Episode 190: Can Coaches Really Make Money? BTS With MY Coach Kelsey Murphy
My coach Kelsey Murphy has a unique combination of letting those of us with big hearts keep that sense of self while teaching us how to be more pragmatic and implement and understand the data driving our businesses. We’re going to talk about that, pull back the curtains on the conversations I have with her, and more about her coaching journey.
Kelsey is a career and business coach for Fortune 500 companies like Twitter and Facebook, along with entrepreneurs such as Kelly Leveque, who is Jessica Alba’s nutritionist. She’s also the host of The Whiskey and Work Podcast and previously worked as the advertising account director for Nintendo, Go-Pro, and Elizabeth Arden.
Now she coaches people who want to feel different about their work – more purposeful, more lit up, and more satisfied.
Full transparency on making money coaching
It’s rare to have a “coach and coachee” conversation that pulls back the curtains, but Kelsey is excited to share because she’s a big believer in transparency.
“Working with Marie Forleo, working with Cathy Heller and Amy Porterfield and those women -- they have really nice, shiny personas, and so for me, I'm like that's cool. But I actually am not going to love this business unless I know about your skeletons in the closet,” says Kelsey. “And I approve of those skeletons!”
“That's why I really like Marie and I love Cathy and I love Amy. They're very honest and open and so even though they have these shiny personas, you get in and you have these real conversations with them and they're very transparent.”
That transparency is echoed when Kelsey talks about her journey into coaching. In the beginning, Kelsey needed to freelance to support her business. It wasn’t making money and she didn’t have someone in the wings funding her.
She says she had to swallow her pride for the first few years until her business was generating enough income to support her, her retirement, and her savings.
She says she hid behind the curtains for many years trying to figure out what she loved to do. She knew being an account director for Nintendo wasn’t it and wasn’t going to grant her the freedom she wanted. The question became, what was the intersection between love and money?
What could she do that she would love, put in the world, and be really known for that could also bring in financial stability? She says sometimes it just takes some people longer to figure that out and acknowledges that she wasn’t a “doer.”
She’s an over-thinker – so in building a business her first years were slow as she reflected on all her different passions. She tested things out – from career coaching to massage therapy -- to find the place that she could plant her flag, fall in love with and then create that stream of income that wasn't hard.
Building a sustainable coaching business
Kelsey tried out career coaching for a while, which is how she met Marie Forleo. Marie brought her to coach people on their small businesses. As she started working with people, she found two niches – podcasts and starting a sustainable coaching business.
She tested out owning a podcast as an expert for a year and, in doing so, garnered referrals and the most money she’s made at the time in her business.
“This is why you focus on one thing because that is where the momentum comes,” says Kelsey.
However, when she started gaining referrals to speak at podcasting conferences, she realized she wanted to turn them down. This wasn’t what she wanted to do for the next five to 10 years. She realized coaching was her passion.
“I could talk about coaching for hours, the empathy that goes behind coaching, the way coaches are built. The fact that breaks my heart is that coaches are not successful from a financial standpoint because they're missing the tools to build that business,” says Kelsey.
Knowing she could teach coaches how to build a sustainable business led Kelsey to create the Coaches Mastermind. She created the program quickly, knowing who she wanted to talk to and serve, and launched it over two weeks. The response was immediate.
Safe place to land
Choosing a coach is difficult, but I knew right away I wanted to work with Kelsey. In her own words, I asked her how people realize as a coach, she is a safe place to land.
“There's that transparency piece where I'm very honest with people like I think people see my business and they see that I have three kids and have this great relationship with my husband and it feels very easy. I talk about a minimalist business and then I'm also like: 'Hold on. Let me tell you about my hard days,' ” says Kelsey.
“Another thing that I get a lot is that people do like the balance between my kind of life coach, like open, warm, safe space, but it's balanced also with this other piece of like data-driven tough love conversation.”
Kelsey teaches coaches how to collect data to make sure the offer is going to hit their targets. She tries to reverse engineer a plan that leaves coaches more prepared to get the results they want rather than tossing darts in the dark.
“I think people feel a sense of hopefulness when they hear that there are two pieces. Yes, you've got to listen to yourself and your gut and what feels right … But I also want you to have, like, the proof and the data behind making sure you're going to get to the place you want to go, and I think that empowers people,” says Kelsey.
Data protects our emotions
I love that Kelsey talks about how data actually ends up protecting your emotions in the long run. So many coaches cry every day. We love everyone we see, and we want to save the world all the time. We have these huge hearts that shy away from numbers and data. But Kelsey marries the two in a way that lets us protect our big hearts so we can do more.
Kelsey says whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the game but feel like nothing is hitting – it's important to remind yourself you’re in it for the long game. When you're in the trenches, it doesn't feel fun, it feels hard and feels heavy, and you feel like you're constantly problem-solving. But if you recognize, "I'm not in this for the next year or the next six months, I'm in this for the next 10 years," you start to think a bit differently.
It takes the pressure off. You’re in a season of learning. You can create an environment that makes this more fun and more enjoyable. You can have these beautiful relationships like in a Mastermind, where you fall in love with these people, and they become like family, and you refer each other. Look at this as a long-term investment.
It's such a mindfulness exercise. You're not so in the nitty gritty kind of narrow-minded head-down space. All of a sudden, you lift your head up; you rise up 30,000 feet, and you look at your business, and you look at your family, and you look at your year. And you think about yourself one year from now. It shifts the entire experience from the moment.
