How Much Money I Make as a Coach & Meditation Teacher (Full Year Revenue Breakdown)
In this episode, I bare my financial soul. I share my full revenue from all the money I made as a coach, speaker, and meditation teacher on Insight Timer, Aura, and Simple Habit last year. I also share a report on my key expenses and investments. My hope in sharing my financials as a wellness business owner is that it shows you what's possible and encourages you to stay on your path. I'm rooting for you!
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Podcast Transcript
Welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond, and if you are new here, I come sharing this podcast as someone who quit a full time job in 2015 to pursue sharing, meditation, speaking to the world, sharing my gifts, writing books, and it's been a journey to figure out, okay, how do we do that and how do we make a living do that? So a lot of what I share on this podcast is helping in some ways. A former me wishing that this was the podcast that I had at the time to help make a living doing this work. And today, so beautifully timed is that this podcast episode is coming out a day after tax day in the United States and I am doing a full broadcast breakdown of my 2023 revenue and expenses so you can get a sense of, well, how are you actually making money? Lou, you talk about making money, but where is it actually coming from? So full transparency on this episode. I'm burying my financial soul and sharing it all with you. So I know some colleagues outsource their bookkeeping, but I actually still do it myself. Every month I go through my income, my expense, write it down manually in a spreadsheet, and I consider this a financial practice. And sometimes it's really hard to get me to actually sit down and do it. So I try and make it relaxed, I do it on my couch and yeah, just try and have some fun with it. And I've actually considered doing a monthly revenue report because I know creators that I follow that I really appreciate when they do that. You're able to see, oh, okay, what's their revenue now? What are they doing differently? So that might be something I do on this podcast or in my new. So if you find any of this valuable, let me know because it would really help give me some of that extra motivation to do it. And so let me backtrack here a little bit because I did One post in 2022, I shared about the money that I made in 2021, and it was my first year after six or so years, I don't even remember of doing this, where I actually made six figures doing this work. So that's a post that you can check out in a link below here on this podcast episode. And so I didn't do a report like this in 2022. So I will just share briefly that I made in 2022, $110,540.67. This is about 4,000 more than I did in 2021. In 2023, I made $122,371.73. This was an $11,000 jump from the year before. And so I'm grateful that the trajectory is still trending upwards. And so let's talk about the sources I'm going to break down. There are really two main sources of revenue that I have and then a few that are tertiary and bring in a few thousand dollars. So the first main source of revenue that I have is through my one on one coaching practice which I made in 2023. $53,385. And this is not a huge amount if you're just doing coaching. But again, I'm not just doing coaching, so it's a nice solid pillar for me. When I started seeing clients in 2019, everything changed because up until that point I was grinding. I was grinding to jump from class to class, studio to studio, driving every constantly having to seek and bring in new opportunities. I would track my hours of work in an app called toggl and I had one that was called Lead Generation where I literally spent over 329 hours in developing and trying to get leads. And I promise you that ROI was not worth that much time. And so it was a constant struggle. And once I started coaching, it was not only deeply rewarding, but I could do it from home. And this was before COVID So this was really, really incredible for me to have a little bit more space to make this type of money, seeing clients at home. And since I've always had a coach at different times in my journey, I knew the value of coaching. And so learning coaching skills and developing a one on one practice as a meditation teacher, if that's all you're doing, can be so useful to supplement the other work you do. Now if you are a coach, my suggestion is to think about, okay, yes, you have your one on one coaching practice, but now let's look at what are other legs of income that you can bring in. And so what I find is that most coaches make two mistakes. Number one is they charge too little unless you have a massive audience or don't want to do anything else besides coach. If your packages or sessions come out to anything less than $100 per session, it's going to be a GR to make your living from coaching. The other mistake coaches make is they charge too much. They take some high ticket training and they buy the coaching dogma to make your prices super high. But then they can't energetically hold the container. They don't actually believe in the value. And while they might get some people to say yes. Sometimes this leads to weird energy and might burn you out quicker than you even realize. And I've made both mistakes. I've charged too little and I've also charged too much. And now I need to say that pricing is so nuanced and it depends on what you want your life to look like and who you want to help. Do you want to coach 20 sessions a week or five people a year? And your pricing will change depending on what's right for you. For example, you can do really fine with a hundred dollars a session. With 20 clients a week, that's $2,000 a week, $8,000 a month. And you have living these many sessions would leave me drained and offer zero time for other work. And for the person that wants to coach five people a year, they can charge twenty thousand dollars each to those people and have a hundred thousand dollar a year business. And they have all of this ample time to really pour into those clients depending on the service that they're offering them. And they obviously have time to work on other things. There is no wrong or right. You have to know who you're working with, you're offering and the life you want to live. My mission is broad and I feel this deep in my bones, the drive to impact millions. And so my coaching packages are relatively expensive because beyond my credentials, training and experience, every hour I spend one on one coaching is not spent on reaching the millions. I also only have the bandwidth for eight to 10 clients at a time, especially because I am there for them throughout the week, answering voice messages, reading documents, listening to their meditations if they're meditation teachers, and just offering feedback and support throughout the week. Now you can take the therapy model and offer no contact in between sessions, but I find it more fulfilling to be on the journey with people. I can talk about coaching prices and fees for days because there's so much out there and I'm fascinated by this topic and I'm sure I will share much more about them on this podcast in the future. So stay tuned. Next my 2023 revenue from insight Timer Insight Timer is a meditation app where anyone can teach on, and I've been teaching on there since 2016 and I wasn't able to start making money from insight timer until 2019 and it has consistently grown from there. And there's a caveat here because in 2023 my revenue from Insight Timer was $39,261, which is incredible. However, it was actually $2,000 lower than it was in 2022 and what happened was Insight Timer began Premium Tracks. And what I've noticed in Premium Tracks is it is diluted the revenue for courses. Insight Timer pays percentage of their revenue for free tracks, which is a much smaller percentage and a bigger percentage of the revenue for their premium tracks and courses, which they now rate on the same level of payment. So when Premium Tracks came in, I noticed my revenue from courses go down and I'm going to save my old head lament for another day because I've been on inside timer since 2016. The truth is I am entirely incredibly grateful for the money I make from Inside Timer every month. I make it a practice to look at my statement, to slow down into my heart and to pour my thanks into it that literally I had a financial goal in like 2020 or 2019 to make $3,000 a month from Inside Timer. It was a moonshot goal at that time and I have done it. And while I spend hours creating content, the income is passive, meaning I make money while I sleep. It is, no pun intended, a dream come true and I don't take it for granted. If you are into spirituality or self development, I promise you can find a home on Insight Timer. It is the YouTube of spirituality and it pays a lot better. And it's really not too late. You can find another interview on this podcast with Ni Ni Lee and it's talking about is Insight Timer worth it? And shares her journey starting and growing on Insight Timer. As I said, the bulk of this revenue comes from course streams and comments because Insight Timer incentivizes teachers to respond to comments by paying another percentage of the revenue, which is just great for everyone. It creates more community and it gives teachers more incentives to go through and respond, which is super, super fun and fulfilling to send voice messages to people who are taking my comments. Now if I were to break this down even more, I have a blog now, I'll break this down a little more because I have the numbers here and I'll go through it not with exact number numbers but where this money is coming from within Insight Timer. From the free tracks I made about eleven hundred dollars from the premium tracks. And that's a newer thing. It only started in May of last year. I made about $600 and in engagement with both free and premium tracks, I made $579 for courses, just bulk plays. About $25,000 came from just play counts and a little over $10,000 came from engaging with my courses. So simply responding to people who took my courses brought in over $10,000 of revenue. Incredible. And then donations from the web and the app. And this is going to change because Apple is taking more money now, but I made $1700 in just pure donations. So, so grateful for Insight Timer. And the benefit is that's often how people find my other work. That's how people do one on one coaching. And I can create a lot of free content on there and pour into Insight Timer, pour into this podcast, which is absolutely free. Pour into other spaces which are absolutely free because I charge well for one on one coaching. Okay, moving along. My 2023 revenue from motivational speaking was 14,350. In 2022, I worked on developing and crafting a presentation for high school students called Greatness is a Whisper. If you go to my website, you can see I have a speaker reel that demos this talk. I am so proud of this work, yet I really struggle to connect with kids. I find it's less rewarding. And schools are just a grind. I constantly have to pry the doors. It's a continual struggle. And so I had to get back to that grind. It's been a couple years since I had reached out to schools because I used to do a lot of mindfulness training. But I got back to reaching out to schools more for this motivational talk. And this time I used an app called Mail Merge where I would streamline the process and pretty much spamming schools. Just blowing an email out to a bunch of schools. And for whatever reason, I think it's okay to spam schools for gigs, but if I were to spam you or spam people through my regular email list, that is a 100% no go. And so there's this cognitive dissonance for me with schools, which is one of the many reasons where I feel like I'm just not aligned. I'm not the most authentic version of me. And so I'm a human design manifestor for those that have any idea of what that means. And so in typical manifester fashion, I created the talk. I did it, and then I'm like, all right, that's it, onto the next thing. So I haven't given this Talk yet in 2024. I have no plans to give this talk yet. So I made about 14,000 DOL dollars last year and kind of just said, all right, let's continue. And so for me, I consider myself a speaker. I see a vision and a future of public speaking. And this was great training for me. And I know there's a future in it. I just don't know what it's going to look like quite yet. 2023 Revenue from meditation School which is a meditation teacher training where I co taught and led and I made $6,600 doing that. This was such a joy, it barely felt like work. And what I did on that training is I did a couple guest classes, I had a small mentorship groups throughout the whole time and I had some one on one sessions with students and the training was really a highlight of my year because it made me realize how much I love helping emerging meditation teachers and coaches. It was the catalyst for me to start this podcast you are listening to. It opened up my heart and like yeah, I want to talk to meditation teachers and coaches because I know what it's like. I've been on that journey and so I'm back again with the Meditation School this year and I'm excited to see where it goes. 2023 revenue from Meraki mastermind is $5,316. Now this mastermind started in late October 2023, so this is a solid few months of revenue. This offering means so much to me. The main reasons I've talked about on this podcast already. But for me, joining my first mastermind in 2014 absolutely was the catalyst for me starting my personal development, getting into meditation and having all the beautiful things that happened after that and then after I left that mastermind. I wish I had a more niche mastermind around meditation and coaching to help me. And so I am so grateful that I got to create this and offer something that I wish I had. And I keep describing this offering as pure for my golfers. It's like the feeling of hitting a golf shot just on the money. And since its inception there has been a flow and alignment unlike anything I've experienced at this point. It doesn't even have a website will at some point, but I'm just sharing about it through a word doc and I don't know where it's going, but it continues to be more rewarding every week and my forecast is that this Mastermind is a solid leg of income for me this year. I am so grateful that I can make money doing something I would do for free and that is when you know you're onto something. 2023 Revenue from Aura Aura is another meditation app that I've been posting meditations weekly for two years and I use just content that I have from Inside Timer and I use it Aura, you own the copyright to your content on either meditations app, so it's a nice way to just get your content out to more people. And a few of my tracks on Aura have recently reached over 2000 or 5000. I forget which is the number, but it upped the ante of how much I get per play. So I'm now getting I think 15 cents a play on certain tracks, which really is going to boost this revenue, I believe, in 2024. So that's amazing and I'm looking forward to seeing how that continues to grow. 2023 Revenue from my book Find you'd Truth I once naively thought that when I wrote my book, it's going to magically sell and I have thousands of dollars in passive income and I never have to work again. Alas, maybe after I get on Oprah. But the truth is that a lot of people in the industry will tell you that it's actually not the place to make money. A highlight of 2023 is that I published the audio version of Find you'd Truth, which is the reason actually that 641 is a lot higher than 2022's revenue from the book. Also what I did in 2023, which has no impact on this revenue, is that I started running Amazon ads to promote the book, so I sold a lot more copies. However, I never got it profitable because I was spending a thousand dollars to make $800. So I was losing money each month. And so I decided to stop that initiative. 2023 Revenue from simple Habit Simple Habit is another meditation app that doesn't allow me to add any new content to the app. They've changed a lot, but for some reason every six months they still send me a couple hundred bucks so I will take it. So that, my friend is roughly my $122 $371.73 revenue. I didn't include some of the one off classes and workshops I did. And I hope hearing this is inspiring or interesting. Now let's talk about some of the investments I made in 2023. My total business expenses were $41,200.60 and I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty here because there's a lot of tech and subscriptions and things like that that just make my business be able to run. But I'll highlight some core areas. The first my assistant where I spent $6,584 on. Since 2022 I've been working with a virtual assistant and that has been a game changer. I definitely don't give her 40 hours a week of work. I don't give her a couple hours a week of work. But it's so nice to have to do all the things that I don't want to do. It allows me to streamline processes and keeps me focused on my zone of genius. I thank you Joyce who is my assistant. It's been so fun to have this relationship to support another human on their journey and it's so fun. I can't wait to see as my business grows, the opportunity to employ and support more people and grow this thing together with others. So, so grateful for that. Next expense is coaching and coach training which was 3670. This is actually a big drop off from 2022 because this year I did not work work intimately with a one on one coach which tends to be a high investment. I did a few one off trainings and sessions like readings with certain people. However, bulk of this money was actually investing in my continuing education as a coach with a company and an organization called Alethea. And it has been so powerful to learn some of these coaching skills to build on the skills I already have. I've never felt more confident leading coaching sessions and I'm excited to continue my study with Alethea in 2024. So if you're a coach, continually be honing your craft, continually invest in trainings and invest in coaches. 2022 and 2021 was heavily into one on one coaches. And then this year or last year was more into the coach training. So finding that balance I think is important. Where the bulk of my money went was transformational events and conferences where I spent $16,012. Now maybe this is a post Covid splurge, I don't know. But it was really incredible to do a lot of my own deep inner healing work on a couple holotropic breathwork experiences and retreats. I went to a couple's workshop which was really nourishing for a relationship. And a lot of networking conferences got back in action this last year. And so a piece of this networking is more business but the inner work. I still think that your biggest way to find success is to keep doing your inner healing and transformative work. More than getting the strategies or the know hows or knowing the right people that when you are connected to your heart and your source, that's where alignment happens, that's where synchronicity happens, where you don't have to know the right people like you attract what you become. And so investing in those inner work coaches and experiences in doing the healing work will help your business. I promise. It's the thing that's going to help your business the most. And not only that, you're going to to be a lot happier and joyful and connected. So it's, it's amazing. So keep doing that. Another expense that is consistent over the years is audio editing. I have a audio editor since 2019 and over last year I spent a bit over $2000 getting edits. Shout out to my man Lester who is editing this and he has. He edits all my meditations and podcasts. And unless you absolutely love audio editing or have absolutely no money, I'd recommend outsourcing your tracks at a price that you can afford. It will free up more time to record and ultimately you can make more money when you're spending more time in your zone of genius. So recap. I made $122,371,000 in revenue with $41,200 in expenses. This is roughly $81,171 in profit. Pretty good. Note that this is a pre tax number. So I paying taxes on this number and self employment taxes and think about 20 to 30% but still really solid profit margin. And so some other financial stuff since we're talking about it, is that I donate 5% of my revenue to charity. I do regular contributions to GiveWell center for Action and Contemplation and Reality Changers and I have this bucket of 5% that's there for me in a moment when someone reaches out. I see a cause that I like and I can make a generous donation because I have that money in the bank already and it's in a separate account. I use a bank account called Novo, which makes it so easy to set up accounts where I have revenue coming in and I get 5% that automatically goes to a donation. And so it's all set up so I know how much money is where and it allows me to really be free. And I love knowing that the work that I'm doing, it's coming in but it's also impacting more than just me. So my income is also going out into the world in some way. And I know 5%, it's minimal, but hey, it's $6,000 in the year, which is a good amount and where that money is going. I have a couple monthly donations that go out. One to GiveWell. GiveWell is a great charity that finds the best charities and is kind of does the work for you of giving and finding charities that are actually making the most impact per dollar spent. So I give monthly to GiveWell. I give monthly to center for Action and Contemplation, which is Richard Rohr's foundation. I've gotten so much from their teachings that I want to support them. And I give monthly to an organization in San Diego called Reality Changers. And this is something I've been giving to for seven or eight years. I don't give a lot. It's kind of been the same recurring reven. But it's a great organization that I love supporting. And then I save the other amount for those spur the moments donations. I give a bunch to Himalayan Children's Fund this year and also to One Love Prison Meditation Project, which you can listen to my episode with the founder Tim Bryant on my podcast. I highly recommend checking out that episode. I also have a fun account that gets 5%. So whenever I'm in a new city or on vacation or doing things that I would classify as fun, I love having this just guilt free spending. Let's just go out for dinner. Oh, let's do this thing. Oh, it's in the fun account and it just makes it a lot of fun because money is not meant to just be hoarded and controlled and just, you know, strict. And we gotta save up like we're a bunch of squirrels, you know, waiting for winter. That, that we, we. Money is not an end in itself. Like it doesn't do anything. So, you know, learning how to spend money, often for people that make a lot of money, what they have to learn how to spend it and use it because then their whole anxiety is about keeping it or growing it and it's really not leading to well being. Money can lead to well being. Obviously this is not talking about the baseline level that people need to actually feel safe and secure to live their life. That's another conversation to have. But understanding that if you're starting to make some money, learning how to find flow and ease with it is really important. Learning the energetics, the energy around it, because money is neutral. It can be a blessing, it can be a curse. And so with this podcast, with my conversations on this podcast, I'm trying to continually check my intentions around money because I feel like I am in a unique position to speak about it in a way that maybe calls out some stuff that I don't feel integrity with and also shares my own times of experiencing greed. There's a podcast episode you can listen to of my own experience with realizing that I had become a greedy life coach. That sounds extreme, but you'll get a sense of what I mean when you hear that. Episode. And so none of us are immune to very human tendencies to grasp onto false idols, whether that's money, power, fame. Everyone starts. Maybe not everyone, but I like to think most people start with good intentions. Things happen. Think of every guru cult movie that you've ever watched. So it always started really well and then something took over. And so I'm trying to learn out loud with you all and have conversations about this because to me, it just feels aligned and something that I want to share and work on myself. So thanks for learning out loud with me. Thanks for being on this podcast. If this was your first time listening to this podcast, welcome. I hope you go through and scroll and see some episodes that might call to you. And if you haven't yet, I have a free course that will help meditation teachers and coaches create unique, moving, evocative, powerful, guided meditations to learn how to come up with new ideas to create guided meditations. If I didn't, I didn't, you know, create all these meditations. I could never make any of this money because I believe meditation is a medium to share our hearts and our gifts. And I've been able to use it to start to nurture this business and this impact that I've been growing. And so if you're looking for some guidance on developing new ideas and structures and how you should script the meditation, I have a free course. It's about seven lessons, it's an hour long, and it's super valuable. So please go check it out. It should be on the link below. It's called Meditation Script Mastery, and it's my gift to you. So enjoy. And as always, thank you for listening. I will see you next week.