Weeks 1 through 7 live primarily within the first two pillars. Coaches learn the OPEX method, how to evaluate, plan and manage long-term programs, and how to work deeply with people.
Week 8 shifts to the third pillar, the professional side. The point is not to turn coaches into classic ‘business coaches’, but to give them the foundation they need before they worry about funnels, fancy systems or complicated tactics.
The idea is simple: if you miss the “why” and the principles, the business side breaks under pressure, just like a bad training program.
Set up coaches in CoachRx
On the practical side, this week also helped the coaches get fully settled into CoachRx’s business tools. This included:
Automatic payments
Contracts
Resignations
Pricing systems
For many coaches, these pieces feel uncomfortable at first. They like the coaching part, but the money, contracts and manager can feel heavy.
Early placement helps eliminate friction. When payments, contracts and waivers are handled in a clear, repeatable way, it’s easier to focus on what matters most, which is driving and building strong customer relationships.
PVMPP: Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values, Principles
A big part of Week 8 was building each coach PVMPP:
Purpose: Why do you want to become a coach at all?
Vision: Where do you want to be in 3 to 5 years?
Shipment: What are you actually doing every day to move towards that vision?
Values: What do you believe as a coach and what do you stand for?
Principles: How will you transfer these beliefs into your actual coaching practice?
For many coaches, this is the first time they have written any of these. They know they love helping people, but they haven’t mapped out where they’re going or what “success” really looks like for them.
A nice moment from the workshops this week came from Melissa, one of the mentors. He walked the team through their PVMPP and shared that he has probably updated this document about 15 times over the years. This reminder helped relieve the pressure. You don’t have to “get it right” the first time. The PVMPP is a living document that grows with your experience, but also keeps you honest about the goal you’ve set.
Knowing where you are in your training journey
Another key theme this week was simple but powerful: where are you currently as a coach?
Within this cohort, there are coaches:
Zero customer training
Mentoring 80 clients
This gap affects everything:
A coach just starting out doesn’t need the same operational complexity as a coach running a large book of clients. Being honest about your current stage prevents you from copying models or values that fit someone else’s situation, not your own.
Your stage shapes your next steps, your ability, and your expectations, both for income and workload.
Owning your unique value as a coach
Value and pricing got a lot of attention this week, especially during office hours. Instead of starting with “what to charge”, the focus was on a more honest question:
what are you doing uniquely supply;
Your value is not only:
How many certificates do you hold?
How much theory do you know?
It is also:
How well you connect with people
How many times have you helped someone get from point A to point B?
The experience you create for customers
A coach with great knowledge but no coaching experience has a different value than a coach with the same knowledge and years of practice in the trenches. This is not a judgement, it’s just real.
Many coaches tend to underestimate themselves. Others sometimes overestimate what they offer. This week’s topic was to give more honesty to this question. You look at what you deliver, how you deliver it and who you deliver it to. Then you ask, “What’s this worth in my market?”
From there, pricing is a reflection of value, not a random number or something copied from Instagram.
What is it really like to be a professional coach?
The group also spent time on a big question: what does it really mean to be a professional coach;
This covers a lot:
Are you getting consistent results with your clients?
Are you building strong relationships of trust?
Are your programs keeping pace with the results your clients want?
Do you have regular patterns for your work, not just “when you feel like it”?
It also includes your lifestyle. You don’t have to be the skinniest person in the room or look like a fitness model, but clients are watching how you live.
In most coach-client relationships, the coach is the authority. Clients often hire a coach because they see something in them that they strive for. If your habits are sloppy or your actions don’t match your words, it can quietly discourage the very people you want to help.
Professionalism here means alignment: your work ethic, your education, your lifestyle, and your message all point in the same direction.
Confronting the “Dirty M Word”: Metrics And Money
Talking about money can be uncomfortable for coaches who love the “helping” side of the job. Week 8 faced this head on.
The coaches were asked to clarify:
Income is coming
Cost structure
Average price per customer
Profit as a coach
These numbers are not cold or greedy. they are what allow you to continue training long term. If you’re not making a profit, at some point you have to stop coaching and get another job just to pay the bills.
This reality is simple: no profit, no long-term impact.
There was also discussion around contracts, month-to-month options and predictability. For newer coaches, decisions like “Should I use a contract?” it can feel heavy. Hearing other coaches share what worked and what didn’t helps shorten the learning curve and avoid some common mistakes.
Attract, delight and retain customers
The week touched lightly on customer acquisition, with a plan to go deeper in the coming weeks. The focus here was more on two ideas:
Attracting strangers in a simple, honest way
Delight current customers so they stay longer and refer others
It’s not just about chasing the next new customer. Conservation matters. When you do great work, keep people engaged and help them progress, you often unlock the easiest growth channel you can have: referrals.
The discussion was also linked to service delivery. If your model is solid and you really enjoy the way you train, it’s much easier to keep clients, not just sign them.
How coaches apply the OPEX method in real life
The labs this week showed how flexible the OPEX method can be in real life.
Coaches shared how they apply the model to:
Settings in person
Fully remote settings
Hybrid structures
Two examples stood out:
Austin he is mostly an in-person trainer who also takes on some remote clients. Many of his remote clients come from local connections. He often works from the same cafe, he is present and friendly there and people just know him and what he does. When someone in this circle needs a coach, he is the first person they think of.
Sam performs a more fully remote practice. Even so, he and Austin regularly work together to host camps where their clients can meet, train and bring friends. These events:
These stories gave the cohort ideas on how to adapt the OPEX model to their own context. It also pushed them to think about lifestyle first. What kind of life do you want, and how do you design a service model that fits that, rather than the other way around?
Looking Ahead: Branding, Content, and Simple Marketing Systems
Week 8 also set the stage for what is to come in coaching.
A strong PVMPP, especially clear values, will lead to:
These days, even if someone meets you in person, they often go straight to Instagram or Google afterwards. Your content becomes a public resume, a living reflection of your value.
The next few weeks will help coaches create:
A content strategy that matches who they are and who they lead
A simple marketing system that creates a steady flow of customers
A process that fits into their normal weekly rhythm
The goal is not to turn coaches into full-time content creators. The goal is to help them share useful ideas in a way that they enjoy, that doesn’t copy all the other coaches on the stream and doesn’t steal all of their training time.
Bringing it all together for your coaching career
Week 8 of the OPEX method is where coachability begins to meet career planning. Coaches wrote their PVMPP, faced their stage in the journey, faced prices and metrics honestly and looked closely at what it means to be professional both at work and in life.
From here, the path leads to branding, content and simple marketing that supports, not replaces, real coaching. If you want to dig deeper into this guidance and see how the full system works, you can explore the OPEX method program and follow future cohorts.
Your coaching knowledge matters, but how you turn that knowledge into a solid, meaningful career is what keeps you in the game for years to come.
