Building a location-independent coaching business has been a f*cking amazing ride. For 5+ years, I’ve been growing as a coach and putting my business chops to work…except that for nearly 4 of these years, I let others make me believe that 1:1 services are the way.

The way to 6 figures, the way to scalability, the way to freedom. 

I crashed pretty hard when I woke up from that funny dream and I’m so glad that I’m wide awake, alive, and thriving to tell the tell as to why a location independent coaching business should most definitely not be based on private coaching offers. 

And what to do instead.

Are you ready to spice things up a bit here? 

Then read along (careful though, the below pretty much blew up my business. It also put it back together in a much better way) 

What is a Location-Independent Coaching Business?

A location-independent coaching business is a business that serves your clients powerfully, with a large profit margin, and without sacrificing your ideal lifestyle.

When you set out to create a freedom-based life as a coach, you’ll likely want to create a business that is on-purpose, impactful, and provides you with the location and time freedom.

Already now, you might see how committing to dozens of pre-scheduled calls with private clients might not be the way there. 

However, most coaches are taught to start offering 1:1 coaching, create one big ‘flagship offer’, and even they can ‘scale’ their 1:1 coaching offer.

How, that is beyond me. 

Here’s why:

If you have to trade your time for the money you get, your business is not scalable. 

If you can only serve one-to-one and have an exact cap on the number of clients you can serve, your business is not scalable. 

And if you have to be up after 10 pm to serve your clients, you don’t have a location-independent coaching business. You have a business that literally keeps you up at night.

Finally, (and just to throw something in that’s way beyond this article, but covered in this Nomad Business Blueprint), offering just one big-ass flagship program that runs once a year is like opening a Target that only sells zero-sized sweatpants, but only once a year. 

Please tell me you see how ridiculous that is! 

Back to being productive: While flagship offers and 1:1 coaching won’t scale or create a freedom-based lifestyle, there are business models that serve the shit out of your clients while you travel the world with true freedom. 

I’ll share what these look like below. And if you’re ready to draw a line in the sand and put all the right puzzle pieces in place to create freedom through coaching, this $39 blueprint is totally for you. 

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How to *actually* scale a coaching business – is it possible?

Yes, it is possible to scale a coaching business. This industry is worth somewhere between 5 and 6 BILLION USD…people scale their businesses, believe me. 

But in reading through forums, Facebook groups, and working with my clients, I realized one big mistake people make when it comes to growing their coaching business:

People have a self-sacrificing mindset. That’s it. It’s why you can’t get yourself to scale your business:

• Because you’d want to be there to powerfully serve your clients, you tell yourself (and coach): “A course won’t do.”
• Based on your belief that coaching only works if it’s private, and you say: “A rolling-admission mastermind will damage the confidentiality of the group.”
• Because you want to ensure that everyone who buys the course will complete it, you worry: “What if they don’t end up walking themselves through the course they bought? A course can never achieve the transformation I can help them achieve if I were to hold their hand.”

And boom, now you are stuck with 1:1 because you’ve been told it’s the only way to powerfully serve. If you’re lucky, you launch a mastermind once a year and run a retreat every spring. 

The problem with this is two-fold: 

1. Your clients can only ever work with you if A) you have a spot available, B) they can come up with thousands of dollars to pay you for your time.
2. You can only make money if you show up. If you’re sick, you have to reschedule a bunch of calls, etc. 

Instead, the way to scale a location independent coaching business (any, really) is by learning to fully embrace all ways in which you can serve, teach, and coach clients and allow your clients to be the self-powered, independent humans they are. 

This will open you up to offering courses that have unlimited capacity, create masterminds that admit new members on a rolling basis, and make your 1:1 offer extremely exclusive..

Must-Haves for scaling a location independent coaching business

In brief, here’s what you need to scale your location-independent coaching business: 

• An unapologetic connection to what freedom means to you, and a relentless desire to build a business that serves you that freedom life on a silver platter. 
• multiple streams of income 
• Multiple offers, at different price points, that solve different problems. 
• A mix of offers that are evergreen (make money in your sleep) and programs that you run life
• An audience that adores you, with credit card in hand. 

I wanted to throw these out there now in case you need a minute to acclimate to this idea of massively adding to your 1:1 offer. 

If you’re willing to see things a little differently, then I’ll share with you my business f*ckups inside the 1:1 world and then show you how to move out of time restrains and into time freedom. 

If you’re cool with living out your best years on the 1:1 rodeo, this might not be for you. (but I think it is for you) 

Read also: How working with a digital nomad coach can transform your location independent lifestyle and business.

My story of “Scaling” 1:1 while being Location-Independent

I, too, was told that I could “scale” a coaching business to multiple six figures with 1:1 clients.

In fact, I received countless trainings on how being there with a client will achieve the best transformation for them. Howthere’s nothing quite like it.

I, too, was trained in priding myself in hyper-tailoring everything, including the damned contract-signing ceremony. 

I was even told that social media isn’t needed to scale a coaching business. 

It was all about being there with the client…and that that’s the only way to truly serve. 

The beauty of such a tailored approach was that I learned to become a freaking powerful coach. I can see what’s up by looking at the way you blink or sniff your nose. 

I also ended up with a full private client roster, funky sleeping schedules, and calls at 8am and 10pm. All because I was traveling.

As a result, I had no capacity to take on more clients. Therefore, I had no way of making any significant chunk of additional money in my business. Instead, I was exhausted and money seemed to be stagnating simply because I’d run out of time.

I realized that while I was working online, I wasn’t exactly running a location-independent coaching business. 

I couldn’t serve more people. Neither could I scale bigger. And I could for sure not sustain this model while traveling the world. There was no room for differing time zones, vacations, or sick days.

It became clear to me that I needed to diversify my income streams, and create asynchronous ways of serving more people, and more offers. I also realized that I may, in fact, need to grow a social media audience (duh). 

And so I changed my business model from 1 to 1, to 1 to many.

How to Scale a Location-Independent Coaching Business

A year ago, I changed everything about my business model in order to create a business that is truly freedom-based.

I’d realized that not every online business is a location-independent business. But the below ingredients will make for just that: a location independent coaching business.

Buckle up.

Oh, and if you’re totally ready to go for it, jump in my (entirely ever-green) $39 course:

Freedom Vision – Are you IN the Business?

If your business seems to drain the life out of you, chances are that YOU aren’t really in the business.

If your personality is suppressed, you’re not showing up authentically. Similarly, if you’re toning down your opinions, you’re holding back. In that case, you’re selling what you think you need to sell to turn a profit. Ultimately, you’ll end up creating a business that reigns your life…

When what you wanted was to create a business that leads to true location independence and time freedom.

So, in order to create just that, you need to get super clear on what freedom looks like to you. And that’s going to be different for you than it is for the next person.

You’ll also need to fully show up as yourself every time you show up in your coaching business.

Knowing who you are and what you want will help you come up with marketing methods and offers that are truly aligned with you.

In other words: if you embrace your personality and your dreams, you will sell more.

Are you IN the business?

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Location-Independent Structure

If you do nothing else, you must embrace the fact that a 1:1-reliant coaching business will not scale. Especially, if you move through different timezones, this model will not be sustainable in the long run.

While you may wish to keep a few private clients, your ultimate goal should be to create a business structure (and offers) that provides multiple price-entry points to your clients. This structure, eventually, should also allow you to serve without being at your laptop.

You’ll want to create a business that provides services in all of the following ways: 

• Low-priced masterminds, small offers, and courses. 
• mid-prices programs that focus on one particular aspect* 
• in-depth courses that solve one very specific problem and will affect everything else. 
• Masterminds/retreats/miniminds, some sort of one-to-many program that runs live and offers personalized coaching. 
• Optional: 1:1 as your highest-priced item, highly exclusive, and capped at a low number. 

In the Nomad Busi Blueprint, I go in-depth on how to create an offer journey: a way for your clients to be able to know exactly which programs to plug into in order to solve which problem, and where to go next.

You’ll also want to let go of the idea that coaching equals holding hands. It’s truly not. Coaching is empowerment – and your offers should reflect your unwavering belief that your audience is capable of making the best decisions (and taking the best actions) for themselves. And you’re there to help if they need you.

Automated Client Attraction and Onboarding

Many coaches are taught how to establish genuine, personal connections with people who could become clients. There’s a whole method of how to serve from afar, via emails, and offer complementary coaching calls to people you’d like to have as private clients.

It’s an approach I’ve come to master. One that allows me to now automate how I serve from afar, via emails, and free offers.

The operative word here is ‘automate’, of course. To scale a location-independent coaching business, you must become comfortable with marketing and with systems that help you automate. 

Specifically, you’ll want to focus on two things: 

• Audience attraction: commit to at least 3 ways in which you constantly attract new eyeballs that truly want what you offer. Have at least one of these ways be actual, in-person networking. The other two should be one social media platform and something with a longer longevity such as a podcast, a blog, or YouTube Channel.
• Systems that automate: start simple by creating a freebie that new subscribers automatically get upon signing up, then look at ways in which you can move a new subscriber through an email sequence, or commit to systems such as Teachable that allow you to automatically upsell a product on check out. 

Again, you’ll want to truly lead from a place of scaling your service here, and you can serve more people by agreeing to simplify and automate your systems.

Further Considerations for Your Location-Independent Coaching Business:

Now, aside from creating a freedom vision, scalable offers, and a way to attract and retain clients, you’ll also need to set up the legal and transactional side of your business in a way that is conducive to traveling internationally and conducting your business from a different continent.

Here are just four of many things to be aware of:

Prepare your financial systems for location-independence

Unless you intentionally set up your financial systems for location-independence you’ll run into legal or cashflow issues quite quickly. I go in-depth about the systems you need to have set-up here.

You’ll need to make sure that you can pay your team across currencies and financial systems and that your clients can pay you in various currencies.

You’ll also need to prepare your financial institutions that you’ll be logging in from different countries and locations – so that you don’t get blocked or logged out of your bank, etc.

Pre-record if Timezones don’t work

Part of creating scalable offers and location-independent is to allow yourself to do what works for you. I used to createoffers that I needed to show up live for and that I wanted my clients to be there live for as well.

This landed me in a lot of late-night calls, especially when I lived in Asia.

Now, I simply pre-record everything unless I can find a time that truly works for me and would make sense for my clients.I try to do at least 40% of any programs live, and ensure that questions can be asked asynchronously. 

Masterminds and 1:1 are scheduled in a way so that I am set up to show up fully present. Hence, they’re super exclusive. 

See, what’s crucial here is to give yourself permission to create something that works for you first. You’ll need to start operating from a place of believing that what you say on video can change a person’s life in just the same way as something you say to them live on a private call.

Stay Put while you Launch a Program / your Business

One of the biggest mistakes I see new digital nomad entrepreneurs make is to travel too often, especially while launching a program or business.

When you travel through different destinations, your body and mind, inevitably, need time to adjust to a new climate, timezone, etc. All energy that you won’t have for growing your business, a new branch of your business, or for launching a program.

Later, once your systems are dialed in, you may be able to travel while launching a whole program (cue the reels made at airports, gotta love ’em). But for the start, as you’re pivoting in your business, be sure you don’t travel too frequently.

Schedule your program launches for while you’re put.

Don’t Wing the Legal Side – Become a Business

Let me be very clear: you cannot automate and scale something that is not a legal business. You won’t be allowed to sign up for Stripe or Teachable, or any other platform that can allow you to truly automate and scale customer journeys and sales.

The taxman will come after you, as well, if you’ve not set yourself up as a business.

Now, there are brilliant ways in which you can minimize your tax obligations, and there are negligent ways. Be a pro, set up your offshore business or a virtual business. Hire an accountant if you have to, or even a lawyer.

Believe me when I say that doing this upfront will save and make you money down the line, and it will likely help you grow faster because you have all the back-end infrastructure set up.

Final Words

Growing a location independent coaching business is fun, rewarding, highly profitable, and super impactful. If you do it with the right intentions, offers, and marketing.

I believe that many coaches are brilliant coaches and mediocre business people – perhaps that’s why there are so many coaches teaching coaches to focus on 1:1 and a flagship offer.

I honestly don’t know. Once I turned on the side of my brain that studied business and entrepreneurship in school, and has been an entrepreneur across industries for 5+ years, I had to laugh: why would I ever…?

Jump in my free webinar to take your first steps towards impact, freedom, and entrepreneurship here:

How many offers do you have in your business? And what does freedom mean to you? Tell me in the comments.

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