Looking for helpful advice for coaching

[Shiloh Lundahl]

Let me give a brief background for the context of my question.

I’ve been investing in real estate for the last 14 years but more actively for the last eight years. During that time, I built up a portfolio of 250 doors with a business partner. This portfolio consisted of around 80 single-family homes, some mobile home parks, a commercial building, some multifamily, and some luxury short-term rentals.

I started getting a lot of people reaching out to me and asking me questions about real estate and if I would help them learn how to invest. In 2018 and 2019 I started coaching people on how to invest in real estate. The way that I set up my coaching program helped around 80 to 90% of my coaching students buy real estate and increase their net worth by between $30,000 and $500,000 during the year that I coached them.

I tried to make the coaching program really affordable and based on psychological principles of motivation. The way I set up the program was that I would have the coaching student pay me $5200 upfront for a year-long coaching program of 26 phone calls every other week. I would give them homework to complete in between the phone calls and if they completed the homework they could earn back half of their coaching fee, making the coaching program only $2500. Then after doing that for a while, I raised the fee to $10,000 with the ability to earn back $5000 of the coaching program if they completed all of the homework assignments.

Coaching real estate has just been a side gig that I’ve done for the last couple of years and I’ve had anywhere between one and five coaching students at a time, but I’ve helped over a dozen people increase the net worth substantially during the year that I coached them

So here’s the question: One of my mentors recently shared with me that I am selling myself short as a coach and that in addition to charging the upfront fee, I should also write into the coaching agreement that I get an equity steak in the deals that I help my coaching students get during the year that I coach them. It would be a partnership agreement on their deals where I would get paid out 25% of the profits at the time of sale or refinance.

I have never set up a deal when I would get some of the equity of my student’s deals before and I’ve helped several of my  students increase their wealth over $100,000 during the time that I coached them. Do you think that creating an agreement where I would gain 25% of the profit of the deals would make people not want to get coaching from me or do you think that they would still want to get coaching because of the value they get from learning how to build wealth in real estate? 

[Shiloh Lundahl]

@Autumn Cain thanks for your reply. And I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. 

For me, I have a finite number of hours that I can devote to creating an income for my family. I’m a very busy person with a lot of businesses and tasks that need to be done. Anytime I take on one task it takes away from my time at a different task.  so even though I enjoy coaching, I can only justify doing it if the income from the coaching justifies hiring someone else to do another one of my responsibilities. I’m not at a place where I can altruistically give my time without trading it for income.