What's up, you guys? Welcome back to The Conscience Coach Podcast. We are continuing with the Abundant Coach Series. I thought it'd be really fun to share my snapshot of my coaching journey. So, like, I don't mean being coached, although that would be an interesting one, too. I've been coached by dozens of coaches. I've worked one on one with coaches. I've joined masterminds. I've done group coaching programs. I've done courses. I've been in memberships. Like, I've done it all.
But today is about like what I have actually done as a coach, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner coach. And so we're going to take it way back to like 2017 when I first heard the word coaching. So I did not jump into coaching right away, but I did start a blog. So like phase one of my coaching business actually started with a blog that I called GrowingAndGrace.com. Some of you found me because of this blog and this era of my business when I started an Instagram called Growing and Grace.
I started publishing content. And it's so funny because it was just like very generalized content. I took a course on how to build a WordPress website, how to host my blog, how to monetize my blog, which is hilarious now. And I'll explain more. But I was in kind of like a journey with my family finances to make money online. I'd been flipping products on eBay. I was teaching VIP Kid, which was like teaching English to kids in China. I was transcribing videos and podcasts. I was doing it all to make some money for my very poor family.
And I started this blog thinking I would monetize it, which is hilarious. If you know anything about monetization, like I would have needed so much traffic to actually make any money. I didn't know that at the time. I just follow these family bloggers who were like an original family blogger. Like they developed a huge audience and started to monetize it by hosting ads on their website. And they made a ton of money and they got to travel the world and all this stuff. And so I was like, oh, like freedom. I'm going to start a blog.
And so I was blogging about growth and grace. This concept of like pursuing personal development and becoming your best while like giving yourself grace in a not stress out way. Very similar to my concept of quiet wealth, but back then I called it Growing and Grace.
And so as I started to do this blog, I started to post on my Instagram. I started to post on Facebook and I started to share this blog and I would have like guest contributors like I had my sister and I had my friend and I had my coworker like all contribute to this blog. And it was just like baby business owner Amber.
Many of you met me. Not many of you. Some of you remember these days, which is crazy. Then I had been developing this idea for months, like my sister in law told me like, hey, you should look into life coaching. Then I had a friend that was like, are you a life coach? Is that what you ended up doing? And I was like, what does a life coach even mean? And I watched this video. I don't even know if he's still YouTubes, but it was this video called “How I Would Start a Life Coaching Business.”
So I watched and he's like, I would just start doing free calls. And so I was like, what? That seems really risky. I don't know. And so I just kept blogging. And it was just like this idea that kept brewing. And I remember one time I was just like, you know what? My blog is not making me that much money. It's so funny that I was thinking this because, of course, it wasn't. I had no traffic. I watched this video about having 100 free calls and starting like this life coaching business.
And then what started to happen as I started watching like Tony Robbins videos and I found Brooke Castillo on YouTube and I found this guy named Project Life Mastery, and then I found Dean Graziosi and I found Brendan Burchard and all these like internet marketer coaches about personal development. And then I read the book Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis. And I was like, these people are life coaches. I can do this. And so I took that guy's challenge, the 100 free calls, and I did it.
I was like, I made this post on social media that was I'm going to be adding coaching to what I do at Growing and Grace because I'd been blogging. Book a call with me, like help me out. I'm looking for 100 people to say yes to a free session with me as I gain experience as a coach. And I didn't know it at the time, but that's actually a process that I highly recommend to new coaches, whether you're certified or not, doesn't matter. Start getting calls on your calendar and make it about you getting experience. People loved to help me out.
And ironically, like they joined the call because they wanted to help me. And then many of them ended up liking coaching and then became my clients. Some of my first clients came from those 100 free calls. I didn't even get to 100, by the way. I think I got to like 40. But my intention was to get to 100 free calls on my calendar. The first 40 or so, I'd have to look back at my records. I don't remember how many calls I actually booked. But about 40 of them, as I started to actually coach, like some of them wanted to actually work with me and pay me.
So phase three of my story is that I started charging $200 a month for coaching, so that's $50 a session. I had no issue with that. It's so funny. Sometimes we get in our heads about pricing. I have always just, and you'll see this theme. I have always just charged what felt good to me.
That was an underrated strategy, and we'll get into that later. But when I believed in my pricing and I didn't have any mind drama about it, it was easy for me to sign clients at $200 a month.
And I loved it. I loved my clients. In fact, you probably heard me talk about this, where I found one of my clients that I coached in a Starbucks, like I would walk to the Starbucks and coach her in person because she was local. And I'd have some virtual clients. And those were my first clients, right? $200 a month. I had the first client. Then I had two clients and I had three clients and had four clients. And I was like, I'm making $800 a month.
That was enough for me to replace some of these things that I was doing, like teaching English to kids. That was life changing for me. Sometimes we forget the miracle of what coaching can provide. So that was 100% life changing for me to be charging $200 a month, virtual and Starbucks coaching, making $800 a month. That was like, mind blowing to me that I could do this all from a blog. That's how it all started. It was like this Growing and Grace blog. I put a little tab on my blog that was like, coach with me or something. And no one booked a call from the website, which is why I started to learn how to sign clients this way.
And one of the themes that I will talk about is like conversations. That's what we talked about in the first part of the Abundant Coach Series was like the art of one on one conversations, because that is absolutely how I got my first clients. Conversations started with free calls that turned into paying clients. And then phase four is when I started to raise my prices. So the first time I raised my prices, I went from $200 a month to $600 a month. I learned this strategy where you grandfather your clients in. So like I kept all my original clients at $200 a month. The next client after I was like, I have like five clients, maybe even six.
I can't remember how many I had. Six one on one clients at $200 a month. I was like, I'm going to raise my prices for the next person that I talk to, because this is crazy. So then I charged my next client $600 a month. So now I had five or six clients at $200 a month and then one client at $600 a month. And then I sent her. I was like, oh, my gosh, like this is a thing. I have clients. Then I got fully booked at $600 a month with clients. And this is where things started to get busy. I hired my first mommy's helper during this time because I was like, I have calls on my calendar, like I have an email list that I want to build.
Like I started to learn marketing. So at this point, I was making money. I started to invest back into my business. I got my first coach. I joined a course. I started buying books like crazy. And I started investing back into my business because I could see the potential of what this could become. At that point, I started really seeing this could be my career. And it felt different than in the beginning because I was like, I need to dedicate time and space into becoming a great coach and becoming a great business owner. Like I said, I started investing back into myself.
I think I joined my first mastermind during this point. I'm a little fuzzy on the dates. I’d have to look back. But I remember at that point when I was starting to send clients at $600 a month, I was starting to invest back into my business pretty heavily because I could see the return on investment. Right. I joined a course called Knowledge Broker Blueprint, I think. And I like made that two thousand dollar investment back based on what I learned from the course.
I just went right back into marketing and using what I learned. And so I completely bootstrapped my business. I would take a course, learn something, apply it, make more money. At that point, I raised my prices. So I joined my first mastermind. I had been working with this coach for a while. I had joined courses. I read books and I was like, I'm ready to take this to the next level. And I raised my prices from $600 a month to 3K for three months, which is basically like a thousand dollars a month. But I moved to packages. So I started selling these packages and I started working with higher level clients.
And this is something that I teach my clients is like, if you want to raise your prices, you elevate your ideal client. And that's a process that I teach inside the Conscious Coach Academy. Like you elevate your ideal client avatar when you raise your prices. You imagine someone further along in their journey. This is where I started signing business owners. And I wasn't a business coach when I made this transition. I was absolutely like a mindset and life coach at this time. So I was working with clients who were like a stay at home moms. I was working with clients who were work at home moms. I was working with clients who were college students. I worked with someone who was struggling in their marriage.
Like I was doing all sorts of generalized life coaching at this point. When I started signing clients at 3K for three months and I was like, I could really see… the picture started getting clear about like, I need business skills, business skills beyond just like DMing people, even though that's like the bread and butter of a coach's conversations. And so I started taking group programs. I started learning about email list building. I started building my own website and I stopped doing Growing and Grace. I changed my Instagram handle to Amber Smith Coaching. It's now @itsambersmith.
I changed things up because I realized, like, I'm a coach, I am not a blogger. This was a huge transition for me. The other thing that I started doing during this phase is I started my podcast, which was called The Seeker Podcast, because I realized I needed a place to share my long form thoughts. And so if you scroll way back into my podcast, you can listen to The Seeker Podcast, which was much more about personal development. So I was taking things that I learned from coaching, taking things I learned from books and just sharing my thoughts about it.
During this season of my life where I was taking group programs. I started really investing into my own mentorship. I worked with my first one on one coach during this time, like high ticket one on one coach. I joined a mastermind. I bought a bunch of courses, including one of my favorite courses by James Whitmore called Business by Design. During this time, I really felt this like level up experience. So I started having my podcast email list. I was growing on social media. I started podcasting regularly, sending emails regularly, posting content regularly.
During this phase of my business, like I said, I started working with a coach and I really saw my identity shifting. Also, during this phase is when I signed my first business coaching client, and it was kind of an accident, honestly. She didn't work with me as a life coach, but she had started a network marketing business and wanted to know how I was signing clients because she was like, how many clients do you have? I don't remember the exact number, but I felt fully booked at the time because I was considering a group coaching program that I wanted to sell.
During this time, I realized like what I was doing to get fully booked, like people probably weren't doing. I was expanding my money mindset and like I was investing pretty heavily in myself. And I was also starting to make more money as a coach. And so this person asked me, like, can you tell me what you're doing? Like, can I hire you as a business coach? And I was like, sure, but it's just going to look the same. We're going to meet every week. It's 3K for three months. I can share everything that I know about building this business. And that kind of set me on a different trajectory.
So I had the podcast. I was taking mostly life coaching clients, and I had started having people ask me about business. I was like, okay, I'm going to lean into this because I love it. Like I love studying. I studied so many marketing books, taking so many business courses. I had invested heavily in my own business coaching. I saw this need, especially for people who are like solopreneurs. So like I started working with stay at home moms on like how to start a business from home. That was like my first business niche.
It's so funny. Actually, I found a freebie that I had posted on Pinterest because I had dabbled in Pinterest for a little bit about how to choose your niche as a stay at home mom. Basically, like what kind of business works for being a stay at home mom? It was like network marketing where you sell people's products. Maybe you're like I talk about like transcribing things or being a virtual assistant. I talked about being a life coach. I talked about being someone's like Pinterest manager or like social media manager.
There's so many possibilities of making money. And that was like my first freebie was what you could do to work at home for a few hours a week as a stay at home mom. And that was like my first business coaching freebie. At that time, things started to really pick up because I saw word of mouth, when like a lot of my clients were starting to tell other clients. Some of my life coaching clients became business coaching clients because they were starting their own business. And then I started to see this theme begin where it was like the clients that I loved working with were entrepreneurial minded.
They had a side business. They were in network marketing. They were a coach. They had a platform. They were a podcaster or something. They had something where they were making money. And so I started teaching money mindset and like investing in yourself and taking risks and the mindset of failure. And I made this pivot in my content about entrepreneurism. That really changed one, my identity, but also like I found who I love to coach. I loved coaching people who were growing.
So through the years of blogging and life coaching, I felt like my identity completely transformed and my confidence grew when I worked with people who were what I like to call like in motion. My clients were up to something in life and we gelled together really well. So then at this point, I invested pretty heavily in myself. I joined a group coaching program. I joined another mastermind and I was working with a one on one coach all at the same time. That's where like exponential growth happened. Around this time, too, is when I found the book, The Prosperous Coach. So up until this point, I had just been kind of winging it and just doing what worked for me. I read the book, The Prosperous Coach by Rich Lifford and Sue Chandler.
And that book blew my mind. I was like, oh, this is the kind of coach that I want to be. I want to work with people for six months or a year. And I want to be the kind of coach where they work with me and their life changes. Their whole trajectory in their life changes because of our work together. So at that point, I raised my prices to 10K for six months. I think there's a few price jumps in that last season that I just described. So from 3K for three months, I raise it to 6K for six months and then to 10K for six months. I got fully booked. I launched my first group program. So this was over the course of months and years.
Like I just became more of a business coach in this season based on who was asking me to help them, based on what I was finding my clients wanted. During this phase of my business where I was charging 10K for six months, I had a group program. I launched my first mastermind. I called it The Inner Circle, where we met together as entrepreneurs and we talked business and we talked money. The other thing that happened during this time is I noticed that many of my clients wanted more mentorship from me. So now we're years into my coaching career. I'm mentoring other coaches who want to do what I did.
I made the shift from life coaching to business coaching. I still life coach, but that's a concept for another day. I started making big money. I also started investing in myself pretty heavily. I started investing in my team. Then I went through another transformation, hired more coaches, got more mentorship. I had a one on one mentor at the time who helped me see what this business that I was building was more than just one on one. So I had a mastermind. I launched a group coaching program that then led me to teaching coaches.
So I launched this course called Pro Coach. I signed my first $20,000 client. And if these numbers are freaking you out, don't worry about it. But you can see the growth, like leave the numbers behind. You can see my own evolution as a coach, as I invested in myself and my team and getting support as not just a coach, but as a business owner, I started making a lot more money. I started making more high level decisions and I started working with higher level clients. And that was the beginning of what I call like this phase of my business.
Let's see, I signed my first $20,000 client in 2020. At that point, I had the Pro Coach program. I had a mastermind. I had high level one on one clients that I was mentoring and coaching. And then I transitioned from Pro Coach. I ended that program. I started The Matrix, which is still running, which is a group coaching experience. And I would argue like a business mentorship program. Again, this is a quick podcast to kind of share my coaching journey. And from the time that I started the Matrix, right now I have a quiet wealth mastermind.
I actually have two Quiet Wealth masterminds. I have a quiet wealth membership. I have The Matrix, which is my group coaching program. I have my 33K per year clients. I have long term clients that I've worked with for years. And that's where I'm at today, where I run a multiple six figure coaching company. Obviously, I mean, this is like a 20 minute episode. But what is possible from ideas? What is possible when you invest into yourself? What is possible when you use what you learn and you implement it immediately?
That has been the biggest lesson for me is like I would join a program, learn a skill, implement it, hire a coach, get what I needed and immediately implement it into my business. It's not just about the money, although that has been amazing to learn how to make money as a coach. And now I help my clients make money. I was adding u,. I should know this number, this would be such an incredible number to know. But like my clients have made I mean, collectively, not individual clients, but like all of my clients combined. We've made millions of dollars as coaches, not just business coaches, life coaches, marriage coaches, mindset coaches, fitness coaches in the online space. Like that's an incredible feat.
And I have grown myself at the time when I started the blog, like remember, I started as a blogger and I would just get scrappy and I would use the tools and the resources and the people in my corner and take action. I would implement the ideas and I would grow and I would grow and I would grow and I'm still doing that today. But it all just started based on like a desire. I used what I had. The word that we use in entrepreneurship is bootstrapped. I bootstrap my business with my growth, with my understanding at the time.
I know way more about business now than I did when I got started. I was just scrappy. So I share that with you because many of you are at different phases of business. You know, some of you are my one on one clients and we have more of a mentorship relationship where you're trying to build what I've built. And that's great. Some of you are at the very beginning of your coaching business. And like the beginning of my journey might really resonate with you where you're like, I could never charge ten thousand dollars. I'm just trying to sign a client that would pay me any money. And I've been there.
And that's honestly what I teach a lot in Conscious Coach Academy is how do I go from zero paying clients into like 5K months? How do I go from zero paying clients to fully booked? That's what I teach inside the Conscious Coach Academy. But my journey was not overnight. My journey was incremental but became exponential. And this is what I want to leave you with. Incremental activities done in faith compounded over time equals exponential growth. Incremental activities done in faith compounded over time leads to exponential growth.
And so the things that I did to get here are not miraculous. I was not gifted at anything. I did the work, right? Like I started out just doing stuff for free, putting out a lot of value in my blog and social media and things until I made my brain valuable and raised my prices based on what I felt good about. And now I have a thriving coaching business with one-on-one clients, with mastermind clients, with group coaching clients and now a membership. Like I've done it all. And I don't say that to like say that my business model is the best. It's not. But it works for me.
And I think learning what works for you through experimentation, through getting mentorship and getting guidance based on where you're at with your journey can make an exponential difference. And so this was my journey. Like I said, clearly my journey. I don't think this is the journey that you should go on. There are many ways to become an abundant coach. And this was just my journey. And so I hope it inspired and served you on whatever journey that you're on. And I thought it would be interesting to share some of what I've been through and how I got to where I am. So I will see you in another episode. Talk to you soon. Bye.
