How I Built a Multi-Six-Figure Coaching Business Without Ads

In this episode of The Power Table Podcast, Taylor Smith pulls back the curtain on exactly how she built a multi-six-figure coaching business without running ads, going viral, or starting with a large network.

Taylor shares the evolution of her coaching business from one-to-one services to scalable one-to-many offers, the lessons she learned along the way, and the strategies that ultimately helped her grow a thriving community-driven business in one of the most crowded industries online.

This episode is an honest look at what it really takes to build a successful coaching business in today's market. Taylor breaks down her current offer suite, why community became her greatest growth strategy, and the specific decisions that helped her stand out in an industry full of people selling similar promises.

Listeners will hear why one-to-one coaching is often the fastest path to consistent revenue, how to create an ascension offer suite that increases retention and long-term client value, why pricing matters more than most coaches realize, the role events have played in scaling The Power Table, and the community-building strategies that transformed her business from multiple five figures to multiple six figures annually.

If you're a coach, consultant, service provider, or entrepreneur who wants to grow a sustainable business without relying on paid ads, viral content, or complicated funnels, this episode will show you what actually worked.

In this episode, we cover:

• The biggest misconceptions about what it actually takes to grow a coaching business
• How relationship-building became the foundation of Taylor's business growth
• The strategies that helped her sign clients consistently without running ads
• What changed when she shifted from chasing visibility to building community
• The lessons she would apply immediately if she had to start over from scratch

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Power Table. If you are leading your business with a big vision and you're ready for your visibility to match your ambition, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Taylor Smith, founder of the Power Table, serial entrepreneur, and international keynote speaker. I've generated millions in my business who are speaking of personal branding and community building, and I'm here to teach you how to do the same as a founder-led brand. Each week, we dive into the business strategies, identity, and leadership work required to become the woman people recognize, trust, and choose again and again. Because your next level isn't just about what you do, it's about who you become in the process. This is your seat at the table. People are often genuinely surprised when I tell them that I built a multi-six-figure coaching business without a single ad. I also never went viral. I also felt like I had no network whatsoever. Nobody knew I existed when I started just a few years ago. And yet, here we are. And I want to pull back the curtain on all of it for you today because I think that understanding the structure of what kind of offers I built in my coaching business, how I got here, how those offers have evolved over time, and how I actually grew, and more specifically, how I grew in a space that is typically considered to be highly oversaturated. There are hundreds of thousands of people teaching marketing, personal branding, and business coaching with the exact same promises and quite honestly, very similar frameworks. So I'm going to share what took me from invisible to being the obvious choice for female founders who want to grow their businesses, grow their networks and their relationships, and start being recognized for their work. So let's get into it. If you are a newer coach growing your business, the fastest path to four figure months or five figure months in revenue is going to be one-to-one coaching, whether that is health coaching or business coaching, tax strategy coaching, marketing, or anything in between. And this is what I started with as a coach too. In fact, the moment that I moved into one-to-one coaching and consulting with four and six month packages and not just month to month, is actually when I consistently started hitting my first four-figure months in revenue consistently and ultimately grew to five figure months in one-to-one coaching. So if you are a newer coach or you're a coach who's looking for fast cast injection and time is less of a constraint and you just need clients, I do still think that one-to-one coaching is the single best choice that you could make for your business at those specific stages. It's what I did when I got started. And I would highly recommend that you work one-on-one with clients in the earlier stages of your business. This is also true for done for you or done with you services. Again, if you're looking for cash injection, really thinking about the fastest path is actually not a one-to-many offer, even though, girlfriends, that's where we're going. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. But the fastest path to a cash injection or consistent revenue month is going to be a one-to-one coaching, consulting, or done for you, done with you service that you provide individually to clients. However, at some point, you are going to realize that one-to-one coaching takes a lot out of you. And even though it can be incredibly rewarding, at some point you will hit a calf. There are only so many clients you can take, and your income will then be limited by the fact that you only have so many hours in your day, in your week, and your month to onboard new clients, to facilitate services or coaching for clients, to offboard clients, and to market to find new clients. And there's only so much time that you have if you're serving people one-to-one. So if you are a coach, eventually you don't have to do this right away. You will begin to think about how can I serve a bunch of people all at the same time? Because I have experience now offering the same kind of transformation or result over and over. I've taught it. I know how to deliver this kind of outcome for people. And you'll start to think of what we call a one-to-many offer, which is being able to walk a group of people through that same outcome, whether they do it in a self-paced manner, such as a course or a membership, or you'd group coaching where everyone goes through the transformation in a cohort so they are all on the same journey at the same time. Both are phenomenal methods for building a one-to-many offer so that you can make more revenue because you're making more money for the same amount of time by serving a group of people at once as opposed to one-to-one. And this is what I did when I was first starting coaching. I did one-to-one coaching for about six to eight months before I realized that I didn't want to only coach one-to-one. And I did continue to offer one-to-one coaching and consulting for about another three years in my business. But about six to eight months into that, I started a membership which was originally called PCM or Profitable Content Membership. And the first iteration of that, which has now ultimately become the mastermind that I facilitate today, but the first iteration was $47 a month, and we mostly focused on content, personal branding, marketing through specifically social media content. I really love this membership. I was really good at it, but we were covering a lot of the basics. A lot of it was very beginner when it came to content. And I found myself getting a little bored by kind of teaching those same beginner principles of content marketing over and over. And this is not to say that if you serve with a beginner audience, there's anything wrong with that. And if that is where your heart is, like go for that. I just know for me, I really enjoy my zone of genius and my passion is like working with people who are a bit more advanced. So after I developed this membership, I kept going like this for a few years. I had one-to-one coaching clients, a few consulting projects, and this membership I was growing. And I was hitting just under six figures typically in coaching revenue. And I have my hands on a few other businesses and projects. And then I made a shift that changed everything. I got very serious about community building. And I'm gonna get into that in the second half of this podcast episode. But that investment in taking the time to build my audience and to truly build a strong, engaged community is what then skyrocketed my business into multiple six figures every year from coaching alone. And before we get into actually that component of how to build a community, how to grow one-to-many offers as a coach, I actually just want to say first, I am so grateful that I did not skip the early stages. I am so grateful that I spent so much time one-to-one. It squeezed me on time, it made me uncomfortable, but it also let me put in the reps of having those clients and going through those frameworks while I built a community and an audience and multiple platforms to market on, which takes so much time. And I'm actually really happy that I started with those one-to-one clients out the gate. I truly don't think I would be where I am today with Power Table if I hadn't done those things first. So, what does my current offer suite as a multi-six figure coach look like now? Well, let's get into it. Today my offer suite looks really different from when I first started coaching. And it works the way I and it works really well the way it does now because I have taken the time to build the social media following, to build the email list, to build up my podcast, to build my network of referrals and to build my personal brand. So I have a very high degree of visibility, credibility, and trust with my community, but also with my peers. And that all takes a lot of time. So this could not have happened, and we couldn't be where we are right now with my community, the power table, and therefore also my coaching business if I hadn't taken those years to build those things. So here's what it looks like. I no longer have that low-ticket $47 a month membership. Instead, I have a mid-ticket membership. This is the power table mastermind. It is $297 a month or $24.77 for the year. This is where women who are not on day one of their business, they're in that middle growing and scaling stage, really get serious about scaling their business and about their visibility. So we still focus primarily on messaging, marketing, and sales inside of that mastermind, but we're doing it from the lens of a more advanced set of personal branding. Our mastermind members are people who are already starting to speak on stages, starting to get on podcasts. We are continuously refining their offers in terms of raising prices, restructuring things, offering VIP days. Our members are often hosting their own events and they're really focused on that platform building and audience building process that they will need in order to support their growth over the next few years. I also have a high-ticket coaching program called Leaders, where I specifically teach on how to use your visibility to step into leadership and to grow your business through personal branding. We mostly focus on speaking, podcast guesting, and personal brand monetization, such as brand deals or sponsors or events. This is different than the mastermind because we are dialed really into primarily just personal brand growth through speaking and monetization. But more than that, this is also a cohort. So the mastermind is evergreen. People can join at any point. And we have set call schedules. We meet every single Monday. And leaders, on the other hand, is a cohort-based program. So enrollment is only open for a certain time. And then the whole group goes through the program together all at once. I also run in-person and online events throughout the year. These serve to both grow revenue for the business, to drive members into our coaching programs, but then also for brand awareness and platform growth too. So we have a virtual conference every summer called Standout and Sell Out. It's happening August 11th to 13th. If you're listening to this episode in real time when it comes out in July, we have our flagship in-person conference, which happens every April called Power Table Live. And then I host throughout the year smaller events such as dinners and in-person and online networking events, Galantine's events, and things like that. These are smaller events that some are free, some are paid, but at the same time, they keep bringing new people into our community. They also give us a way to nurture members of our community and provide them with more touch points, strategy, and connections throughout the year. Every event has multiple tickets here and options, which also allows me to generate more revenue and to really identify people who are more advanced and to identify which people are right for which offers based on what kind of investment they're making at the events, based on what part of the event that they're most interested in. So this is also a very important thing to think about if you host live events is structuring your ticket tiers to naturally lead into the different offers that you have in your offer suite. And then in addition to my coaching business and those offers I outlined, I have quite a few other streams of revenue, mostly with personal brand sponsors, partners. I'm a brand ambassador for several incredible companies. And these allow me to monetize my personal brand and my podcast and my platform in other ways. Now, you certainly don't have to have that many different streams of revenue. You don't have to host in-person events to have a very successful multi-six figure coaching business. And even if I didn't host my events, my two coaching programs alone would still generate for me over six figures, multi-six figures per year, depending on how many cohorts and how many launches that I'm doing. And so what I really want to share with you is the key to growing and scaling a successful coaching business. And that is having what we call an ascension offer suite. So instead of having a whole bunch of different offers that speak to a whole bunch of different people, you teach one thing to this group over here, you solve this problem for this group of people over here. Instead of that, with an ascension offer suite, we focus on one single person and we create offers for them at every stage of their journey. So as they advance, there is always something else that you are supporting them with at their next level of success or growth, whether that is in their health, whether that is in their business, their career, or anything else that you're serving them with. So in my world, what that looks like is people join my free or paid networking events, or maybe they come to the conference and then they join our mastermind. And then when they are ready, after they've gotten more success, they're refining their offer suite, they're growing and scaling their business, then they typically join leaders, which is our highest tier at this point coaching program for women who are wanting more visibility, wanting to get on stages, want to go on a speaking or podcast casting tour, and are really focused on that personal branding and leadership piece so that they can become recognized leaders in their industry. We also have a couple of in-person events that are formed that more advanced person as well. So we have Yaf Day, we have mastermind weekends, which are our in-person retreats. And as the female founder We Sur continues to grow and advance in her career and her business, we have something that puts her at that next step that continues to support her growth. And it also connects to more people who are at that advanced stage as well. And I want to say it is so much easier to keep and retain clients when you have an ascension offer suite. And it is in general, it is just easier to retain a client than to constantly go out and find new ones. So if you only have one type of coaching, one type of offer, and it is already doing well, clients are happy. The very next thing that I would do is consider making the next level of your coaching offer suite. What is it that you can provide to people who are ready to advance from where you're currently serving them? The Ascension offer Suite is as much a retention model as it is a sales strategy. So I would highly recommend if you're trying to grow your coaching business, to build out an Ascension offer suite. Now, I just want to give one quick note before we move on to how I grew my community, how I built a platform for my coaching business. But I want to have a quick note on pricing. This is not a pricing episode. We're not going to spend that much time on it. But I do just want to say pricing actually really does matter as well. Your offers have to be properly priced in order to get traction and to have people stay with you long term and to keep buying from you again and again. If your offers are underpriced, it's going to be very hard for you to hit your revenue goals. You're going to have, you're going to find yourself maxing out your time and just feeling very frustrated. And you're probably not going to attract the right kind of clients because if an offer is underpriced, then the ideal client you want will actually not trust it. The basic sentiment, and I've thought this many times myself when looking at buying people's offers, is if it's too cheap, then it must not be worth investing in. So underpricing might actually hurt you far more than overpricing. Overpricing can also have you missing out on the client you want entirely. So it's just very important that you take the time to carefully research in your industry what is the appropriate pricing for your experience level, your audience size, the transformation you offer. All this is to say your pricing needs to match the perceived value for what the client believes it is worth paying for, not what you think you should be charging. We won't go too deep on this today, but if you're having trouble scaling and growing your offer suite, pricing is something you might want to look at. Okay, now let's talk about what did I actually do to grow my coaching business, to go from multiple five figures to multiple six figures a year in coaching and client revenue. And I want to frame this in a very specific way because I think it really matters. Technically, I'm a business coach and consultant. I work in personal branding. I'm an expert on visibility, speaking, personal branding, and stages. I teach founders of businesses how to market themselves and become the face of the brand. And this is important. That is one of the most crowded spaces on the internet. If you search personal branding expert, I might not even come up because there are so many personal branding, business and marketing coaches out there. There is no shortage of people who will sell you a framework for building your brand, growing your audience, and signing more clients. The argument can be made that business coaching and personal branding is incredibly oversaturated, and that would be true. So the real question isn't actually what I did. It's not that my skill set or my experience or background is really so life-changing different from many other highly qualified coaches in my industry. But rather the question is why did it work for me when there are so many other people in my niche and in my industry not seeing the traction and growth that they want? What did I actually do differently? So let's talk about it. The first thing is that I built real relationships in the DMs. I see a lot of people who are highly consistent with content, but they never talk to anyone in the DMs. They don't talk to their community and their audience. I got to know people one by one. I learned what they're working on, what are their goals, what are they struggling with, what are their priorities, what are their hopes and desires? That's how I earn clients, that's how I own referrals, that's how I earn stages, speaking and other big opportunities. So I really just took the time to set my sales and ego aside and just get to know people. Most coaches in this space treat DMs like a pipeline. It's so annoying. They will send the same copy and paste messages. They have a goal to get you to, you know, agree to get on a sales call or check out the link within three DMs in a conversation. And I'm just not interested in any of that. I want people to come to me because they know I can help them, but I want them to do it because I saw them as a person first. So I focus on relationship building. The second thing is I built a true community, a community that lives and breathes and exists far outside of my membership, far outside of whether they ever buy from me or not. Now that's important. Of course, I want people to buy from me, but at the same time, I have created a strong community that's built around like-minded values and shared goals and shared hopes and true connection, a group of women that is incredibly supportive and uplifting of each other. What I built is a shared mission, a shared purpose. We believe at the power table that no one should have to rise alone. We believe that community creates breakthroughs faster than competition ever will. And so, with that shared purpose, I built this incredible community of women who open doors for each other, refer each other, tag each other, cheer each other on, and buy from each other. And when you create a community where people feel connected, they stay, they refer, they stick around, and they will continue to invest with you because they see you as their trusted guide for everything that is to come next. My community became my most powerful sales engine. People sell my offers for me because I took the time to really care for people, to show up for people, and to create a shared purpose and a shared journey that people wanted to become a part of. Now, the third and fourth things are similar but slightly different. And the third thing that I did that I don't see a lot of coaches doing is I documented everything in public. I'm a huge fan of don't build in private, instead, build in public because people want to know you. They want to know the person behind the brand. And if you're a coach, this is incredibly important. In fact, it might even matter more for coaches than it does for other types of businesses because the coaching industry is full of shady people and smoke and mirrors. And most of your clients have been burned by somebody else at some point. In the coaching industry, there are a lot of big claims, a lot of perfect screenshots of all your stripe revenue, and not necessarily a lot of results to back it up. So I made a choice when I started coaching. I decided I would let people see everything. I would let them see my strategy, the decisions I made, why I made those decisions, the behind the scenes, the highs, the lows, the silly, goofy stuff I did, what was embarrassing, and the moments that weren't necessarily clean or polished. I also let them see me working over and over again. I truly believe in leading by example. And I think that if you're just constantly doing pain point marketing for your client, you're not really giving them a reason to trust you because you're not showing them you putting in the work to grow yourself. And I'm always a big believer of like, if you can't show me that you're as serious about your goals as you want me to be about mine, why should I hire you? And I truly think this is a big part of my success is because people are more likely to buy from somebody they trust and they're more likely to trust you if they can see what you're doing. They see you working, they see you putting in the time, the effort, the energy to show up to not only deliver, but show people that you care. People love seeing your wins. They want to be associated with people who are winning and growing and learning. And I think that really has become a huge part of my success. And then number four is very similar, but slightly different. So I said I documented and I built my community in public. The second thing is I documented my thinking and my decisions. And this is different. Most people document the results. They might share a little behind the scenes and they share a bit of the journey, but they don't ever document their thinking. Why are you doing something the way that you do it? What is the strategy? What are the pros and cons? They don't document decision making. And that's something that I do differently. I don't just share what I did. I don't just make announcements or share the result at the end. I share why I did it, how I did it, what were the factors that are allowed me to arrive at that decision? What were the trade-offs? What did I have to give up when I made that decision? How I know that not everyone will agree or feel that that was the right choice. And when people understand how you make decisions, they're not just going to buy your offers, they're going to buy your judgment. What you're showing them when you document decision making is that you are capable of discernment. And that's what we're also asking our clients to do when they invest with us as coaches is we're asking them to use discernment and trust us. And the best way to do that is also by modeling that behavior yourself. The next thing is I built a lot of events in person and Online. And you don't necessarily have to do this. I know lots of incredible coaches who do not do live or virtual events and they're very successful. But for me, I'm someone who loves groups. I love live energy. So why not lean into that zone of genius? And if that's you too, if you know you thrive in live settings, I would definitely consider going for it. And it doesn't have to be a huge event either. While my conference is hundreds of women in the room every year at the same time, you don't need an event of that size to generate stellar results for you and your business. I will say events are the fastest way to take someone from just knowing a little bit about you to being completely sold on your mission, completely sold into your offers because they get to see so much in one day or one event. They get to see social proof of other people buying from you. They get to experience you live, the way you speak, the way you sound, the way you laugh, if you're funny, if you show up with a lot of big emotions, if you feel grounding or calm, they get to experience all of that in a very short amount of time, as well as seeing the way you teach, coach, and lead. So they get to see you not just as an expert, but as a leader and a human, and they get to see massive social proof of all these other people around buying from you. If you're thinking about hosting events as a coach, I won't spend too much time on that in this episode. I'm gonna link in the show notes to an episode I recorded a couple of months ago called How to Host Your First or Next Event and Actually Monetize It. Go listen to that episode. If you are thinking about adding events to your coaching business, it doesn't necessarily have to be something big, and I go into a lot of different options that you can do and be highly successful with making sales from that event. Okay, and the next one is so obvious, and also people don't do it, which is why they have a hard time building trust and generating sales as a coach. And that is I actively do and show people the thing that I coach on. I feel like I'm doing knife hands right now because this point is so important. I teach on visibility and personal branding. So that means I'm actively out there doing it. I'm applying to speak on stages where I have no connections that sometimes I get rejected. I'm actively going on podcast tours. I'm actively practicing and writing talks and keynotes. I'm actively creating content that generates more visibility for me. I actively work with brand partners. I'm still on my own social media, on my own Instagram stories every single day. I don't want to be someone who's trying to sell other people on theory. I want to coach. And I also don't want to coach or sell a course on something from five, 10, 20 years ago that isn't the most current way that people are operating now. I want to coach and support and advise and lead from a place of I'm doing this right now alongside you. I might be quite a few steps ahead of you, but I can advise you because I'm also currently in the same process and same journey with you. That's what I look for in a coach. And it's also how I lead and show up in my own business. My clients are not getting a framework, they're getting a front row seat to someone who's actually doing the work, which allows them to learn faster because they're in a highly engaged environment. Another reason that I've had a very successful coaching business is that I'm present and available for my clients. I hear this a lot from people is that they joined a coaching program and then the coach is never around. Somebody else does their calls, or they take weeks to get back to clients because they're over-leveraged and they don't have the capacity or time, or they just check out and they're not even actually delivering on the coaching and the services that they promised. My community knows they can send me a DM with a question or a win and I will answer. My community knows I do not miss coaching calls. They do not get rescheduled. This is my actual job, and I will be present and fully committed to what I promised to deliver to them. And I know that my clients being able to send me a DM or send me a question or an email is not necessarily scalable advice. And you might hear people from time to time say they don't think clients should have that access to you. And it's not, I want to clarify that it's not that clients have full access to me all of the time. I have boundaries. I do not give people my phone number. I will tell them when they are asking a question that is outside of this scope. But I also want them to be able to send me a message and say, hey, personally, I just wanted to share a win with you. Personally, I'm had this come up and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. And I want to continue to be present and available for the people that are paying me to be there and be available. And it is the honest truth of how I built this. Being present and available is what continues to build trust and retention for me. And I don't see any world in which I would give that up in my business. I build real loyalty and loyal clients don't leave and they don't stop referring you. And that is actually what has created so much growth for me is that people then refer and bring other people into my world and into my coaching programs. And then finally, this is the last one. I invested a lot of time and money and energy into getting into the room myself. Tens of thousands of dollars over the last five years is what I have spent on attending events, following up with people I met at those events, being in peer-to-peer masterminds, paying to be in masterminds, paying to go to retreats and experiences. And all of these put me in proximity to the right people, to the people I needed to give me ideas or feedback, or to offer me opportunities. And it's not something I ever could have done just solely from home scrolling on social media. I did not wait to be invited, did not wait for someone to qualify me. I chose actively to invest in education, in access, and in proximity. And those relationships today continue to generate referrals for me, whether that's clients or invitations to go speak on stage, invitations to be a part of something. And these are partnerships that no ad budget could honestly ever buy me. And I don't even know if I'll ever use ads. Maybe we will, maybe we won't with the power table. But truly, at the end of the day, I have had such an ROI on relationships and network building and getting in the room that if I were to do that one strategy and only that, it would continue to generate so much growth and revenue for me for years to come. So that's the list of how I built a multi-six-figure coaching business with an ascension offer suite and a highly engaged community. And I want you to look at it through this lens. The coaching industry that I'm in, business marketing, personal branding, is full of people who have better content than me, bigger audiences than me, and very similar frameworks in a lot of ways. And yet, not all of them are making the same revenue that I'm making. What I actually have done differently from the people who are selling the same promises, the same content, the same ideas, is lead with relationships, show my real work, my real thought process, my real decisions, and invest in proximity. None of that requires a big platform. If you're just starting out, you can do all of those things today. None of it requires an ad budget. None of it requires you to go viral. It does, however, require a decision to build something that is real instead of something that just looks real. I was a best kept secret once. Nobody knew I existed. I didn't have the clients I wanted. I didn't have the business I wanted. But the only thing that changed was that I stopped waiting to be discovered and I started building recognition and community and a platform consistently on a purpose. You are not behind, my friend. You are just not yet known. It will take time to grow, but it is a hundred percent achievable for you. And the question of visibility and recognition is one that you can get started solving this week. If this resonated, I would love for you to do two things. One, would love for you to subscribe to this show so that you don't miss the next episodes. You can also follow the Power Table on Instagram or connect with us on any social media platforms so you don't miss what's coming. We've got a really big announcement coming in just a couple weeks. So follow on the podcast and everywhere else that you connect with us so you don't miss a thing. And then also, I would love for you to share this episode with other growing or newer coaches that you know who need visibility, who are trying to stand out in a world of smoke and mirrors, in a heavily oversaturated industry. And share this as a not only walkthrough of some things that you can do to grow your coaching business, but also to show that people want to connect with real people at the end of the day. And being real is what will set you apart from everyone else in your industry. All right, my friends, I will talk to you soon.