Hey you guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited to share a conversation that I had with my friend and colleague Mark Butler. Many of you know him, he's the money guy, but he also runs a podcast that I highly recommend. It's called “A Podcast for Coaches.” I will link that up in the show notes. But me and Mark align in a lot of things about building a coaching business, as well as just business and coaching in general, but specifically how to build a one-on-one practice, which lines up nicely with what you've been talking about inside the Abundant Coach Series.
So I wanted to share this interview with you because Mark's perspective is fresh and real and raw. He lives this. Like me, he also is building a one-on-one practice. Despite having a lot of success in other domains, you'll hear a little bit more about his story as we jump into the interview, but he still signs one-on-one clients, he still uses content and relationships and networking and invitations and just being a normal human to build his practice. And so I really enjoyed chatting with him. I know you're going to get a ton out of our conversation together. So without further ado, welcome to my conversation with Mark Butler.
Amber: All right. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.
Mark: Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here with you. We are due to have you back on my podcast, so we'll do that here in the next not too long.
Amber: Perfect. We have a lot in common as far as building coaching practices one-on-one, so I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about on your podcast as well.
Mark: Sure we will.
Amber: So I think a lot of my listeners probably know you and many might not. So why don't you take a second and just like introduce yourself, whatever you think is relevant and whatever you want to add.
Mark: If we start from where we are today, I'm a coach who works these days with a mix of individual women, individual men, and now couples. And it used to be all coaches and all women, and then over time it has evolved to be still a lot of coaches, still women. But the women have started to refer men, so there are more and more men in my practice. And six months ago or so, I started to invite couples into my practice, and that's probably 25% of my time now.
Amber: That is so cool. I didn't know that. Do you like coaching couples?
Mark: Do I like it? I do like it. I'll tell you, it's never boring.
Amber: I bet.
Mark: I find it to be a brand new challenge and it is very different, very different engaging with a couple versus an individual. And it's hard. I will say I'm finding it difficult, not difficult in a way that I don't want to do it, but it's not easy. With couples much more often than with individuals, will I end a call and say, I may not be very good at this. And I think I'm fine. I mean, none of my couples yet have said, you're not very good at this. Maybe they never would. But it's new territory. It's new territory. But I plan to expand there. It's where I see a lot of pain in the world and not a proportionate amount of support. So I'm excited to keep moving in that direction.
Amber: I love that.
Mark: Before that, I've always been the money guy. As far as the introduction goes, people think of me as the money guy. I did accounting and CFO kinds of stuff for coaches for the last 10 years. And it's kind of where people got to know me. But these days, much more of my energy is in actual coaching.
Amber: Like one-on-one coaching?
Mark: One-on-one coaching. Yes.
Amber: Which is what I want to ask you about a lot. My curiosity, because in my own one-on-one practice, sometimes there's only so much you can do with someone about their marriage. You know what I mean? Alone.
Mark: Yes.
Amber: So I love that you do couples. I probably will have people that I refer to you, knowing that you do that, because you know, you can only do the work so deep for yourself. And then at some point, you have to bring in the other person to communicate, to problem solve.
Mark: It's true. 100% agree. What you would find, and this, I think, is a skill that we have to develop as coaches. We have to develop the ability and the strength to stay in our client's stuff, maybe even long after we agree with the fact that their spouse has a lot of stuff. So it's not about holding pure neutrality. I don't attempt to hold pure neutrality. What I attempt to do is to say, look, I might even agree with you that your spouse has X and Y and Z, personality challenges, behavioral challenges, etc., but they're not here.
So let's talk about what can you do to change your experience, and I'm not talking about gaslighting yourself, to be clear. What can you do to change your experience of the relationship? And what can you start to practice in order to engage with your spouse in a new way so that the relationship can evolve? Because there's almost always more that we can do to change our experience of the relationship and to help the relationship evolve, even after we honestly acknowledge that the person we love has a lot of challenges and they may not be willing to show up to coaching.
Amber: Right. When you coach couples, do you also coach them individually?
Mark: I don't.
Amber: Okay.
Mark: And it's not that I wouldn't. I was just talking about this with another couple's coach recently. My experience is that a long time ago, I coached a business partnership, and a business partnership has a lot in common with a marriage. And in that coaching engagement, I coached both partners individually, and then I would coach them together. And I got really frustrated doing that because I started to feel like the individuals were telling me things and telling me those things in a certain way, and then bringing either different information or a different spin on the information to the one-on-two interaction.
And I found myself over and over wanting to say, that's not how you said it to me. And that's not the story you told me but that didn't feel appropriate to the interaction either. And so I know that many couples' coaches and couples' therapists do meet with the individuals and then with the couple. I think it helps in some big ways, but for me, the costs outweigh the benefits when I feel like either I know information that the other person doesn't know, and I don't want to be in that situation. And when I feel like the interaction that we're having one-on-one is very different from the interaction that we're having one-on-two, and then I feel like I'm having to keep too many plates spinning in my head.
So I think there's a cost to my way of doing it as well. I've had moments in my couple's work where I think that one of those spouses has something to say that they won't say in front of their spouse. And I kind of have to accept that as the cost of my way of working with them, that I stay in the dark about certain things. But that's where I am now. I may go back and try a different experiment because there's a couple's coach that I really trust her, and she will meet with each individual in the relationship for multiple sessions, sometimes months, before she ever has them come together and meet with them one-on-two, which is very interesting to me.
Amber: Yeah. I think, too, it depends on your relationship with the client, because I can see it this way too, where it's like if you've been coaching a woman for three months and she's like, hey, well, you do couples' coaching, and now you bring in the husband, you have this relationship with this client, but you don't have it. You know what I mean? I can see that being a disadvantage as well.
Mark: And for that reason, I actually wouldn't do that.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: If I have a long history of rapport building with one person, I don't trust myself to give really good service to the other person when they come in. So if I have a long-term coaching relationship with a husband or a wife, and then they say, would you talk to both of us? My answer would be, I will do that once, because maybe we can do some getting on the same page in that interaction. And then if the two of you decide you want to do ongoing couples' work, I'm going to refer you to a trusted peer.
Amber: That makes a lot of sense to me. And I don't do any couples' work, so I always just refer to people who can do it much better than me. Very cool. Just kind of a curiosity. Did someone just come to you and ask, or did you start putting it out there that you wanted to do couples' work?
Mark: I put it out there. I've had the feeling probably since early 2023, I've had the strong feeling that I want to and should be supporting couples. It's not fair to say I think it's the most important work in the world. I think that relationships, in particular marriages, are the most important thing in the world, and I don't see enough support for those. And so starting in early 2023, I started to think about doing it, and then it was in early 2024 that I just put it out on my podcast and said, I'd like to start working with some couples, so if you'd like to get some support. And I started with a very discounted rate and limited engagements, and then once I dipped my toe in the water and felt like there was something there, then I've been sort of stair-stepping up to my normal rate and staying pretty busy with couples.
Amber: That's awesome. Sounds like some principles that I'm sure we'll get into about clinic creation, too, because this is what I wanted to ask. If someone, and I'm sure you've heard this before, is like, no one wants one-on-one coaching. No one's buying one-on-one coaching.
What would you say?
Mark: Oh, do people say that?
Amber: People do say that.
Mark: Oh, interesting. No one buys one-on-one coaching.
Amber: Maybe they wouldn't say no one buys it. It's hard to sell one-on-one.
Mark: Fair enough. Who is saying that, though, in your world?
Amber: Struggling coaches.
Mark: I was going to say coaches with no clients?
Amber: Yes.
Mark: Okay. Yeah, fair enough. No one's buying one-on-one coaching from you.
Amber: From you, yeah.
Mark: And I'm sorry for that, and I'm not blaming you for that and making that your fault or whatever, but yes, people are absolutely buying lots of one-on-one coaching. Now, do I think the worldwide demand for one-on-one coaching is just outrageously high? I actually don't. Being a coaching client is hard work, and so in a world and in a culture where we can either just self-soothe with substances or media and just buffer ourself against everything difficult about being conscious, the thought of going to a one-on-one session and exploring difficult thoughts and feelings, I don't think that that's universally appealing. So I do think that we as coaches end up having the job of generating demand for coaching because it's not a candy bar, a cheeseburger, or a sexy video that people are just going to seek it out on their own. I think it's our job to create demand.
Amber: How do you create demand?
Mark: The most tactical thing I can say about how to create demand is with content. So I do have the experience now with my podcast and observing my clients' businesses over the years where if you have a resonant podcast and substitute in a resonant social media feed, a resonant newsletter or whatever, what you're doing is you're doing remote trust-building at scale. And if you're present in a person's life through podcasting or content, and then their pain spikes or their curiosity spikes, and you're present through your content and the trust has already been established, then you get an email asking about your availability or a DM asking about your availability. And in fact, that's the model I want. I don't want another model that involves me having to do a lot of chasing kind of clients.
I want to talk into this microphone and then have people send me an email. That's my desired business model. And fortunately, that can work. So that's one of the ways we generate demand. Just yesterday, actually, I had a former client where the relationship was great and it ended well. She emailed and said, could we pick back up again? I'm thrilled, of course. And when I talked, I said, what's going on? Why'd you reach back out? And she said, well, I listened to your most recent episode of your podcast where you talked about coaching as a utility versus coaching as a luxury. And she said, that made so much sense to me to view coaching as a utility that I thought we should just start again. I was like, fascinating. I did not expect that episode to produce that result. It didn't produce 50 clients.
It produced one renewal of an existing relationship, but it resulted in an email requesting coaching, which is all I want. So tactically, I very much believe in content. I also believe in being present where your people are physically. If that's a thing you do, it's not a thing I do much of. If my content weren't putting emails in my inbox, I'd probably do more being physically present. But I also believe in that because I also emailed you recently. I don't know if you saw it yet, but I was on a call with one of my coaching clients and she thanked me for introducing her to you because of a group thing that you're doing.
Amber: Yeah, cool! Thanks!
Mark: And I was like, that's amazing. She said, yeah, thanks for having her on your podcast because I really like her style and I'm really loving what she's doing. And that sounds like a podcast success story, but it's actually a physical presence success story because you and I hung out in person in St. George and in other places built a relationship so that then I was excited to have you on my podcast so that I can introduce her to you so that she could be part of your group. For me, that's a very repeatable scenario that coaches should be thinking about as they attempt to create clients.
Amber: Yeah. I was talking to someone, you can't beat in person because of the, I'm saying intensity, but I don't mean like this like intense experience. But when you think about the dilution that happens online, like if I show up on Instagram and they catch 15 seconds of my stories or something versus we talk for 30 minutes straight at an event.
Mark: Right.
Amber: Not even close to the level of impact and resonance that you can have in person.
Mark: I love that you use the word dilution and I would say it's opposite as concentration.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: And so when you say intensity, I think you mean like the concentrated experience of a 30 minute conversation in person cannot be beat. What I think people misunderstand is the 15 second tile on an Instagram story is extremely useful, especially when it's maintaining a relationship that was started in person. The relationship that I feel like I have with you needs very little maintenance.
Amber: Yes.
Mark: If I have five minutes of interaction with you in a year, I probably maintain all of my Amber Smith enthusiasm, which I do, but we don't talk often.
Amber: No.
Mark: But that's built on the strength of concentrated interactions on a few things. But one of those things is concentrated interactions in person and supported by my friends vouch for you, people I trust, trust you. Now I have the experience of a person who trusts me, thanking me for trusting you that further solidifies your place in my mind. All of that adds up to the point where if I were to talk to you five minutes a year or watch two Instagram stories or listen to one podcast episode, all of that maintains my Amber Smith enthusiasm.
When it comes to content, by the way, I think people probably worry too much about whether a person listens to a high percentage of their content. I don't need Amber Smith to listen to 95% of my podcast episodes to believe that Amber Smith still thinks I'm great. You might listen to one episode of mine per year. It might be the one that you're on. I don't know. But I believe that would be sufficient to keep me in the right space in your head such that when the opportunity to do something together or to refer to each other comes up, we absolutely do that.
Amber: I think a principle that I've been thinking a lot is I am who I say I am. How do you portray that to clients? So I think real talk, I think a lot of people are nervous about talking to a stranger that they found on the internet. So your definition of content is where people go after they've met you, which is, I think, unique. So it's like a confirmation. They are who they say they are.
Mark: Yes. You just went to the most important place. So I go to the place of content as tactic, but what's above that tactic is character.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: So the content is only effective if it's portraying you accurately and in an appealing way. So I love, I am who I say I am, I think is a lifetime project. I have regular interactions with the reality that I am who I say I am, except when I'm not and there's work to be done there.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: That's the work is being who I claim to be.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: I actually believe that we as coaches would keep our practices full and healthy if the vast majority of our attention is on being who we say we are and in making that an ever more useful thing to the person that we hope to serve.
Amber: Yes. I was just talking to someone about this. I can't remember what they asked me, but my response was like, oh, I need to share more about this idea. It's like, I would just want to be a resource to people. And it's not even about marketing. It's not even about renewals because most of my one-on-one is renewals and referrals now. And I honestly think it's because I just make myself a better resource, increasing value. I'm a resource in their lives.
Mark: Right. This is actually what I talked about on the most recent podcast episode, this idea of if I view myself as a utility and if I try to actually be a utility, then I don't have to do very much tactical marketing. I don't have to know about trends. I don't have to think about an algorithm. I just make my focus ever-increasing usefulness. And if I am, then the end. So simultaneously, I think this should be an enormous relief to people who have a desire to be one-on-one coaches because you can, starting from this moment, ignore 98% of the tactical noise online. Bad news, you've been buffering with that tactical noise and now you have to deal with yourself.
And that is hard work that I personally like to avoid. It's just hard and scary and sad and sometimes great and exciting. But the greatest compliment that's been paid to me in the last year, and it meant so much was, I am building a new website. It is for a membership where I want to bring coaches together to only talk about character development as business strategy. And I was showing it to a client of mine who has made millions of dollars. I said, let me show you my new website. And she looked at it for 30 seconds and she just laughed. And she's like, it looks great. She goes, it's just Mark Butler turned into a website.
And I was like, that is an unbelievable thing to say to me. I feel my confidence in the whole project just went up by double. Not because I'm now sure that it's going to quote unquote work, whatever that means, but you just told me that this website tells the truth. That's all I want. If I can tell the truth and if that finds resonance, I win. My practice will be full. I will receive referrals. My clients will renew if I am who I say I am and if I'm working toward that being ever more true.
Amber: That is amazing. I think too, especially because one-on-one is so high proximity, that integrity piece is even more important because you know who you are and you know what you say about yourselves. And when people get close, you don't want them to have the experience of like, oh, you're so different than I imagined or something. That would be awful.
Mark: Awful. I've used the example before of headshots where you see a person's profile somewhere, you see the photography on their website, and it looks a very specific way. And then you meet them in person or you encounter them in your Zoom room on a call and you barely recognize them. That by itself, I think is not what you want to do in that specific area. But as a metaphor, I think it's an even bigger deal. Another client said to me a few months ago, which also meant so much to me because I'm working with him and his wife. He said, well, I first heard about you when you did a call for this other big coach and then started to listen to your podcast because my wife suggested that we both listen to it.
And then I met you in person. And then when we were driving home from the thing where we met you in person, we listened to a couple more of your podcast episodes. And while we were driving, I turned to her and I said, he's the same in every setting. He's always him. And that, by the way, is something that good news, bad news. Sometimes I have to apologize for being me, but at least I'm me. At least in interacting with me, they weren't like, oh, he's so different in person. That was weird. It's like, no, he's just him in whatever setting. It's way less work. If that can work out, it's so much less work. There's so much less to think about. I went to a wedding reception the other night and my wife, Kate, and I had this funny little mini argument before we went because I was wearing my uniform to the wedding reception, which is black t-shirt, jeans.
And she's like, could you just, baby, like, come on? And I'm like, no. And the person whose wedding reception we were going to, she's a client of mine. We were laughing. I was telling her, yeah, we were kind of fighting earlier because she wanted me to change my clothes. And my client goes, I expect you to wear your uniform. If you were wearing anything other than your uniform, I would think something was very off or we're at church. But there's no other scenario. It's like black t-shirt jeans, blue suit on Sunday. I’m predictable. I think as a strategy, it's not about the dumb black t-shirt and jeans, but as a strategy, people knowing what they're going to get is really helpful. It makes everything easier.
Amber: I think you address something that people are asking subconsciously, especially about starting to work with a one-on-one coach. It's like, what am I going to get? They don't actually know. And so I think giving them that cohesive, almost like standard experience gives them a taste of what it will be like when they talk to you on a Zoom call or in person.
Mark: Yes. And because of my way of being, I do find myself in a situation where I am apologizing. Not that infrequently. I say things to clients that hurt and that I look back and say that wasn't right. That wasn't fair. And then you go and you apologize and you try to make a repair or my way of being in my business sometimes, I think has an unpredictability to it that hurts trust. So I've started to say more like, when I put out the call for couples on my podcast, in the little ad at the end of the episode, where I said that I said, if you're interested, please email me.
And just don't forget that my email response times are typically 30 seconds and never, and it's pretty much one or the other. So if you email me and you don't hear back, don't be surprised. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying you can count on that. So it's not that in order to be trustworthy, I have to start being Mr. Responsive. It's, I have to not pretend to be responsive when I'm not. And that builds trust.
Amber: It does build trust with yourself too.
Mark: Yes, exactly.
Amber: This is who I am.
Mark: I'm as prone to anybody to a shame spiral about like, why am I such a loser that I just can't respond to an email? Why can't I respond to an email? And I can spiral there easily.
But as I started to tell the truth more often and say, it seems all the evidence points to the fact that I'm either going to respond never or in 30 seconds. So maybe I just start by saying that out loud. No more shame spirals. And people thank you. They said, oh yeah, I emailed you. And then I followed up four times because I know you don't do email.
And then when I finally respond to them and say, hey, I do have an opening. I'd love to talk. We've started from a trusting place, even though I was unresponsive. I can thank them for following up and how excited I am to be working with you, which is all true. But there were no lies built into the process that sound like, oh, hey, I'll get back to you quick. Or another lie, which is sorry, I didn't get back to you sooner. Because that's a lie because I'm not sorry.
Amber: Yes.
Mark: It's just, let's try to bring the truth into all of it and see if we can make the truth work. And it turns out the truth actually does work.
Amber: And even truth that your non-responsive emails or whatever, like some people might have judgment. I'm like, oh, he should because he's a business owner. And like, he should respond. That's separate from what I want to share. But you are just honest about it. So there's nothing to hide going into a coaching relationship, which is exactly what you help your clients do is like stop hiding from themselves or stop hiding things right and get into the truth. So it's like it opens the door for a really beautiful start, I think, for coaching.
Mark: That's exactly right. That's so important. That's powerful. I had not connected those dots in that way. It's really good. Can you imagine how much work it would be? Well, over the years, I've seen clients, not many clients, but I've seen clients who do this, who especially ones who unfortunately are representing themselves as, you know, making a certain amount of money or having a certain type of success with a certain frequency. If you make that your brand, if you make that your primary message, you have to protect the message.
I mean, you don't have to, but I think they think you have to. And so it's really hard to watch. And sometimes people know who some of my past clients have been. I'll say right now, I'm not referring to the biggest names that people are aware of me having worked with. I'm referring to people you've never heard of, just to be clear, where I'll see them say things in their content. And I'll say to myself, I know that you can make the case that there's truth in that, but it's not true. You're protecting an image.
And that's so dissonant internally that of course, it's going to make its way into your relationship with them, with your clients in whatever group or mastermind you just sold. Because now you have to protect the lie you told. It's the classic lies lead to lies. It's just too much work. Just tell the truth. The truth does sell. Actually, I think it can be really scary to commit to the truth, but you just kind of have to.
Amber: It is. I'm not surprised that we're going here because this has been some of my own coaching work. To the point of being so honest with myself, it is a little painful, but also so freeing. And so I was thinking about this. I had a client ask me in one of my groups, it was like, what do I do if someone asks me how many clients I have and I don't have any? I was like, you say you don't have any, but that's where people are at. They're afraid to reveal something. I'm like, when I was starting, people asked me if I had clients. I was like, no, I just started. There's nothing to hide. This is where I'm at. And they still hired me.
Mark: That's right.
Amber: Because it wasn't about... They were just curious.
Mark: Exactly. And some of them, there were people who either that you know about or that you don't know about who didn't hire you because of your inexperience. But attempting some deception, attempting some curation of an image to try to catch those people, to try to keep them from would have cost you far more in the short and long-term than telling the truth. The insecurity that we feel as new coaches, and that I continue to feel as a person who's been coaching for a decade, can be so crushing and so scary at times that you're like, maybe if I just said it this way, then they would hire me.
We're so desperate for a specific type of validation that we'll give up even our integrity in pursuit of that validation and tell ourselves that it was justified. And how do I know? Because I've done it. I'm not saying that I'm immune to this. It's the classic sort of, you put on your website, we instead of I. There's no we. I mean, I don't. But when my focus was that maybe I was doing accounting or I was doing bookkeeping for what I hoped were bigger businesses, you don't want to be like, I'm just a guy in my basement.
I'm working by myself. But that's true. So if I even put the we're so excited to be your bookkeepers, I've introduced a lie into my business that I'm trying to soothe myself, but now I have to deal with the lie. So I'm doing this thing right now with this new website where I write it. I just write the copy, however I write it. And then I go back through, I'm going back through each piece and I'm saying, where am I embellishing in a way that makes me feel like the story is stronger, but it's not quite true?
Amber: That's so good.
Mark: And I'm like, oh, this story is way better if I say it like this and I could make the case that it's true-ish, but you feel it in your body, you hear it in your head, your heart. You're like, I'm lying. I don't want to lie.
Amber: That is so good. I think too, like even more tactical, like on a consult, like if someone's like, you're talking about working, I don't even call it a consult. What do you call it? I don't even call it a consult, but.
Mark: I call it conversation.
Amber: Okay. Yeah. Like a conversation about coaching.
Mark: Yeah. Conversation about coaching. That's great.
Amber: Yeah. Or just a chat. I got that from Rich Livin. He's like, do you want to chat? Like, does it need to be weird? But when people ask you like, what can I expect? Or like, I don't even give that question much because that's just not kind of how I sell coaching. But if I do get it, I'm like, oh, I don't know. I don't. I can tell you what we've worked on. And I try to demonstrate the whole, as much of a range as I can, because like, yes, sometimes business growth, because like you,
I'm a one-on-one coach that's pretty general. Like I don't just do one type of coaching. And so it's like, these are the things that we talk about: marriage, business, mindset, spirituality, your relationship with yourself. I'm going to try to demonstrate, like, there's a lot of things that we can do together instead of being like, yeah, we'll get you to 20K months. You know what I mean? Like people feel like they need to say something like that.
Mark: Yes. And I don't blame them. I want to make sure that the way I'm talking about this, I think I have a tendency maybe to start sounding holier than thou or sanctimonious. And I'm not in a moral position to even pretend to act that way. I understand the impulse to say, I'll get you to $20,000 months. I understand a person's enthusiasm for saying it. I understand the buyer's reasons for buying it. It sets the coaching off on such shaky footing that I'm like, well, could we talk about this in a way where both coach and client are the same amount of excited, but it's not built on this very fragile result called 20K per month that who knows whether it's achievable.
It's like when I was doing more of what I would call business coaching, there was this time where I did a little group. I brought five coaches into a little group and it's like, let's do some business coaching. And when I was doing individual calls with them to talk about that group coaching experience, maybe one or two of them said, either they said it or I just volunteered this. I can't remember, but it's sort of like, well, I would really like to start making this much money. And I would say, oh, I have no idea if that's going to happen. And they're like, well, what should be my goal for this coaching experience with you?
And I said, well, I don't know what your goal should be. I said, here's how I'm thinking about it. My desire is that on Sunday nights, you'd be really excited that tomorrow is Monday and you're going to dive back into building your practice. And if I can help you create and sustain real enthusiasm, I think we won. And they're like, oh, that sounds amazing, actually. That's probably where I want to get anyway. So I didn't have to say you'll make a thousand a month or 5,000 a month or whatever. I had to say, maybe we'll just try to create an environment in which your enthusiasm stays high. That for me feels much more attainable, much more predictable.
Amber: And real.
Mark: And real.
Amber: That resonant word again, that's probably resonant for your people.
Mark: In the long run, I think these kinds of results, promises that on Sunday night, you'll be happy tomorrow's Monday and promises that, you know, you'll grow, you'll develop, that you'll enjoy the coaching. What should I expect from this coaching? Well, you should expect to enjoy it sometimes and hate it sometimes. I think these results are much harder to sell in the short run, especially, but so much easier to deliver.
Amber: And you get renewals.
Mark: And you get renewals. In my opinion, I do have some data. People don't renew the program that says I'll get you to 20K. Sometimes they do. I should choose my words here carefully. Sometimes they do, but they're not as likely to renew that. Tragically, they're very often at the end of that, they're blaming themselves for the fact that they didn't get to 20K per month, which is a whole other tragic conversation. But renewals, you get to the end of a one-on-one coaching engagement and the quote unquote sales conversation sounds like, hey, by the way, this is our second to last. And then they say, oh yeah, I noticed that too. Now what? And I say, well, the spot's yours if you want it. And they say, oh, great. Okay, good. And that's the sales interaction.
Amber: Yep.
Mark: That's it.
Amber: Yeah. I kind of got in a wave with clients. So I just had three renewals all at once, which is rare, but that's kind of what happened. And these people have been with me for years now, years.
Mark: Yes.
Amber: And it was like, I didn't even bring it up this time. Like they asked me and I can hear someone listening be like, oh, Amber and Mark, you know. But I wish I knew this kind of business model existed when I got started, that like you create a relationship with people where I didn't promise them 20K months. Like at all. Now I'm a resource or a utility or like a utility in their life where we can keep doing this work together because it was never about a 20K month MRR or whatever, you know?
Mark: No.
Amber: It was about way more than that.
Mark: No, I do like to beat this drum, which is that as a coach, when you sell measurable results, you probably have an easier time generating individual transactions. You'll have a much harder time generating referrals and renewals.
Amber: So good.
Mark: And if you sell a non-specific result, a non-measurable result, you will find it a little bit harder to make the initial sale because what you're selling is so ethereal. You're selling a conversation. You're selling an interaction.
Amber: Yeah.
Mark: That's more ethereal and that's why I think really trying to actively sell that gets weird in a hurry. That's why my model is talk into a microphone, try to be trustworthy and wait for an email to land in my inbox because then those people have already persuaded themselves of the benefit of the ethereal thing.
Amber: Yeah. Well, they already have it. You talking to a microphone is an experience of coaching.
Mark: Yes. Now, if the inbox is ever empty, if we ever get to the point where the inbox just nobody's emailing, I'm going to have to evaluate. But at that point, I will not primarily evaluate my tactic of talking into a microphone. I will look first at my character. Who am I? How am I being? Has my way of being changed, that's made me less trustworthy, less appealing such that people are not emailing me anymore? What's going on with me? It won't be like a self-hatred exercise or a shame exercise. It'll be on a self-introspection. Like who am I right now? And is that of service? That's correctable.
Amber: It's not like I need to go to my sales page.
Mark: No, I totally understand when we interact with our friends, our fellow coaches, and they're like, will you look at my website? Happy to look at your website. Well, do you think that it should say this or that? Doesn't matter. Just doesn't matter. Now, sometimes you or I could look at a sales page and see something really egregious and say, look, I think maybe we want to tweak this sentence or this headline. But overall, it just doesn't matter. Not in a one-on-one business.
Amber: This is exactly what you were saying earlier about character, right? People want to buffer with tweaking their sales page and copywriting. But the confronting thing is like, where am I at with myself or with God? Am I living the values that I actually believe in? Am I in harmony with what I say I am? But that's the hard stuff.
Mark: Yes. And trying to act appropriately when I'm not in harmony. And I'll give an example right now. This person could listen to this podcast. I don't know, actually, if she does. I started working with a couple. I don't know how often this happens to you. This actually happens to me a non-trivial percentage of the time where people either don't finish their coaching engagements. We get halfway through and they're like, hey, I think I'm not going to continue. That happens with me. And in this case, there's a couple that I was working with and we did a few sessions together and now they're not around. They've disappeared.
Well, my ego wants to make that theirs. You know, it makes me want to say something about not serious or not committed or whatever. Luckily, I'm aware of that voice and I can set it aside pretty quickly and say, okay, hold on. Do I owe them an apology? Was I inappropriate? Was I unkind? What happened in those interactions? How do I self-assess around this? What would be the right thing for me to say to them if I were to reach back out? Etc. And I'm not going to lie. It's extremely uncomfortable. It's extremely uncomfortable to face the possibility that I acted badly and not just that I acted badly, but that I acted badly and ignorantly. I don't even know how I was misbehaving.
So now I've got to hunt down my own failure that I'm not aware of and deal with it. It's like, no, I would much rather just go talk to people who want to pat me on the back and tell me how special I am. That's way more appealing. But if I want to be reconciled to myself and to God, the way you just, I love how you said that, I got to be like, I might've misbehaved badly. There's probably an apology due there and I got to go do that. But I think the accumulated repetition of that kind of difficult self-confrontation turns us into a person that people email and ask if you have availability for coaching.
Amber: Yes, I agree with that. Or that someone will say, you should talk to Mark.
Mark: Yes, totally. I want to do another conversation with you about this, but something I think about a lot is that I want, and this is part of the reason I'm starting this membership. It bothers me that I don't have a more confident shortlist of coaches to refer to. And I'm not necessarily blaming my fellow coaches for that. I think there's work to be done in me trying to experience my fellow coaches' work more, understand their particular way of being so that my confidence goes up, so that when I have an opportunity to refer, it's easier. But part of working on our character, I think we should have it in our minds that I want to develop my character in such a way that a person finds it easy to quickly refer me. You've got to talk to Mark. If anybody in the world is saying, you've got to talk to Mark, I win forever. But I've got to be the person that they can say that about.
Amber: Yeah. And across the board, like you were saying, like podcast, website, in-person, online, on Zoom, wherever.
Mark: Yes.
Amber: And what I do with my plans is like, and with your kids and with your spouse. One of the things that we could totally have a whole, part two is coming! But if I'm so great in my business and I'm not so great in my family life. I'm this great person, but my integrity, like I'm always thinking about business when I'm with my kids, like I haven't been on date night or whatever, right? Like there's this thing about integrity that goes beyond just like business settings too. If you're a personal coach, right? Like it goes all the way.
Mark: I have this vivid memory of an interaction, maybe three months ago, maybe four months ago with a client. I'm coaching a client about their relationship with their spouse. It's a tough situation. And I'm inviting this client, in the moment, I'm inviting this client to do some really difficult things, really difficult self-confrontation, really difficult engagement with the spouse in a way that hasn't happened before. And I get off the call and I think to myself, am I in a position to invite her to that kind of difficulty?
And then immediately came to my mind, the areas of my life in which I am not meeting the standard that I just invited her to. And in my case, it's not with my spouse, but I can give you the list. It's not that short of a list. And I was like, man, you got to figure it out. The invitations were appropriate. I invited her to the right things, but then I had to get off that call and say, are you doing it? Hmm, maybe not.
Amber: But the fact that you asked yourself that question is exactly what we're talking about, because we're not expecting people to listen to this episode and be like, you are always in integrity 100% and you never vary. But I think your willingness to look at that question is why you are in integrity.
Mark: I appreciate that. That's helpful to me. Because always and forever, as long as we're alive, we're going to be in the tension of knowing that we could be and do better. The question is whether we're willing to ask, like self-confront. And that's what coaching is so brilliant for, so powerful for.
Amber: And then actively work on it.
Mark: Actively work on it.
Amber: Which is what you were asking your client to do is work on it. Then you asked the question, if you were working on it.
Mark: Yeah. Isn't this just the best? Sometimes I actually find it hard to convey how good and important I think coaching is. We tend to wrap it so much in financial terms and in lifestyle terms, and I think it holds up. It's an amazing way to make a living. But I always find myself saying to people, I just don't think you, especially coaches, I just don't think you understand how much good you're going to do if you keep going.
Amber: If you stay with it. So true. Thank you for your time, Mark. Where can people find you real quick? I'll put it in the show notes as well.
Mark: Yeah, markbutler.com. That's the easiest.
Amber: And the membership, will there be a link?
Mark: There will be.
Amber: Okay.
Mark: It's called officehourswithmark.com.
Amber: Hours with Mark. Perfect. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for your time. You're amazing.
Mark: Same. I want to do this again soon. I want to do it on my show and we should do this all the time.
Amber: We should. We should.
Mark: Great to see you.
