Alternative business model for NLP trainings

What I had in mind when I posted that was something like Tony Robbins does, where he has hundreds or maybe thousands (I have no idea how many exactly) coaches that work for his company, and he does the marketing and sales for the coaches, and then he gets a cut of the coaches’ revenues. He also has two tiers of coaches with different pricing, regular coaches and elite coaches (I forget the exact terms he uses). I had one of the regular Tony Robbins coaches for a year before I discovered NLP. The part I’m adding onto the TR model, based on the above article, is actually training the coaches in NLP for a reduced price before bringing them on as coaches.

What I’m describing is really more like a franchise model that a salaried employee model. You train coaches, you do the marketing and have sales people (who may also be coaches) to generate coaching clients, and feed the clients you generate to your “franchisee” coaches, under your own brand name. So you don’t pay the coaches any salary… they just get paid for each breakthrough they do, and then you get a cut of that. So if you train these coaches for free or for a heavy discount, then they give you a cut of their breakthrough session revenues until they have paid off their training, plus extra so that you’re making a good return on your investment in training them.

Say you have a $4,000 Prac. Your student Bobby pays you say $500 up front to take the Prac so that you get enough cash up front to pay for the training room etc. So he owes you $3,500. Instead of putting Bobby in debt, you bring him into your stable of coaches, and you feed him new clients. In return, Bobby gives you a cut of his sales (maybe 10-25%? Need to play with the numbers to see what works) until he has paid you back the $3,500, plus say a 20% annual return on your investment (so an extra $700 if he pays you back within a year, for a total of $500 cash up front + $3,500 in principal + $700 premium to you for “investing” in Bobby = $4,700 for a Prac).

If Bobby decides after taking your training that he doesn’t want to become a coach, or he works for you for a while and quits, you keep the $500 he paid you plus any revenues he generated for you, but he forfeits his certifications. So he still knows NLP and can use it for himself, but he’s not certified to work with clients.

So the win-win is that Bobby can take your training and develop a lucrative new coaching business a) with very little up-front investment, b) without having to master marketing and sales just to become a coach, so it opens the doors to many VL4 coaches who otherwise might not even take the training let alone become a coach. The benefit to you as the business owner is that there is no limit to how many coaches you can hire, so you start building “mailbox money…” You’re no longer a hunter gatherer living off of your own coaching and training efforts, but you’ve become an industrialist… you’re leveraging the time and effort of many coaches that work for you to build your company to a much larger scale than you could do on your own. And you can make a healthy return on your investment in your students… like I said a 20% ROI could be possible, or maybe more, but taking into account that some students will drop out of the program, so you need a healthy enough return to account for that drop out risk. Maybe you charge a 20% premium per student, but after all the drop outs your average ROI is more like 10%. But you’ve also covered your downside by charging $500 up front, so you’re not putting any of your own capital at risk… all you’re risking is the opportunity cost of what you could have made if you had charged full price up front for the training.

If you just do coaching or training on your own, there is a limit to how many people you can physically coach/train in a year… granted with the Internet that limit is increasing dramatically. But if you have many coaches working for you, there is no limit to how big you can grow your coaching/training empire.

The other main benefit of this I see, as briefly mentioned above, is that you can really expand the market for NLP coaching and training by making it accessible to more VL4 or VL4/6 students, who may not have much money, and may be uncomfortable with sales, but you can hold their hand and get them set up as coaches, feed them clients, they can make a lot of money as coaches, and you can make a lot of money from your cut of their revenues. So in terms of Transforming the Planet, we can potentially do it way faster by including many more people. If the majority of people on this planet are VL4 at the moment, wouldn’t it be nice to get more of them involved in the process of Transforming the Planet? And to help them transition to VL5 faster by holding their hand to build their coaching businesses.

So this is a model that excites me because it’s so scalable, both in terms of economic benefit to me and my students, and in terms of multiplying our efforts as trainers in Transforming the Planet. The above numbers are off the top of my head, so you would need to really crunch the numbers and see what works for you. And maybe you start out charging full price for trainings until you build your business and build a cash cushion for yourself, at which point you’re free to experiment with other business models.