Robert Hargrove

For as long as I can remember, I have made my way in the world being a masterful coach/ business guru who can walk into a CEOs office or conference room and charge abundantly for my words of wisdom. Helping people deal with their leadership, busines, and career challenges on the corporate chessboard with all of its vagaries is for me like attacking an intensifying crossword puzzle with relish.

At the same time, I've been strongly influenced by a talk I heard a number of years ago by Michael Gerber, author of the E Myth, who said that any entrepreneur worth his salt should "work on the business" vs. "work in the business." After all, Ray Kroc, founder of MacDonalds, never worked in a hamburger stand. I've wanted to take the "work on your business" path, but haven't been sure how to do that.

Aha!!!! The acid test of a new business model is the financial formula.

In the past year or so, the Masterful Coaching brand has been building and we have received calls from all over the world from peole who wanted us to certify them as masterful coaches.

While this might lead to a good business for wannabe coaches, it was hard for us to figure out a good business model. The dilemma: MC certification is time intensive and what we could charge a MC candidate would, in comparision to our normal consulting rates, be miniscule.

For me, this was a great lesson in the fact that a business model can be awe inspiring, but you've got to get the accounting right. As former ATT Chairman, Harold Geneed, said, "the business is in the numbers."

The Eureka moment arrives at last

After realizing that MC certification for individual coaches didn't work, we began considering joint ventures with consulting and training firms.

In the spring last year, Jobs DB in Singapore, the Asian version of Monster.com, invited me to come to their small, but dynamic country to give a MC workshop. What really impressed me on my trip was the company's CEO, Stephen Seek, who showed little interest in the workshop itself and great interest in some kind of joint venture.

He told me, "Masterful Coaching has great content, and you need to figure out how to create products you can license, and then turn those products into dollars and cents." He said instead of thinking about how you can charge one client $100,000, relegating you to a small market of 25 clients, you need to start thinking about how you can charge 100,000 clients throughout Asia $25.

I went away thinking Eureka! why not create a workable business model around a product I can franchise and market in emerging markets throughout Asia, where there is an abundance of cheap labor, but a scarcity of emerging leaders who can run a business. More to come...