The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [87]
Jena got her first health-coaching client while playing violin in the subway. A man walked up to her, asked her if she was a student, and she replied yes. He asked her what she was studying. When she said, “I’m studying to be a health coach,” he said, “I need to be your client!”
(What is a health coach? They are like personal trainers for healthy eating. They provide a level of week-to-week, even day-today, attention and encouragement to eat healthier food and make other healthy lifestyle changes; such attention and encouragement would be prohibitively expensive for doctors to provide.)
With her certification from IIN (and no college degree), Jena began seeing clients first in cafés and in her living room. As her practice grew, her rates began to go up, first from $97 per month of coaching, to $150, to $200, to $250, to $300 and up. Within two years, her practice had expanded to the point where she was renting a private office near Union Square three days a week.
“My work ethic was in full drive. My goal initially was to have ten billable hours each of those office days, thirty hours a week total, at an average of one hundred dollars per hour. I did health coaching and private yoga instruction. I found clients through networking on my off days and weekends, through morning Business Network International meetings that started at seven-fifteen in the morning, by doing little lectures here and there, on Craigslist, and on Quentin’s Friends.”
(Michael’s note to readers: Quentin’s Friends, http://www.quentinsfriends.com, is one of the best personal and professional networking resources I know of. I’ve been an avid member since 2003. I am not personally involved with Business Network International, http://www.bni.com, but it also has an excellent reputation, with chapters worldwide. These are two examples of the many low-cost ways now available to increase your business network. High-quality business networking is no longer only for graduates of expensive alma maters.)
As a result of all this hard work, Jena was bringing in about $3,000 in revenues per week, with business expenses of only the $1,500 monthly room rental. Her annual net before taxes, then, was around $130,000.
I have seen this again and again and again. If you can help someone achieve something that is valuable to them, such as losing weight, having a healthier relationship, meeting a life partner, expanding their business—or many other valuable things you can learn from life experience and self-study rather than from an academic degree—and if you’re willing to learn some high-integrity marketing and sales around your skill set (see Success Skills #3 and #4), it’s really not out of reach to earn $100,000 per year. It just isn’t.
Jena was married, at that time, to a self-educated circus arts performer and entrepreneur she met in New York who had started an extremely successful aerial arts school in Brooklyn. He began earning six figures as well during their marriage. But the two both had a voracious instinct for bootstrapping their businesses and keeping personal costs low. (Bootstrapping is a concept crucial to this book, which we’ll be learning a lot more about in this chapter. It involves keeping costs low while you generate revenue.) They once split a tiny windowless room in a shared apartment in Brooklyn, for $275 each. “Being consumers wasn’t our focus, it was being creators.”
Earning six figures and living extremely frugally meant Jena had a lot of cash left over each month. After a brief but serious scare in her business when the 2008 recession first hit, she discovered the power of marketing and sales to get her income back on track. (I tell this story in Success Skill #3, on how to learn marketing.)
At that point, she began plowing her savings heavily, not into stocks and real estate, but into learning how to