Coaches reaching breakeven

How or when do you as a coach meet your Black Friday? This is about finding the breakeven point for your coaching – and then going well beyond breakeven. It’s important to evaluate even-handedly both the costs, and the benefits, for you to operate as a professional coach. How do you assess when and how the benefits you gain from coaching outweigh the costs of providing the service?

Retailers – and many consumers – celebrate Black Friday this week. The term is said to mark the time in the year when the retailer’s overall accounts shift from red ink to black ink. In other words, generating a surplus of income over expense. It seems quite simple in this trading environment to add up income, subtract expenses, and see if the total makes it worthwhile to continue.

It’s a good time to consider the costs and benefits to you of your coaching practice.

Has your coaching practice reached its Black Friday this year?

Following the metaphor of “red ink” for costs, and “black ink” for benefits, what fits in each column for you?

Your list might be different – the above is merely an illustration or “starter kit” for your cost and benefit accounting journey. Once you have a list that works for you, you might like to assign a score to each entry, and total them up. Are you in the black – have you passed your Black Friday yet?

If you’re not completely satisfied with your accounts of cost and benefit, there is a lot that you can do.

Shifting the balance beyond breakeven for coaches

If you are a professional coach, then according to your values the benefits should strongly outweigh the costs. In our accounting language, you should be firmly in the black. And if you aren’t, it is time to change. Many of the entries in the example above are in the realm of mindset and attitude. Set yourself change goals, find a buddy or accountability partner, and you can shift away from the red zone, starting right now.

As a coach, some of the first things I learned were about my own presence and purpose. And since I began working with relationship systems in 2012, my sense of collaboration and community have been huge benefits. Many aspects of the “black ink” benefits column are strong for me. And likewise, many entries under the “red ink” column are open to management via my own mindset and attitude.

You’re a coach. You know what to do if your mindset and attitude need attention. Get a coach! Or get coaching supervision.

But the plain, simple nuts and bolts of income and expense do not yield to mindset and presence alone (although they can help).

Develop your coaching business

Just because most of us love our work doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get paid for it. And just because our clients appreciate us doesn’t mean they don’t make business decisions about whether to hire us.

It’s important to pay attention to the business aspects of coaching. Being businesslike as a coach doesn’t have to mean you lose your heart! And for those celebrating Thanksgiving this week, there are many dimensions to the harvest coaches might like to celebrate for the blessings of our work.

And you still need to develop your coaching business, unless you are funded some other way.

Business development for team coaches

If you are a team coach, the business side of coaching is even more crucial for you to win clients. This applies whether you are an internal coach or an external coach, and whether your client organization is for profit, non-profit or institutional: you still need to engage with and support their business goals.

Team coaches engage directly with the culture and productivity of an organization. Hiring us has to be a business decision for our clients. And because of the scope and scale of our impact, there are usually a number of different decision makers who have a say in whether they go with team coaching as well as who gets hired.

Generally, the training we get to become qualified as team coaches focuses on what to do once a client has decided to hire us. What about the complex process of building relationships and winning those organizational clients? A lot of the sales help on offer makes B2B sales sound easier (sometimes cheesier) and more automatic than the reality of doing business in 2026 and beyond.

If you are a team coach and would like a comprehensive collaborative program to win more high quality clients and develop your business in a sustainable way, please apply to join my Wider Value Business Development program for team coaches. I’ve been working at this, on both sides of the negotiating table, all around the world, for decades. The next cohort starts in January, 2026.

Expand the conversation

There will be a live online seminar building on this topic, on Tuesday January 6, 2026. We will explore what constitutes value for us as team coaches and how we account for the tangible and intangible value and meaning we derive from our work.