Coaching and Mentoring

The old joke goes that those who can do while those who can’t, teach. It is, of course, not true. Coaching and mentoring is an important part of career development in business and it’s led by those with real-world experience in their fields.

If you have that experience yourself, passing it on to others can be a good way of making a modest additional income.

TL;DR

• Free – there is no cost to getting started as a mentor
• Easy – no specialist skills are required to be a mentor, other than communication skills
• Enjoyable – it’s nice to teach and pass on your knowledge, giving you job satisfaction
• Competitive – there are a lot of other mentors around, but it is still possible to stand out
• High Effort – mentoring is not a passive income. Some work will be required

What is Mentoring?

Hopefully you will already know what coaching and mentoring is. As we said above, it plays quite a big role in career development and has done for centuries. Mentees have had various names throughout history, from squire to apprentice to student, but the result is the same – learning a trade from someone who has a lifetime of experience.

Nowadays, mentors and coaches can take various forms. It’s not just the wise old worker teaching the youngster how to weld properly or how to handle a scythe without chopping off a foot! Entrepreneurship coaching is an especially popular option as more and more people want to establish side hustles and passive income streams – I mean, that’s effectively what we’re doing right here! However, coaching can even extend to life coaching, helping those struggling to handle the stresses that life throws and them and find the right path to happiness.

The only requirements for being a mentor are deceptively simple: you just need to know what you’re talking about and have the communication skills necessary to pass that knowledge on. Of course, in order to know what you’re talking about, you really need to have been there, done that and got the scars to prove it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be old, though. Subjects like social media marketing, for example, have not existed for long enough to be taught by retirees and the optimum approaches regularly change anyway. All you need is valid, provable experience.

The communication skills are not the afterthought the previous paragraph may have implied. You could know the secret to a rich and happy life but lacking communication skills will mean that you are the only person who will even know it. A desire to teach helps to, of course, but those skills really matter.

If you’ve been reading our guides for a while now, you may see some similarities between this particular side hustle and a passive income we described before – online courses. Sure enough, the essential skills are very similar. However, there is a significant difference between the two which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Creating an online course requires quite detailed video-making skills, but the resultant video courses can become a source of passive income. By contrast, mentoring requires no such technical skill, but requires you to personally teach the same subject over and over again to each new student.

On the other hand, the amount you could be making can potentially be quite considerable for relatively little of your time. Depending on your success rate, your teaching ability and the uniqueness of your knowledge and insight, you could make up to $100 per hour as a coach. Of course, it’s important to note that this is the upper end of a spectrum, and one that is fairly rare for new mentors, so don’t dive into this expecting to make big bucks overnight.

How To Get Started Mentoring

As we’ve already said, the most important step in getting started as a mentor is having something worth the sharing. In particular, business knowledge and experience is very highly valued – everyone wants to make more money and they’re willing to give you money to help them do so.

Assuming you’ve got that sorted, the next step is to market your expertise in order to attract potential mentees. You could do this independently, setting up a website and working on building up your SEO and marketing, but it’s much simpler to put yourself into a marketplace. Fortunately, exactly such a thing exists for mentors, advisors and coaches – Clarity.fm.

Setting up an expert account on Clarity is very simple. The only potential obstacle is that you need to link it with a LinkedIn account, both as a means of verifying who you are and proving your expertise. Once you’ve set up and optimised your profile, you simply need to set your hourly rate. The minimum is $60 per hour, but the average is about $100-$300.

When it comes to selecting how much to charge, there are various approaches you could take. Some start with a low price to build up a good profile with plenty of positive feedback, but this has the potential to backfire. Old clients may be resentful of prices suddenly increasing while new clients may form the opinion that you lack confidence in your skill. The alternative is to find those with comparable skills and experience and base your pricing on theirs. While this prevents you from undercutting yourself, it also makes it harder to get an initial burst of customer reviews to bolster your profile. Naturally, you can change your rate at any time.

Once you’ve got your profile set up, you need to wait for your first call. You can offer the first one for free, which is an attractive prospect for potential clients as it will give them an opportunity to decide if you are what they are looking for. If they decide to follow that up with further calls, they will be connected through Clarity’s system. That allows them to track the duration of the call so that they can charge your client the appropriate amount, collecting their 15% commission in the process.

Things to Consider 

We’ve already gone over this in considerable detail, but it is a very important point – coaching is definitely not a form of passive income. It is a means on monetising your knowledge and, depending on the value of your tutelage, you can generate an impressive amount of money for comparatively little time and effort, but some effort is still required.

We’ve also previously mentioned that you cannot necessarily expect to get immediately flooded with high-paying clients the moment you put your profile online. Clarity has something like 30,000 mentors on their books, coaching clients in a limited number of topics. There are plenty of other mentors available outside of their system, too. Put simply, the amount of competition you will be facing is considerable, especially when you have only just started and you have little to no feedback on your profile.

Speaking of mentors outside of Clarity’s system, it’s worth noting that the 15% commission taken by Clarity is a considerable chunk of change. It means that, for every hour you are tutoring clients, nine minutes of that time is spent making money for Clarity and not you. If you can set up a coaching business independently of Clarity, you will obviously not have to pay the commission, but you will also have to invest a lot of time and effort into marketing yourself and setting up payment gateways. If saving yourself that trouble is worth nine minutes of every hour, you have nothing to worry about.

Cost To Get Started

Setting up a Clarity account and hosting coaching calls is entirely free, so there is absolutely no cost to setting yourself up as a mentor, other than investments of time.