Key Strategies for Career Advancement with Barrett Brooks

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, our guest is Barrett Brooks, a career strategist and leadership expert who has helped countless professionals accelerate their growth and achieve their career goals. Barrett dives deep into the strategies for advancing in any career, from overcoming obstacles to embracing opportunities that lead to long-term success. Whether you're navigating a career transition or looking to level up in your current role, Barrett's insights will inspire and equip you for the next step in your professional journey.

You can find him on:
https://barrettbrooks.com/
https://presencebasedcoaching.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrettabrooks/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Because the leverage they get on that time together can make them a half million dollars a year if they pay me almost$50,000 a year. And I'm always looking for a market where if I'm charging a certain rate, I think I can turn around and help them generate 10 times the value of that rate.

Davis Nguyen 0:16

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Wynne, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to$100,000 years,$100,000 months, and even$100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over$100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Pedro Stein 0:47

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm Pedro, and today's guest is Barrett Brooks, who knows that scaling a business is rarely the hardest part of entrepreneurship. As an executive coach, writer, and former COO who helped scale convert kit from 3 million to 330 million plus while working directly with Seth Godin twice, he spent the last 15 years plus helping entrepreneurs grow sustainably without losing themselves in the process. What makes Barrett's approach unique is his integration of executive coaching with somatic leadership, development through presence-based coaching, PBC. He helps high-performing leaders across media, education, food, wellness, and technology think clearly under pressure, lead without reactivity, and build capacity in others instead of becoming the bottleneck. Welcome to the show, Barrett. Great to have you.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate that introduction.

Pedro Stein 1:52

Well, I appreciate you being here. Okay. And I'm excited to dive in into a little bit of the origin story. So I'd like to rewind a bit, you know, because every coach has that moment where they look at their life and say, you know what? I guess this is what I'm doing now, right? So when was that for you?

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Yeah, I kind of have two with regards to coaching. The first one was in 2011. I was a management consultant at Ernst ⁇ Young, one of the big four accountant firms. And uh I was a volunteering at a nonprofit that served children in foster care in the state of Georgia. And at this camp, every counselor gets one camper. So there's a one-to-one camper-counselor ratio. And it's this week where these children get to escape their realities that can be quite challenging for them. And it's a really beautiful experience. You really get to invest in them, give them unconditional love, give them a lot of attention that they don't typically get day to day. And halfway through that week at camp, the board chair comes into our staff meeting in the middle of the day. We all get a little break for about an hour while the kids take a nap. And he says, so we hired this new executive director. This was her first week. And we realized she's not a good culture fit. So we've let her go. And we're going to be recruiting a new executive director. And we want it to be someone who's been a volunteer here before. And as I heard him say this, something in my brain broke in a way that I realized I could not keep being a management consultant because the two worlds were so far apart. The idea of running a summer camp for kids who uh didn't have the resources I had, didn't have the experiences or the love that I had in my life, or going back and looking at spreadsheets all day on behalf of Fortune 5 companies, the worlds were so far apart that I couldn't reconcile them. And so I went back to work and within two weeks I quit. And while I didn't end up applying for becoming the executive director of that organization, what I did do was I started a business where I wanted to help upcoming and recent college graduates find jobs like that executive director role, where they were going to work in environments where their skills could be put to really productive use. They would be mission aligned, and they could make a bigger impact than just being a cog in a machine at a huge company. And so that was my foray into coaching for the first time was helping people find jobs that were very meaningful to them, uh, very much career coaching to start with. And that was kind of my jumping off point that's led to kind of 15 years of a journey through the coaching industry to where I am today.

Pedro Stein 4:24

Hmm, interesting. Well, first of all, I also worked at Ernest and Young here in Brazil. Okay. So yeah, that and coming. Yeah. And I'm also a coach. So I kind of resonate with what you're telling me here. Okay. Now, moving forward, I want to understand the shift, right? Because there's always that moment for coaching where you're coming from I'm helping people to I'm building a real business around this. Because at the start, you're like, you want to impact people. You're you're looking at those kids and you're like, I just want to help them, you know, and you're comparing to your background, you're like, you know, this seems more impactful. And I believe that's one of the reasons you chose that route. But I want to understand when it when that shift happened, you know, when you're like, ah, okay, I'm actually building a coach and practice around this that generates revenue, you know, that that mentality.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah. And I think that's the difference between what I've been doing these past three years and being a full-time coach versus that first business 15 years ago. So if I think back to that time, I made all of the classic mistakes that you know you probably hear repeatedly on this show and that we know are challenges for coaches. I picked an audience that had no money. They were students. I was not an experienced coach. I didn't have a lot of training. So I wasn't totally clear on my methodology and how I was going to work with people. I was developing in real time. And I didn't have a lot of business skills in terms of running my own business. You know, I had had a lawn business in high school. I had done little things growing up, all the typical kind of entrepreneurial routes. But I was having to learn two things at the same time. One was how to be a coach, and two was how to run a business. And it's really hard to do both at the same time. And eventually that led to that business failing. And the biggest reason was that I picked a really poor market, which didn't have the ability to pay me. And what I learned through the process of that was if college students only have money for pizza and beer, what I needed to find was a market where people could pay me a rate that would allow me to earn a living. And you know, it's easy to like do the math in your head and say, oh, well, if I earn$50 an hour, that's like$100,000 a year if I'm working full time. And it's like, well, but you're not coaching every hour. And so that's not how the math works. So I had to learn all of these lessons. And the biggest thing I took away was that I needed to be clear on who was going to pay me. And the only two people that were willing to pay me with the market that I was working with were parents of unemployed recent graduates who were having trouble getting jobs, which was not fun work because that was remedial. That was like having to go and help someone who was already struggling magically fix a problem that was intractable for some reason already. Or I needed to go get companies to pay me to help them find the right people to join them. And that put me back in that kind of corporate type world if I was going to do that type of work, which was the whole point to get away from to begin with. And so that led me to dissolving that business and shutting it down because I realized these weren't compromises I wanted to make. I didn't want to get paid by parents of kids who couldn't be employed. And I didn't want to get paid by corporations to help them recruit and coach people into joining those companies. So instead, I shut it down. 10 years later, I came back around and I was able to apply all of those lessons and say, I'm going to pick a market of people where I have expertise. I had learned to build businesses at this point. So I knew not just how to build a business from scratch, but like how to scale something. And I already had the coaching expertise. And so I had solved a lot of those issues that I had the first time around. And that allowed things to go much faster, where within six months I had a full practice of entrepreneurs who were all doing a million dollars or more in revenue. I had the credibility in that market because of my work at Convert Kit. And I was able to charge a rate that was going to allow me to earn a full-time living and replace my tech startup salary. And so it was just like the tale of two worlds between the first time I started coaching and then when I started three years ago. And the difference was 10 years of experience of really earning my stripes in all these areas.

Pedro Stein 8:38

So when I talk with Past Barrett, the lawn business owner, for over two years. Okay. Imagine me selling new coaching. So they thought I was gonna light up some candles sometimes, you know, or dance the kumbaya, the blue collar people, nothing against and love the demographic. It's just hard to, it's a hard tell. It's part of an awakening process, also. So they don't sometimes visualize what coaching is. So I think that was funny. And you're a step ahead of me. I tend to ask about how you niche down, right? You already did that. So I'm gonna change my question. I want to understand, because this could serve uh our audience, you know, other coaches out there, like how hard was it for you to accept the shift from I want to impact, you know, because you're coming from a volunteering background. So there's a lot of a passion-driven mindset around this to okay, but they don't have the money. How did you make the shift? Did you did you battle that, you know, inside your head? How did that play out?

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Yes, I definitely did. I think there's kind of three layers to this. So one is what are the causes you care about? What are the things, the changes that you care to make in the world? This is a layer. I think it still matters. I think that there's a naive version of that, and then there's a practical version of it. I think when I was younger, I was operating from a naive version, and I've learned how to modulate that to account for two more things, which is with whom do I have credibility? So I do think credibility matters, and you need to have some form of reputation or background that makes it believable that you can actually serve the people that you're targeting. And then third, are who are the people that you actually enjoy working with? You do actually have to tolerate these people every day, right? I love my client base because I have a lot in common with them. I view myself as a creative person, as a writer, as a podcaster. And a lot of the people I work with are also doing that kind of work. So what I've realized is that working with the group that I work with allows me to support them in building cultures of belonging, cultures of high performance, places where people can realize their potential at work. So that's how I align to the cause piece. The second thing is I chose entrepreneurs earning at least a million dollars a year because they, if we do our work well, so I charge$3,750 a month. I do two sessions per month. If you do the rate on that, it's almost$2,000 an hour. It doesn't make sense objectively to charge$2,000 an hour unless they can get leverage from that time. And so by choosing entrepreneurs making at least a million dollars a year, I know that it will be worth it to them to get really world-class coaching because the leverage they get on that time together can make them a half million dollars a year if they pay me almost$50,000 a year. And I'm always looking for a market where if I'm charging a certain rate, I think I can turn around and help them generate 10 times the value of that rate. So I picked a market where I could charge a rate that makes it worthwhile to me. And then I also picked people within that market because there's many different types of entrepreneurs who earn a million dollars a year. I picked a subset of that that I really enjoy working with. I genuinely believe in them. I like the end output of the creative work that they do, and I know that I can help them. So I checked all of those boxes of mission, leverage on their time, um, people that I have credibility with and that I enjoy working with. And that's made obviously a huge difference now because it's a completely different situation that I'm in now versus when I first started coaching.

Pedro Stein 12:13

Okay, now that's the coaching side. I want to talk about the part that nobody escapes, right? Which is marketing. And you do have a very uh specific audience, right? And you have your podcasts and all of that, but I want to understand how do those creators who are like above one million, like you mentioned, how do they usually find you?

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Well, I think this is broadly true of human behavior, but it's certainly true of the creator marketplace. Creators make social buying decisions. And so, yes, you need to have credibility markers. Like I think of my Instagram feed as almost proof of life. It's not the thing that's gonna sell someone, but once someone knows I exist, if they go there, it should further the trust or it should further the belief that I'm gonna be able to help them. And if you go on Instagram, I think I have like 1200 followers or 1100 followers or something. It's basically nothing. But what matters is that in rooms where people making a million dollars or more hang out, my name often comes up even when I'm not there. And I optimized for marketing and sales that made that happen, not that gave me the flashy metrics and the big public follower account and all of that, because you can easily end up with a lot of followers. And there's many ways to get to lots of followers that do you no good in terms of actually building a business. And I was more interested in whatever activities would allow me to be named by the people that had social trust with their peers than having 50,000 followers of people, most of whom will never hire me as their coach. And I think that was the mindset shift of me being a more mature business owner now versus early. I might have wanted followers over the high signal trust piece. And instead, I optimized for the opposite. And now, because I earn the living that I earn doing this, I've got infinite runway. I can build follower count for the next 30 years, and that'll take care of itself over time. But without revenue, you don't get the right to do that. You don't get the right to stay in the game, and so I wanted to earn the right to stay in the game.

Pedro Stein 14:16

Interesting. I love the the idea that you have. That's like raw data data, right? It's like the followers doesn't mean doesn't equal revenue because is your ICP actually in one of those, like 10K, 15K, whatever number you have, there uh are you converting because that's the strategic mindset you need to have, right? The revenue, what's pushing revenue? Okay, now I want to talk business for a second, right? So, and you can pick the the lane you want to talk about if your coaching practice towards uh the your own business, like the one-on-one, or the you know, the other business you just acquired. So let's let's imagine people find you, okay, through your podcast, through PBC, whatever the your social presence, whatever they resonate with your work, okay, and eventually they want to know what working with you actually looks like because everyone builds their coaching business a bit differently. So when someone actually becomes a client, Barrett, what does that experience look like right now, you know, from their perspective?

SPEAKER_02 15:16

Yeah. I mean, this gets at the blend between the marketing approach I've taken and how I bring people into my practice. So what I've learned is that I can tell you what I do all day long, and that won't necessarily change your belief in the value of it or your trust in me as a coach. But if I show you what I do, you can judge for yourself. And so what I've looked for in all of my marketing and all of my opportunities to interact with potential clients is what are all the different ways I can show you what I do? So one of my principles for people starting businesses is what's the shortest possible distance between you and your ideal customer? And if you think about things like social media, well, what's the funnel there? Well, I post a reel on Instagram, and then I follow up with every new follower with a DM, and then I try and give them a free giveaway on, so they join my email list, and then once they're on my email list, I email them and I try and get them to book a call. It's like there's seven steps there. But what I figured out was if I go speak in highly qualified rooms where there might only be 20 people there, but every one of them is an entrepreneur making a million dollars or more. And rather than teaching or telling what I do, if I just coach live in front of those people on their real challenges with real people from that audience, it does all of the work for me. So a lot of the approach I've taken has been what are all the different ways that I can demonstrate coaching in front of the right people? So it's giving workshops and doing live coaching in those workshops. In some ways, my podcast is that, but that's really a creative outlet. We're currently working on a second podcast where I will coach real entrepreneurs in my target market, and we will work on real problems in their businesses. And that gives me the effect of being in person in a workshop, but I can distribute it much more widely. And you can hear what happens in a coaching session anytime you want. And so I'm gonna do it that way as well. Social media, you'll notice every once in a while it'll be a real coaching challenge that I'm working on and that I'm doing a real about. My newsletter is a breakdown of a real coaching session, the presenting issue, what the emotional blocker was, what the breakthrough we got we got to was. So, what I'm trying to find is what's every medium where I can demonstrate coaching, because that to me builds trust in my actual coaching ability, not just my ability to market. So that's the first thing. And then in the conversation, once someone raises their hand and says, I'm interested, I think you're the right fit for me. Number one, most of the time, 80% of the work is done. By the time people fill out my form on my site, they have usually already decided that they want to work with me. They know what my rates are, they know an overview of what my process is, and they've raised their hands and said, I've heard you're the best person for people like me. I want to have a conversation. And usually it's more about do our personalities click? Do we feel like this is going to be a good and fun fit for both of us? Not like, let me sell you on working with me. So I'm trying to design that so that once someone comes to me, we're in a conversation about mutual fit, not let me convince you that this is what you need right now. Because I find if I'm in the role of convincing, that sets us on the wrong foot for a coaching relationship. Because a huge piece of being successful at actually creating transformation and coaching is a person engaging in the coaching process. And if I'm having to sell you on the idea of coaching on our call, then I'm already on a defensive footing and I don't want to be on that footing.

Pedro Stein 18:50

Interesting. But let's imagine I'm we're having like early day coaches listening to us, okay?

Davis Nguyen 18:57

Sure.

Pedro Stein 18:57

And that piece you mentioned is very interesting. First, you're delivering value and you're serving them first, right? So that's a lot of that, but you have credibility right now, right? Now, what would uh old early day Barret would think about this, you know, when you're scraping by, when you're thinking about, oh my God, I need to get uh the next client on my my calendar. So how would you play that out? You know, I'm just trying to understand how how would you give advice for that, those early day coaches, you know?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

Yeah, great. Um, okay, so let's bring it back to Earth for if you're just getting started. So, first of all, there is no barrier to building expertise. In fact, there's less barrier than ever before with all of the AI tools available and everything you have in front of you. You have zero excuse for getting very good at subject matter expertise related to your client base that you've picked. I don't care what you pick, you can pick dog walkers for all I care as your target market, but you need to be an expert on their world. And with the tools available to you, you should be able to do that progressively over time. So, this is a thing I really believe not enough coaches do is they don't commit to becoming really great at serving their specific audience. They further don't commit at becoming really great at the coaching skill set. So, step one, commit to building the expertise, invest in it over and over and over and over, because that builds your credibility when you're in a conversation with someone. If it's obvious that in the background you've got knowledge of what it's like to be a dog walker, it's going to come across in every conversation you have with them. Just like you, Pedro. I bet you knew everything about what it was like to run a landscaping business by the time you were six months in, right? Right. You didn't have to tell them that. It just came through in your level of understanding in the conversation. I think people want to trust that. They want to know that you understand their world. Okay, that's piece one. Piece two is you have to commit to becoming very good at the coaching skill set. There's two things to this. One is training and learning with programs that do a very good job and have a lineage of training coaches in a very high quality way. And two is getting the reps in. So it's not just the theory, you have to go out and practice it as well and see how it works and do your own learning in terms of real client relationship. Because it's a different thing to say, here's a model based in neuroscience about how change happens, and then to help someone work through change in real time, two different worlds. Okay. So, second piece, commit to becoming really good at the coaching skill set. And then I think a third piece is you have to acknowledge where you're starting from. If you have not yet built a ton of expertise and credibility and you're working on your coaching skill set, that probably means you might have to coach for free or low cost for a while to get the reps in. And that's not a bad thing. It just means you have to have a higher tolerance for the timeline to getting where you want to be. And as like the way I think About it is if I start coaching for free, when I'm full with free clients, now I earn the right to say the next one's gonna be$50. And at$50, when I'm full again, now I earn the right to say the next one's$150. And if you follow this process, and every time someone comes to you, you say, I'm full, but I have a spot opening up next month, you earn the right to charge that next amount. And I, this is the exact way I've laddered up to what I charge today, is it's basic economics. If you have more demand than you have supply that you can help people with, you can raise your prices to make these things even out. And as long as you're humble and you commit to the process of building expertise, building the coaching skill set, and starting where you actually are with your pricing, I think you can scale as high as the demand you can generate.

Pedro Stein 22:52

So you immediately start doing pro bono work after before you start charging people. That's what you're telling me.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

If you're starting from the very beginning, if you already have credibility or you already have demand, then you get to skip steps, right?

Pedro Stein 23:06

Okay, got it. Okay, because that's what the point the point that I want to hit right now is a hot topic, which is pricing, especially, and you kind of browse through it, like especially in the service-based industry, right? It's a self-worth path for a lot of coaches out there, and you feel and it feels like you're so comfortable around this because you you're dropping, you know, something that is a uh like a taboo would be like dropping your pricing. Something we see coaches that sometimes they shy away from doing that, right? So, my question for you is you know, how do you think about it today? And and if there were any lessons along the way that shaped how you landed, where you are right now, you know. Am I charging enough? Am not am I not charging enough? You know, so that I think that's a big obstacle that could help our audience, you know.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Yeah. Okay, so how I think about it today and how I've thought about it over time are different things. So let me just start with where I am. So I mentioned I charge$37.50 a month in the coaching industry. This would be like 99.5 percentile. It's very, very high in terms of like the total scale of coaches. I think the average coach charges something like$150 to$250 per session. And obviously that means that half the people charge less than that and half the people charge more than that. And so the coaches I spend time around today are people who typically charge five, seven, ten thousand dollars a month, not because they have infinite demand or huge audiences. In fact, many of the coaches I spend the most time around have no audience online. But what they've done is they built such a strong reputation in the markets that they serve that they don't even have to create content because they have so much referral-based demand coming to them. And they are so established at that rate that there is pre-existing trust, like there is for me, that that's how they get their clients. Okay, so this is like if there's a platonic ideal of how you end up as a coach, I think it's something like that: the ability to charge very high rates and to have so much referral-based demand that you stay full. I think that's kind of like ultimate success if you want to stay in one-on-one coaching. There's obviously a whole other set of things you can do to scale beyond that. So if then we back that up to how do you think about pricing from the beginning? We are subject to the same process of change that our clients are. And anytime we forget that, we lose our humility on that. I think we lose our way as coaches. But we too are in our own development at all times, all times. And pricing is one of these things, to your point, it's a self-worth journey. And I think one of the ways we build the self-worth to be able to charge what we believe the value exchange should be, is to build proof points that we can actually help our clients change. And this is why I think it can be helpful to start with free if you're at the beginning of your journey, is because it helps you build some proof points that you really do know what you're doing. You've taken your training and now you're applying it and you're seeing it work. And until you see it work, I think it's really hard to believe that it's worth money. But over time, as you see at work, you say, Well, dang, I need to be charging money for this. This is worth something. I'm seeing them get real results that they value in some way. They might value it emotionally, they may value it relationally, they might value it economically, but in some way, you're creating real value for people. And that means you should charge money commensurate with that. I mentioned earlier that my principle I hold myself to, I want to try, I want to have the mindset of I'm trying to help my clients generate 10x the return of what they pay me. And the reason I hold it at 10x is then if we fail and we do 3x, they've still gotten 3x what they paid me. And that's failure, quote unquote, relative to the standard I'm holding myself to. But I never want to be in a position where I feel like what clients are paying me is not being returned in some way to them. And what I find interesting about my client base is now I've learned that sometimes they want to see financial return, but sometimes actually the finances are not their problem. The problem is that they're miserable earning the money they earn. And so many of my clients actually prefer to measure their return in emotional value and experiential value and what it's like to earn the money they earn. And they actively choose no, I don't want to grow my earnings. I just want to enjoy my work and to have the ability to take a vacation a couple of times a year. And that for them is worth more than they would have gotten from additional revenue. And so I've one of my growth areas as an example to stay humble on my end, is learning to trust that my clients know better how to measure the value than I do. That if I came in saying, you must earn 10 times the money that you're paying me from our work together, that would actually shortcut some of their process of growth, which for them might be measured in I have one-third the stress that I had when we started working together. And that's worth a hundred times more to me than more money, which I already have enough of. And so over time, I think you learn to dance with your clients and understand what is the measure of value for them. And how do I make sure I'm delivering on that and measuring our work on that, not just on the obvious metric?

Pedro Stein 28:33

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Value anchoring versus price anchoring, classic dilemma on the sales pitch. No, I love that because that one is harder to sell. And and sometimes they have this saying like, sell the client what they want, but deliver what they need, right? So sometimes they don't see it. And at the end of the day, they're like, oh my god, I'm so less stressed. I took a you know, a sabbatical or whatever. So definitely. But sometimes at the start, they don't have that that that vision. It it there because, and I'm not sure if you agree with that, because they're in such an in in the eye of the hurricane, the middle of the noise, that it's hard to even imagine having like three weeks off or something like that, you know?

SPEAKER_02 29:19

Oh, yeah, I see it all the time. Almost everyone that comes to me says some version of like, I want to double my revenue, or I'm gonna grow 50% this year, or something to that effect. And and I embrace that. I believe them when they say that at the outset. And what I've discovered is that many times the revenue growth is a proxy for something else that they really want. So they're saying, I want to double my revenue, but maybe there's an underlying belief that when I double my revenue, I'll finally be able to take a vacation without being on Instagram 12 hours a day or whatever. And it's when we uncover those underlying assumptions and beliefs that the real work begins. And sometimes they really do want to double their company and it's exciting. They want to build a team, they want to build a CEO skill set, and that's amazing. I want to help them with that. But if what they're saying is money is actually a proxy for another thing I want more, I want to help them with the thing they want more because that is ultimately what they will value and what they will reflect on our work and say, uh, he actually helped me see something I couldn't see. And for that reason, I will eagerly refer him clients in the future.

Pedro Stein 30:31

Okay. I want to shift here for a moment because we have PBC, you have your own coaching practice. Now, I'm curious about where you're taking all this, right? Looking ahead. Where do you see the business going? You know, are you thinking about scaling, hiring, or is there a next step you're excited about, Barrett?

SPEAKER_02 30:47

Yeah. Yeah. So I spent basically the last two years being completely full in my practice and really, really loving it. I like the process of helping someone transform their life through coaching is beautiful, mission-oriented work for me, and I get paid really well for it. So, from that standpoint, I succeeded. I did everything I set out to do, and I'm excited about having a long runway of that. Also, when you're full as a coach, you run into these challenges that I actually similar to the ones we were just talking about, which is okay, so if you've got however many coaching clients a week, let's say 10, and now you want to take a week of vacation or you want to go speak at a conference for a week. Well, now you go from the 10 clients that were in that week, now it becomes 20 clients the week before, because it's the 10 that were supposed to be scheduled, plus the 10 for the week you want to take off. And I realized that this was an undesirable outcome of being successful at what I set out to do. And that I wanted a way to continue to grow my business without me having to earn every dollar through one-on-one coaching. So it's not that I want to stop doing one-on-one. It's actually that I want the option to do less one-on-one when it suits me. Uh, so that was the business-driven thing. But the opportunistic thing was my mentor, the former steward and CEO of presence-based coaching, uh, approached me at the end of 2024 and said, Hey, I'm nearing retirement age. I've been looking for a successor for for some time. And from the day you showed up at training, I felt like you might be a fit for this. And I feel that even more strongly today than I did then. And so I had this opportunity placed in front of me that met the business opportunity or the business pain I was feeling with the chance to take over this 20-year-old company that has a wonderful legacy in the industry and was created by one of the like the leading edge teachers of the last 30 years, named Doug Silsby, who passed away in 2018. And it felt like this incredible gift of being handed a legacy and saying, Will you take this and carry it forward? And so if we go back to checking those boxes, it had the meaning piece. I had trained at this company, I found it to be very valuable training. And from what I could tell, reputationally out there in the coaching industry, for the people who know that it exists, it's a top-tier training program. So it checked that box. I have credibility in the industry now because for multiple years, I've built a practice where I earn a full-time living, I charge high rates, I have a very well-respected client base. So I have credibility in the industry now. And I have a growing and deepening understanding of all of the wisdom-based tradition that goes into the work that becomes training for coaches. And so I think I think that's probably the area I'm growing most right now is continuing to build my base of expertise on the neuroscience and the somatic awareness and where the roots in the brain of our emotions come from and how they show up in the world, and all of that stuff is really exciting learning opportunity for me. And that then uh becomes coach or training for coaches. So the way the business is evolving now is I've got my one-on-one practice. We now have this 20-year-old legacy-driven coach training business that is world-class at what it does, that I get to step into and be both a trainer and the CEO of. And we have a leadership curriculum that takes similar material to what we train coaches with and says, hey, if you're a founder or an executive or a team, we have leadership material here that will help you become more effective at whatever you're leading in. And this then circles back around to my one-on-one clients, right? They are leaders in their context. And I think there's going to be a lot, it becomes a circle in that way. So we'll have one-on-one, we'll have coach training, and we'll have leadership training. And I think this will start to create an ecosystem for spreading a philosophy of how to go through the developmental arc of adulthood in different capacities. And that is super exciting to me because I think it will do a lot of good in the world. It will give me the ability to scale my income and my family's income. And it will also open up opportunity for many others to step into the business and be trainers, be on the full-time team. And that's what we've started doing this year is building out the team so that we can grow this organization to reach the number of people that matches the quality of training it provides.

Pedro Stein 35:23

Okay. So whenever we're aiming towards the next chapter, like you are with PBC, there's always something we're refining in the present. And it sounds like the acquisition was pretty fresh, right? Recently you made that. So, do you what do you think would be the main thing you'd be working on regarding PBC? Would it be like to have your fingerprint, you know, your way of doing things, or is it more like just keep doing what's working? I'm just curious about that.

SPEAKER_02 35:52

Yeah. So one of the teachings that we use at PBC in our coach training is we help coaches work with clients on developing coaching commitments or purpose statements for their coaching work. And you can think of a coaching commitment as almost like a mission statement for how you're trying to grow over a given period of time. Maybe it's six months, maybe it's 18 months, maybe it's five years. And so we teach this methodology of helping people arrive at a commitment. My coaching commitment that I work on with my coach and in my own development right now is using my infinite loving power to build the organization I've always longed for. And the meaning that has in a practical way, because that can sound kind of flowery or out there, is that in my past roles, I was the number two or I was the leader of marketing. So if I go back a couple companies, I led marketing and growth. And then at Convert Kit, I was the COO. So I was the number two leading most of the company, but I wasn't the CEO. And so what PBC represents for me personally in my own growth is it's really easy to have opinions on how things should be, the decisions you should make, the way the company should run when you're the number two. And that's your job in many ways, is to be a little bit of a tension point with the CEO and say, between the two of us, we will figure out what's best. But ultimately, the CEO has to decide. So PBC is my chance to become the CEO, to be the CEO and live into that role and not just have opinions, but ultimately to have decision-making power of where we go, how we do what we do, where we allocate resources, who we hire. And that developmentally for me is an exciting opportunity to live into what I think I'm already capable of, but to have really practical consequences on the other side of that. You know, there's a real company there with actual people employed, and there's different stakes than when ultimately the decisions don't stop with you. So that's developmentally for me. And then practically in the business, it's all about building marketing systems that reach the right people in a way that feels true to the values of the organization. And so, how do we take our approach to things and how we teach people and turn that into good marketing that reaches people and attracts them and brings them in the same way I've done it with my coaching practice?

Pedro Stein 38:11

I love that. That's interesting. It's like creating that legacy, but with intention and having the possibility to create that ripple effect, not just by the one-on-one. So you can you can actually impact more people at the end of the day. I think that's what this is all about, right? Exactly. Exactly. Okay, great. Now, Barrett, if someone is listening and wants to connect with you or follow your work, right? Where can people find you and connect with you?

SPEAKER_02 38:37

Yeah, the best place is Barrett Brooks.com. Right at the top, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It comes out every Monday. It is a real coaching session with a million dollar plus founder, and the lesson that you can take away from that for your own leadership. And then that'll give you a jumping off point for my whole ecosystem from there.

Pedro Stein 38:55

Okay. There were a few things you've shared today that I feel like I need to highlight. I would say first is that when you notice your audience in the origin story, right, had no money. I think that's funny, but at the same time, so true. And I and I I've seen coaches struggling a lot with that because at the end of the day, this is like a passion-driven project for most coaches. They like they see something, they want to help people, but they're uh but then it shows the consultant inside there, right? The the earnest and young consultant, which is like, you know what, I want to help people, but if there's no revenue, there's no point because means to an end, right? I need the money to to actually impact people, to drive marketing, to drive content, to actually pay my bills. So I love the duality on that, you know. And I would say also the uh the exposure on the live coaching through the podcast, I think that's such an interesting idea. And when I hear you, I'm thinking a lot of coaches out there are thinking, like, yeah, but is he going to share away the secrets and they're gonna try on their own? But I think that's just scarcity mindset. If you have that abundance mindset to serve, to provide value, you know, at the end of the day, they're not gonna clone you, right? And they're eventually gonna need you to sit down and talk them through it. So I I think that idea is so interesting. So I would be taking a look at that, okay. And uh, you know, when you mention we are two or in our own development, and and the fact that you, you know, you're still sharpening the sword, I would say like that, you know, and um and one point to that is the fact that you found yourself in one of the most common crossroads for coaches, which is like scaling, right? Capacity that's a main bottleneck. It's like you can only do so much between you know 24 hours in a day. And sometimes having the idea to impact more people is just accepting that it's not you, you know, and you have to accept that other uh other people will join you in this journey. So this is my long way of saying, Barrett, that I appreciate what you do. I appreciate you being here and sharing so openly today, okay? It was great having you on.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Yeah, great to be here, Pedro. I really appreciate you and enjoy the conversation.

Davis Nguyen 41:13

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business, visit joinpurplecircle.com.