The Design Business Show 204: High-Touch Strategies to Grow Your Business Organically with Amanda Walker

Amanda Walker is a certified master coach who inspires coaches to become better coaches. Amanda is passionate about helping coaches and online service-based business owners get their clients massive results in order to grow a profitable coaching practice. She is the host of the Best Damn Coach Podcast and runs the premier coaching program for coaches, Best Damn Coach.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

Amanda’s Start to Coaching

How Amanda had sent me a pitch over the summer to come on the show and talk about high-touch marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business organically
Amanda’s perspective is that everyone is a coach in some way – if you’re a parent, you’re a coach; if you’re a spouse, you’re a coach; if you run a business, you’re talking to clients that you’re coaching in some element
This first coaching job Amanda had was coaching boy’s pee-wee basketball at age 15 – it was that job that made her realize she had a passion and a gift for helping people create results
Amanda wore a lot of different coaching hats and was a teacher, but the year after her son was born, she decided she didn’t want to continue teaching; Amanda took a year of sabbatical in case she wanted to come back but ended up falling into entrepreneurship
How Amanda opened how her own coaching practice in the health and fitness industry, which she did for about 6 years – she had success in organically attracting many coaches and aspiring coaches
Many coaches attracted to Amanda’s work wanted her to help them in their business, which is how she decided to move in that direction with her business
Amanda wanted to help coaches scale to 6 figures and beyond practitioners but, more importantly, work on the art and mastery of coaching because she believes there are a lot of outside resources, but the one thing that will trump when it comes to growing your business organically is, results that you create with your clients
After Amanda had children, she went through a personal weight loss journey, and her first clients were her fellow gym-goers who saw her transformation and wanted help doing the same thing
As business owners, we’re all serving people, and the most important thing we will do is create results because our people become walking billboard advertisements for us
The first few years of Amanda’s coaching business were done through email because she was afraid of live coaching, and for the first client she had, she charged $50 for the month because she was scared to ask for money
The online coaching industry is predicted to be a 20-billion-dollar industry globally by the end of 2022
Because there are so many online coaches, Amanda’s mission is to help her clients stand out, and her perspective is that you don’t do that from fancy Facebook ads or templates – what makes them stand out is who they are as people and how they connect with others

Amanda’s Offerings + High-Touch Strategies

Amanda’s signature program, Best Damn Coach, is a 6-month to year-long experience – Amanda believes it doesn’t do service to entrepreneurs to have a course, step-by-step mission – Amanda believes in real-life support from real-life people holding space for us to be accountable
The Business Accelerator is another one of Amanda’s offerings that aim to take coaches, consultants, and mentors to the 6-figure mark
Amanda’s high-level mastermind called the Inner Circle for those who are already succeeding and looking for intimate upleveling strategies – they have live events and retreats that coincide with this mastermind
Why Amanda keeps one-to-one clients because she believes that to teach coaching, she needs to be involved in it
When you’re growing organically, the first thing you need to do, Amanda says, is shut out the rest of the noise and get back to the basics of human connection
How you can grow to a 6-figure business without a large email list through intentional connections with your small audience
At the core level, we are meant to be part of a tribe; when we think about that, we have more opportunities to make our clients feel connected to us, safe, and trusted.
Amanda is a practitioner of NLP, and something she teaches her clients right away is understanding what rapport is – there’s verbal rapport and unconscious rapport
When you hear someone’s voice or when you hear your name, you automatically build a deeper level of unconscious rapport, which is why Amanda teaches clients to take communication out of text messages and take them into audio or video
Amanda shares that she communicates with her email list twice a week – One is a call to action to listen to that week’s episode of the Best Damn Coach Podcast, and the other is a message dedicated to celebrating clients
When Amanda showcases the results clients are having, it builds trust – she usually takes a screenshot of a result a client shared with her and writes about it
High-touch strategies to Amanda is going above and beyond in the most personal way to cultivate a feeling
Amanda leverages audio and video in email marketing by sending a video in the first email after someone signs up for one of her programs so they can see her and hear her voice
Another high-touch strategy Amanda does is calling each person who signs up for one of her programs
When Amanda has a warm connection, she will reach out with a personal audio message
Amanda is constantly looking to nurture the person versus taking a blanket approach to marketing
The story of Amanda’s client who hosted a workshop and how she sent a personalized audio message to those who attended and those who signed up but didn’t attend to see if they had any questions – she got great results from this high-touch strategy that led to a purchase of the workshop
Another client of Amanda’s sends audio messages back in response to the direct messages she receives on Instagram and asks to hop on a call with them to help answer their question further, which has yielded great results
Inside Amanda’s Best Damn Coach program, they focus on the 4 Ss of coaching: Sales, Service, Strategy, and Self-Coaching
In the Business Accelerator program, they dive deeper into creating frameworks by looking at the common steps clients take when they see success
Within Amanda’s teaching, there are many frameworks she uses; one, for example, is the BEST model is one Amanda teaches to create flow and results inside a coaching session
In the Best Damn Coach Podcast, Amanda explains that they focus on 3 things – 1) helping listeners be better coaches, mentors, and guides, 2) helping listeners coach themselves, 3) helping listeners grow a thriving business
Two things in Amanda’s business that she has stuck to are communicating with her email list every week and posting consistently with her podcast because she says it’s important to show up when people are expecting you to
Amanda says entrepreneurship was the greatest journey of personal development she never knew she needed because it brings up insecurities and weaknesses that are exposed for a growth opportunity
How personal development is tied directly to your profit – Amanda says if you are not nurturing yourself, there is no way to handle the mindset drama that happens inside a business
Personal practices that Amanda uses are journaling and using her personal certifications to visualize where she dreams of taking her business

What Makes a Good Coach?

When someone says yes to you, Amanda says you have to understand that clients go through a moment of buyer’s remorse, so immediately you want to instill belief in them and reconfirm that their success is inevitable, which is a step many people miss because they’re more focused on the details like booking a call with them or having them fill out a form
One thing that makes a great coach is your ability to create results – Amanda says if your clients are putting in the work and they don’t see results, it’s time to reevaluate your coaching, and just because you get a certification, it does not mean that you are ready, able or confident enough to cultivate that
Another piece that Amanda believes makes a great coach is your ability to do the work yourself – Amanda says she only takes her clients as far as she’s willing to go herself
A couple of reasons coaches don’t make money is because of fear, they don’t have a clear offer, or because they have money drama – in the beginning, people want to be accessible to everyone, but you might not always be the best fit for someone to come in and invest in you
In the past couple of years, Amanda thinks the global pandemic positively impacted the online coaching world through many opportunities because coaching becomes more powerful as more people are exposed to it
Amanda also believes coaching rivals therapy because there are things coaches can do that therapists are limited to – it’s the reason she works with so many therapists that are transitioning into coaching because they see the value in both
During the pandemic, Amanda also learned that there are a lot of disappointing things happening in the coaching world around integrity
There is no barrier to entry in the coaching world, so anyone can decide to be a coach for whatever they want, and no one is checking in on them; there’s no certification required
Amanda created the Best Damn Coach program because they believe you don’t need a certification to be an amazing coach, but you do need to have a heart for integrity, hone your craft, and be able to learn from other people
Listen to the Best Damn Coach Podcast – on Tuesdays, they release content-driven episodes, and on Fridays, they release behind-the-scenes episodes where you get to hear Amanda live coach somebody
Connect with Amanda on Instagram, where she has many free resources