-Mails (2010) earnings of $300,000 a month, i.e. $3,600,000 a year. In 2011 on another website, www.the-profit-platform.com, he revised this figure downwards to $1,740,000 a year.
In April 2011 his already attractive personal website had signficantly improved, including a mini-biography about himself. The bio still leaves some pretty large holes, but is certainly a step in the right direction.
He has a major E-mail list of one hundred thousand, perhaps even double or triple that, and is an expert in SEO and affiliate marketing. He is probably best known for his Butterfly Marketing program. The two spiral bound booklets of 120 and 80 pages that accompany it are excellent, well written with solid content, and for a modest price. (The program´s software was not tested.)
He has also written an a comprehensive resource summary, The Research Report, Everything You Need To Run Your Online Business Is Here. It is sent as a pdf file. In it are references, with brief descriptions, of a variety of services. These include domain name registration, auto-responders, credit card processors, survey software and much more, 37 pages in all.
However his firm is weak in customer service, as the scathing scam complaint shows from December, 2008 - that to this day (May, 2011) is floating out there on the Internet. The complaint is not unique, but seems a little hysterical. (The weapon of choice in the U.S. is the Better Business Bureau, www.bbb.org, which has successfully intervened on behalf of other of his customers.)
His coaching programs are mostly delivered by staff, with his own contribution reserved for the top end. He has had the brainstorm of scheduling cruise ship excursions, the Annual Internet Marketers Cruise. One goes on this working holiday for a chance to network with some of the main Internet gurus.
Suggestion: If E-Commerce is a priority for your company, investigate this cruise. If your due diligence indicates that it lives up to its promotion, then reward a key member of your staff with the cruise. That person should be able to find, or get a referral to, the right "E-consultant" for you.
Katie Freiling, www.katiefreiling.com, from California, apparently spent some time in Las Vegas and now (2011) lives in San Diego. She has a "holistic" orientation towards personal development and spirituality, which is rather different from anything one encounters in the C-suites. At the risk of not sounding politically correct, in the "rampant with fat-bodies" U.S., her trim figure is notable; in fact, she´s gorgeous.
Regardless, she is dead serious about her on-line business. She shares the same focus as the others mentioned here, viz. teaching people how to make money on the Internet. Her website has several nicely done videos and she periodically offers private business coaching.
Eben Pagan claims on-line revenues of $20 million per year, i.e. about $1,666,000 a month. That he has multiple websites is therefore not surprising. However that each of the six sites below generates an average of $278,000 a month appears unlikely. Presumably he has other significant sources of on-line revenues.
1) www.doubleyourdating.com, his first site, is still alive and well. It has some amusing content about how single men can improve their social lives, at any rate in the context of the Californian dating scene.
2) www.ebenpaganvideos.com appears inactive, as it leads one (as of May, 2011) to an Optimize Press site, which appears to have nothing to do with his businesses.
3) www.ebenpagan.wordpress.com is a straight print blog, without images. It emphasizes self-promotion. The most recent posts on it were from August, 2009 (status May, 2011).
4) www.ebenpage.org is rather garish. It has a large opt-in for one to receive a free report about him.
5) www.getaltitude.com brings one to the headline "Altitude is closed." -- followed by a quieter opt-in to receive free video training.
6) www.altitudeblog.com is by far the most attractive of the sites, with a clean, elegant design. However as of May, 2011 the material on it is all dated 2008. For further information, it directs you to the preceding website (5).
He does not appear to have a comprehensive business website, either under his own name or that of a corporation. He is associated with Hot Media Inc., according to an FTC Disclosure.* His company is Get Altitude LLC at 3960 Howard Hughes Hwy, Las Vegas. The address at Howard Hughes Hwy is noteworthy.**
Information gleaned from here and there is that Eben Pagan is originally from Oregon. He had a slow start, flunking out of high school, then out of community college. Apparently he did manual labor in his early twenties before getting into real estate sales.
His first on-line venture was selling dating advice: "Double Your Dating" under the pseudonym David DeAngelo. A recent (2010) offering by him was to help people launch their information businesses on the Internet with a three-month group coaching program. One also received one-on-one sessions with business coaches he had hired, as well as webinars and other training material. Each program was limited to 25 persons.
* FTC www.ftc.gov refers to the Federal Trade Commission of the U.S. It is a federal agency that enforces consumer protection laws, such as the endorsement guidelines for bloggers (revised 2009).
** Howard Hughes was a billionaire aviation entrepreneur. He had his first flying lessons at 14 and became one of the most influential aviators in history. (Along the way he owned TWA airlines.) He produced his first Hollywood film, a critical and financial success, at the age of 22. At 25 he spent $3.8 million (ca. $50 million today) to produce the aviation film Hell´s Angels. He died as an eccentric recluse. (Wikipedia, 2011)
! Howie Schwartz, www.howiesapprenticevoyeur.com, repeatedly offers very well done, long pdf downloads for free about various Internet marketing subjects. (He´s seen the halls of academia somewhere, possibly at one of those prestigious East coast "decked with holly" ones.) The website is for one of his programs, but, similar to Eben Pagan and many other Internet gurus, he has no comprehensive business website.
The apprentice website itself is not updated, peculiar indeed for someone who has staff working for him. In April 2011 the site featured a program for May 2010, and takes you to a page that "does not exist" when you click on his name. When you click on "consulting," you see a reference to his being CEO of Blogsucession.com, which also no longer exists, and a fee of $150 an hour for telephone coaching. Both Eben Pagan and he have good content, so their "smoke and mirrors" (lack of) company and personal information seems odd.
In April 2011 Howie Schwartz offered a comprehensive five-month coaching program, limited to 25 people, at a cost of $3,000. The first two months consist of webinars with follow-up Q & A sessions, and one personal 30 min. telephone call per month with him. The next three months one has two calls per month. A real plus of the program is the chance to attend two "live" seminars, one in May in Connecticut and the other in June in San Francisco.
As a bonus for joining one gets access on-line to content he has sold in the past, apparently to almost all of it. The program appears to be good value for money. However before signing up for it, or a similar future offering, one needs first to do a little more "due diligence" on the obscure creator and presenter.
! Yaro Starak, www.entrepreneurs-journey.com, out of Australia is the leading blogging guru. He teaches people how to make money blogging. His website (also vague about his business) mentions coaching, including the possibility of one-on-one coaching. In 2010 for $5,000 or $6,000 one could receive over a period of twelve weeks six one-on-one calls (i.e. three hours) and six conference calls (duration not specified) plus access to various on-line resources. His fee for private coaching over the phone or Skyp is $1,000 an hour (2011).
A host of Internet marketers imply a "life on the beach" can be achieved with little effort, with the "four hour work week" being one of the most ludicrous claims. In contrast, Yarol Starak has written a very honest blog about what it really does take to succeed. His autobiographical blog, ten ways to make money on the Internet, is far more detailed than a resume. Anyone who thinks the Internet is an easy road to instant millions should read it!
Brian Tracy, www.briantracy.com, although not really an Internet guru, is an interesting example of "bricks and clicks." He sells self-help, motivational and business education products on-line with upgrades to seminars. In a recent promotion (September, 2010) for a business seminar, he mentions that his fee for one-on-one coaching is $5,000 an hour. (Is this fee just advertising puffery, or is it really what he earns, reflecting low level celebrity status?). He too has good content. In fact a one-and-a-half minute video of his, "Eat that frog!" is the second part of the insert "Inspiration versus Procrastination" on the "Start-up (EBO) Strategy" subpage at Services.
An attractive aspect of his website is that it actually shows pictures and paragraph CVs of the 15 people who comprise his staff. That notwithstanding, the information about himself is very vague. The statement is made that in a thirty-year career he has consulted over 10,000 companies, held over 5,000 seminars and talks, and written 45 books. That means that in an average year he consulted with 333 companies and made 167 presentations, meanwhile writing 1 and 1/2 books.
Of course he did not work just 50 five day-weeks (250 days) in the year. Let us say that he worked 38 six-day weeks, and 15 seven-day weeks (333 days). Every work day he consulted with a company. Every other work day he made a presentation. His free Sundays (38 of them in the year), he did his writing for his books. (That means he could write 1 and 1/2 books in an uninterrupted five weeks!). As his talks were held in 80 some countries, one also has to include significant travel time. To maintain this pace over decades is impressive.
He also states having been COO of a company with $265 million in assets and $75 million in sales, but does not name it. He claims he knows four languages, but does not name them. The Wikipedia article about him fills in some of the blanks. He dropped out of high school in Vancouver, Canada, worked as a laborer. Then he traveled the world for two years working on a Norwegian freighter and earned a high school diploma at night.
He got into commission sales, then real estate. He worked for Allarcom Developments, a home builder in Edmonton, Alberta Canada. He started selling self-improvement tapes and books out of an office in a warehouse in the south end of Edmonton. Eventually he moved to California, and never looked back.
His books (the website mentions a total of 45) focus on self-help, as the following two examples show: Maximum Achievement, Strategies That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed (1993) and Flight Plan, the Real Secret of Success (2008). The Brian Tracy College of Business and Entrepreneurship, featuring an executive MBA, at Andrew Jackson University (www.aju.com) is named after him. It is a distance learning school based in Hoover, Alabama.
Appendix I - Some Other Noteworthy Internet Gurus
Like most of the Internet gurus, the people below do not have comprehensive business websites with information about the company and its staff. The individuals here do not appear to offer coaching, and therefore are relegated to this Appendix. For well-intentioned, upbeat reviews of the products and services offered by them, cf. www.imreportcard.com.
Jeff Johnson, www.undergroundconfessions.com, has a company named Profitable Results Marketing LLC.
! Frank Kern, www.frankkern.com, has the reputation of making money in Internet market niches besides the standard one of "how-to-make-money-on-the-Internet." How he does this is not clear. He does, however, offer refreshingly honest, and amusing, articles on his main website.
In "Two Magic Powers" he writes about a woman entrepreneur he admires, Madam C. J. Walker. In fact, his comments brought her to our attention, and our own article about her appears as a subpage at CXO Careers. He begins the article about this remarkable woman with a little bit about his own initial trials and tribulations: (Yaro Starak´s more extensive description of his start in Internet business, "ten ways to make money on the Internet," is given as a link at his name above. It does not involve nearly as much drama.)
QUOTE: Here are some of the businesses I´ve effortlessly run straight into the ground (it´s a talent):
1. Used Car Lot (the prestige!)
2. Underground Dog Fencing (don´t ask)
3. Roofing Contractor and Commercial Repair (even more prestige!)
4. Merchant Bank Card processing (failed at "legitimate" business)
... And of course, this is before I got online.
Once I got online, I was able to have my most spectacular failure to date ... the dreaded instant Internet empires, which got the attention of the FTC* and earned me a nice lawsuit, which cost me everything I had. END QUOTE
In another article, "You, the best Guru ever," also featured on the website landing page, he gives some realistic, hard-nosed advice about a) losing weight and b) earning money on-line:
QUOTE Imagine a guy wanting to lose weight (ahem). How many books does he need to buy? For the love of God, it´s easy. Put the fork down and walk around for a few hours a day.
Do that for a month and you´ll weigh less. (Duh!)
But There´s A Gazillion Dollar Industry Delivering "New" Weight Loss Stuff Every Day!
. . . There´s a new diet book every 20 minutes or so it seems. And the books aren´t the problem. I´m sure they all work if the reader just the education they just got, adds in a lot of effort, determination . . .
But that clearly does not happen. People just keep buying books and gizmos that go unused. Same thing happens in the marketing world. . . We buy courses and seminars and then jump to the next one . . . without implementing. . .
1. Don´t buy any advice this month. Go back and re-read whatever you´ve bought in the past. It´s still good. . .
It´s simple:
1. See what worked for other people.
2. Try it for yourself.
3. Adjust according to results.
4. Repeat END QUOTE
* FTC www.ftc.gov refers to the Federal Trade Commission of the U.S. It is a federal agency that enforces consumer protection laws, such as the endorsement guidelines for bloggers (revised 2009).
His websites incude:
1) www.frankkern.com This website is his main one. In 2010 he had a message on it that he had retired from Internet marketing and only accepted private clients and "Platinum Members," with no contact information. In 2011 his website had a bright new look. It features well-written, useful articles, as shown by the quotes above.
2) https://masscontrolsite.com This site links to the one above
3) www.frankkern.net has an unusual promotion for his new book (May 2011) about doing business on-line. Viewers are asked to suggest a title for it.
! Mark Ling, www.affilorama.com, of New Zealand, is one of the more successful affiliate marketers. He has a nice format for his webinars in that one does not have to opt in to receive a registration number. Instead he gives you a choice of different times to view it, and you just click on to the link at that time to join the webinar. In one (4 May 2011) he stated he had a list of one million subscribers, and that one should expect to average $1 a month earnings per subscriber.
He considered having open rates of 30% on an E-Mail newsletter to be good, 5% acceptable, and 1% to 2% a sign of failure. In contrast, Jeffery Gitomer's weekly E-Zine "Sales Caffeine" certainly has an open rate of well over 80%, and 95+% would not surprise me.
After offering some fairly basic, common sense information, the webinar concluded with an offer for $497 to buy an affiliate program. That program included "do-it-yourself" websites with excellent features. One can, for instance, adjust the width of the margin. (On this website, one has to edit the template's CSS to do that.) Nevertheless the "first, provide value" content of the webinar seemed a bit light to market a $497 product, given the sales mantra that one usually needs eight or more contacts with a customer before he actually buys.
The website offers a great deal of free content, including 100 video lessons. Premium membership is offered at $67 a month. His programs are oriented towards people wanting to be middlemen, as opposed to those who have their own content to sell.
Armand Morin, www.armandmorin.com, started on-line in 1996. His website (2010) states that he trains 200,000 people a year and that he has had revenues of $76 million on-line. In an audio clip (26.09.10) promoting his Big Seminar, he stated current revenues of $24 million a year. Before turning to Internet marketing, he may have been the CEO and Co-founder of Global Telecom International Inc., acquired by American Nortel Corporation.
John Reese, www.income.com, apparently has been in Internet marketing since 1990. His claim to fame is that the 2004 release of his course Traffic Secrets allegedly reached $1,000,000 in sales in 18 hours.
Rich Schefren, www.strategicprofits.com, gives more information about himself on the website than most. He has a degree from Case Western University. His work experience includes positions at the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, in the family retail business, and founding a chain of hypnosis centers. He launched his Internet business in 2004. The site has good content in the standard market niche of how to make money on the Internet selling information.
A great many of the Internet gurus have been customers of his. In a webinar on March 26th, 2011 he stated he charged $2,000 an hour for consulting, had received up to $25,000 for a one hour speech, had $3.5 million of sales on the Internet in one day shortly after launching his business, and had first year Internet revenues of $7.4 million. He also briefly mentioned his experience in "bricks and mortar" businesses.
The webinar made the credible point that most Internet entrepreneurs are opportunity seekers. Therefore they are serial buyers of "how to" Internet products, e.g. how to do SEO, how to build lists, etc. They tend to be doing everything themselves in their businesses. In short they are focusing on tactics. What he advises doing instead is focusing on "what to do." Do less and outsource. In short one should focus on strategy.
His webinar presentation used a rather peculiar sales funnel. He began with an extraordinary amount of self-promotion, interspaced with tidbits of content. Of the 276 people who subscribed, he lost about one person a minute the first 20 minutes. The rate picked up a bit, and 40 minutes later 77 people had left, at which point we also disengaged. By the end of the several hour webinar presumably only a small percentage of the people would have remained. That Rich Schefran knows what he is doing seems a safe bet. Perhaps the lifetime value of an "indoctrinated" customer is higher than that of one who has listened to a standard informational webinar, as opposed to his promotional one.
Jeff Walker, https://productlaunchformula.com, has a company named Internet Alchemy, Inc. He has an interesting story about Google, which apparently only allows one AdSense account per company. He and his brother opened two accounts, ca. 2003, in order the better to track income streams. The infamous "Google slap" followed and the accounts were shut down, payments owed not made. A year later (presumably after litigation, although he does not mention that), Google relented and agreed to make the payments. Despite a "no fraud" finding, he is still (2010) banned from Google. That has forced him to develop other creative ways of list-building.
Other Internet marketers are legion; a couple of dozen U.S. examples are:
Robert Allen Lou Edwards Jason Hendersen Tracy Repchuk
Matt Bacak Ray Edwards Mike Hill Joel Therien
David Cavanaugh Donna Fox Bob Jenkins Howard Tiano
Michael Cheney Dori Friend Simon Leung Kevi Wilke
Kirt Christensen David Frey Larry Loik Chris Zavadowski Willie Crawford Paul Hartunian Joel Peterson
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