High Ticket Coaching Merchant Account

One of the more lucrative business opportunities and ways to monetize expertise is with high-ticket coaching. This field allows expert individuals to establish a coaching program. This coaching program can be in various areas, including life coaching, business coaching, and much more.

This field can be highly profitable for individuals who act as coaches: Think of Tony Robbins and the like. Even individuals who fall well short of Robbins’ success and popularity can still book extensive contracts with dozens of successful clients. You can turn high-ticket coaching into a business empire.

That being said, accessing all the financial tools necessary to succeed in setting up this kind of coaching program is not always easy. Unfortunately, high-risk coaches often find that they have high-ticket sales, meaning volume levels that are above average. As a result, they are considered high-risk businesses, making it harder to access standard financial tools, such as credit card processing.

Fortunately, having a high-ticket offer does not have to stop you from accessing vitally necessary financial products. Businesses like Zenti can help you set up your business and ensure you have all the financial tools you need.

What Is High-Ticket Coaching?

High-Ticket coaching means that you are in the coaching business. In this context, a coach acts like a mentor.

A typical example of this type of coaching is a life coach. A life coach will help someone manage their life and better understand their long-term strengths, weaknesses, and goals. Depending on the specific type of coach, a life coach may then provide someone with advice, feedback, and concrete steps that they can take to get their life in order and realize their dreams. A life coach is usually highly successful and has a track record of success in a particular area.

However, this is not the only type of coaching that exists. Other types of high-ticket coaching include:

• Executive coaching: This type of coaching involves working with high-ticket clients to improve their business skills. It may help provide a C-suite individual with mentorship, skill development, and one-on-one assistance in addressing and remediating weaknesses. CEOs, CFOs, and others have benefited extensively from this specific type of coaching.

• Career Coaching: Some individuals find their careers at a crossroads. They may struggle to maintain jobs or find happiness within their chosen career path. In these instances, a career coach can help someone identify the holes in their resume and determine their next steps to fulfill their career dreams.

• Financial coaching: Let’s face it — some folks are just bad with money. Financial coaches are a mixture of planners and accountants: They can help people identify gaps in their budget and find ways of reducing their expenses to create a healthier long-term financial picture.

The sheer number of coaching calls can help a coach find more opportunities and gain more business. Even more importantly: Mentorship and coaching isn’t the only product a coach can offer. This expanded product offering can add significantly to the pressure you face as a high-ticket coach. These added challenges emphasize the importance of finding a merchant account provider, like Zenti, that can help you address these needs.

What Other Products Can High-Ticket Coaches Offer?

As coaches become more popular and their skills are in more demand, a high-ticket coach may begin to delve into more areas, many of which can funnel back to their website and increase their clients. Indeed, these added products have helped to fuel the business model of high-ticket coaching.

Possible products include:

• Webinars: Some life coaches will manage webinars as a way of giving classes on topics. These webinars may be one-off productions that are either free or for paid access.

• Online course: In addition to webinars, a high-ticket coaching program may create an online course that allows them to teach and interact with clients. These courses may be paid products in and of themselves, or they may be teasers that get a client to buy more of a product.

• Instant access: In some instances, coaches may offer “instant access” that allows prospective clients to immediately be able to access their services and get the information that they need. Of course, this service will be an added value and may cost the client a lot of money.

• Documents, books, and white papers: Many coaches will develop written documents that can be downloaded for a price or in exchange for an Email address. These will often be billed as the “ultimate guide” or “roadmap to lifetime success,” and these products can serve as excellent ancillary methods of communicating expertise with clients.

• Podcasts, social media, and other marketing: High-ticket coaches will likely have to manage podcasts and social media as part of their marketing efforts. These added marketing channels may also involve utilizing paid services, like Patreon, to get people to give them money and subscribe. This involves extensive content production and may include using a merchant account provider.

Implementing these services can take a lot of time but will often be well worth it. But, here’s the thing to consider when it comes to these products: They can be very expensive, very quickly. Seminars and one-on-one coaching can quickly add to thousands of dollars, and if you have an extensive client list, you may find yourself billing quite a bit every month. They may also involve the use of subscription services and recurring billing. If this is the case, you’ll be billed monthly or quarterly to collect your revenue.

To be clear, this is a good thing! However, having high sales volumes is a risk for becoming a high-risk business. The paradox is apparent here: The same things that can boost your business may ultimately increase your expenses, as a high-risk business will have to pay more in credit card fees and processing.

Fortunately, while this can be problematic for your business, some vendors can help you manage your high-risk business, process credit cards, get your money on time, and offer you other services that can boost your business. For example, at Zenti, we have years of experience working with various high-risk merchants to help them process credit cards and accept online payments.

Why Might High-Ticket Coaching Be Considered A High-Risk Business?

The biggest problem is sales volume and recurring billing.

First, in terms of recurring billing. Many high-ticket coaches will work with a client to set up recurring payments. Potential clients in this area will expect these easy-to-use financial tools, mainly if they are on the higher end of the income spectrum. The challenge is that these recurring billing models can act like a subscription, often triggering a business to fall into the high-risk classification. This is because customers will often reject or return subscription-based services, resulting in a chargeback to the processor and business. Chargebacks are one of the leading causes of a company being classified as high-risk. They occur when a business returns a product or says that a charge was unauthorized. Subscription or recurring models have a higher-than-average level of chargebacks, thus resulting in a high-risk categorization.

Furthermore, high-ticket coaching often means that a business is billing extensively. A high-level coach can have a very high sales volume between payments made by higher-level clients, group coaching, and product sales. High sales volumes also mean increased risk of chargebacks, higher risk of fraud, and more work for a merchant processor. This, again, can result in a high-risk categorization.

Since high-ticket coaching falls into both of these business categories, you are highly likely to need a merchant account provider who can work with your business to address the specific challenges you face as a high-risk business, then help you develop a plan to limit these issues and stop you from paying more than you need. The need for these customized plans is significant, and at Zenti, we can help prevent you from paying more than you should.

What Does A High-Risk Categorization Mean for My Coaching Business?

Collecting the payments earned from your coaching services and other product sales can be problematic. Fortunately, there are still ways that you can work within this categorization to collect what you need, as merchant account providers, like Zenti, can help you find ways to reduce chargebacks and keep your fees as low as possible.

This categorization means:

• Perhaps most important, you’ll be paying higher fees. All credit card providers charge merchants fees on transactions. So if you are a high-risk business, you’ll pay a higher flat fee per transaction and a higher percentage of a transaction as part of processing. This fee may be double that of a low-risk business. While it’s still a tiny percentage of your overall transaction (usually no more than 4%), this can be very expensive.

• It will be harder to gain access to the services you need. High-risk businesses must provide more paperwork, a more extended credit history, and information to a merchant account provider. It will take longer for a company to process this information, so you will lose the ability to access the merchant account services you need quickly.

• A higher rolling reserve. All merchant account providers require that businesses maintain a reserve that can be tapped if there is a chargeback. Since high-risk businesses have more chargebacks, they need to maintain a higher rolling reserve. This requirement will lock a higher amount of your money in escrow.

What Other Services Might My High-Risk Coaching Business Need?

At Zenti, we offer various services that can be useful to a high-risk business. Of course, some of these services — like EBT collections — won’t apply to your business. However, other services may be an appropriate add-on and help you manage your business better. These include:

• High-risk payment gateway: If you sell products on the internet — or if you even want to collect billing through your website — you will need to use a high-risk payment gateway that will allow you to sell products on the internet. Internet-based payments are often more expensive than in-person payments, as these card-not-present transactions have a higher risk of fraud. As such, you’ll need to find a specialized payment processor — like Zenti — who can ensure that your security is highly up-to-date. High-ticket coaches will have added needs in this area: They will need to ensure that their payment gateway is fully integrated with their marketing software. This ensures that a coach can collect email addresses, thus enabling later marketing or resales.

• High-risk ACH payments: ACH payments enable the “sweep” of payments from your bank account to one of your clients. This can be very useful if you sell a membership, subscription, or regular access to certain services. For high-ticket coaches, ACH payments may be beneficial, as they are more affordable ways of managing recurring billing. In addition, if you use ACH payments, you can remove the need to send out paper bills to clients regularly and instead rely on these secure digital payments.

• Retail merchant services: Most high-ticket coaches don’t have a physical store. However, you may still need portable physical devices that you can use to charge credit cards. This can be necessary if you take payments from clients or sell books or services at an event. There are many devices that will enable the processing of credit cards directly from your phone. You will need the latest technology to ensure the security of your client’s data. You will also need access to tech support if something goes wrong with one of your devices.

Work With Zenti Today

Learning how to keep merchant fees to a minimum is critical for any business, but it’s even more critical for a high-ticket coaching business that is a high-risk business. At Zenti, we believe that you deserve to keep as much of your money as possible. That’s why we’ve worked closely with businesses like yours to ensure you have access to all the services you need. Of course, as a high-risk business, you may have to pay greater fees, but the price tag shouldn’t be so significant that it is impossible to do business.

Ready to take the next step? Contact Zenti today, and learn more about how we can take your high-ticket coaching business to the next level.