If you coach for a living, you already know the feast-or-famine rhythm. One month you sign four clients and feel unstoppable. The next two months you sign none, and the worry creeps back in. Your income lurches up and down, and every month you start again from nothing, looking for the next client to fill the gap.
I ran my first business that way too. And when my marketing agency collapsed in 2010, I was left with a young daughter to raise and a tax bill I had no idea how to pay. So when I tell you that recurring income changed everything for me, I'm not reaching for a phrase. It is the reason I have the business and the life I have now.
The good news for coaches is that this is fixable. You can build income that turns up every month whether you've signed new clients or not. But before you go chasing it, there's something you need to know, because a lot of "recurring income for coaches" advice quietly lumps together things that are not the same at all.
Real recurring income vs the stuff that only looks like it
Plenty of things get called recurring income that don't actually recur. Build your coaching business on those and you'll feel just as anxious as you did before. So let's sort the real from the fake.
Payment plans on your coaching packages. Splitting a package into monthly instalments. It feels like money trickling in, but it isn't recurring, it's one sale stretched out. When the plan finishes, it finishes, and you're back to filling the next slot. Good for making your coaching affordable. Not a foundation.
Ongoing one-to-one and retainers. Better, because it repeats. But you're still swapping hours for money, your income is capped at the number of coaching hours you're willing to sell, and it's fragile. One client finishes and a big chunk of your month goes with them. It also keeps you tied to your calendar, which is the opposite of why most of us started coaching in the first place.
Group programmes and courses. Real income, and a lovely way to help more people at once. But each enrolment is a one-off, so to make it reliably recurring you need a fresh wave of sign-ups every month, usually through launching or ads. That's the peaks and troughs all over again, just on a bigger scale.
Affiliate income. A nice top-up. But it's someone else's product, someone else's price, and someone else's decision about whether to keep paying you. Never build your floor on it.
A membership. This is the real thing for a coach. Members pay you every month for as long as they stay. You do the work once and get paid for it many times over. It carries on whether you've launched or not, whether you're coaching today or away for the week. It's income you can actually plan a life around.
That's why I've built my whole business around memberships since 2013, and why they've brought in over £2 million in recurring income for me.
"But don't memberships need loads of members and loads of work?"
These are the two objections that stop most coaches, so let me take them both apart.
Objection one: you need hundreds of members. You don't. Here's the maths I want living in your head: 40 members at £25 a month is £1,000 a month. Forty people. As a coach, you almost certainly know forty people who'd benefit from your help. Want £2,000 a month to replace a chunk of your one-to-one work? That's 80 members, or 40 people at £47. It's a great deal more reachable than the "you need thousands of members" myth makes it sound. If you want to see what different prices look like at different member numbers, have a play with the membership pricing calculator.
Objection two: memberships are a mountain of work. Only if you build them that way. The mistake almost every coach makes, me included in the early years, is packing the thing full of content and then drowning trying to keep up. You do not need a fresh course every week. A simple, valuable coaching membership can be a group call or two a month and a place for members to gather, and nothing more to start with. You build it as you go. You automate what you can. You design it to suit your life rather than to run your life.
That's my Light-Touch method in a sentence: simple, scalable, sustainable. A coaching business that funds your life instead of swallowing it whole.
How to start a coaching membership without overcomplicating it
- Decide exactly who it's for. One person, one kind of coaching client. The clearer you are about her, the easier every other decision becomes.
- Pick one transformation. What actually changes for a member who shows up and does the work? "Watched some videos" isn't it. "Stopped dreading the end of every month" is.
- Keep the format simple. A group coaching call or two a month plus somewhere for people to gather is plenty at the start. Resist the urge to bolt on everything you can think of.
- Price it so it works for you. Around £25 a month suits a lot of first coaching memberships. If you want the full breakdown, I've written a separate guide on how to price your membership.
- Open with a founding rate and a deadline. A lower price for your first members, locked in for as long as they stay, with a date it closes. That's what gets people off the fence, and those first members give you the wins and testimonials you'll use to sell to everyone after them.
- Then market it like you mean it. For three to four weeks, talk about it everywhere. Make all roads lead to your membership. Where you put your attention is where the magic happens.
It works whatever kind of coach you are
This isn't only for one sort of coach. Whether you're a life coach, a health coach, a business coach, a relationship coach or anything in between, the model is the same: recurring monthly income, light-touch delivery, built around your life. A health coach might run a monthly habits group. A business coach might run group coaching plus a members' library. A life coach might run a support and accountability space. Same engine underneath, your own coaching on top.
If you can teach it, support it, or bring the right people together around it, you can build a membership around it.
The real reason this matters
This was never about chasing the biggest number on the page or stuffing your week with more and more to do. It's about waking up on the first of the month and knowing the money is already on its way. It's about being able to plan, to breathe, to take a holiday, to look after the people you love without the constant low hum of money worry underneath it all.
It's so you never start a month at zero.
Frequently asked questions
How do coaches create recurring income? The most reliable route is a membership, because members pay every month for as long as they stay, rather than a package or course that's a one-off sale. Payment plans and retainers can help your cashflow, but they aren't truly recurring in the way a membership is.
Is a membership better than one-to-one coaching for recurring income? For recurring income, yes. One-to-one coaching is capped at the hours you can sell and stops the moment a client finishes. A membership keeps paying you whether you're coaching that day or not, and it can grow without adding more hours to your week.
How much can a coach make from a membership? It depends on your price and your member numbers. As a benchmark, 40 members at £25 a month is £1,000 a month, and 80 members at £25 is £2,000. Higher prices mean you need fewer members for the same income.
Do I need a big audience to start a coaching membership? No. You can start with a small, warm audience and a founding-member offer. Most first memberships are built from the people a coach already knows and the network around them, not from a huge following.
Want help building yours?
Come and join me inside the Recurring Income Academy. I've been building memberships since 2013 and have made over £2 million in recurring income from my own. Inside, I'll walk you through every part of building a coaching membership that fits around your life: the idea, the pricing, the content, the launch, and keeping members happy once they're in.
Find it all at recurringincomeacademy.com.
Love, Claire xx
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