- Jereshia Hawk is the founder of Leverage, an online coaching business for women of color.
- She quit her engineering job to pursue coaching full time and started by identifying her clientele.
- To grow from there, she hired a support team and started shaping the business to run without her.
In July 2017, Jereshia Hawk quit her engineering job at Consumers Energy to grow her online coaching business, Leverage. Since then, Hawk has given hundreds of women of color working as entrepreneurs and coaches the tools to design, market, sell, and scale their own group-coaching programs.
Hawk knows firsthand the challenges her clients have to navigate because when she started coaching, she didn’t know how to turn her knowledge of marketing, sales, and promotion into a profitable product.
After seeking out online communities for coaches and learning the basics, Hawk started by selling PDFs and digital courses. She went on to launch a $60-a-month group-coaching program in 2016, but the model was unsustainable and required her to trade too much time for money. About nine months into business, Hawk hired a coach to teach her how to develop a more viable strategy to package and deliver her expertise while maximizing her income.
Now Leverage is a seven-figure brand. She shared with Insider the growth strategies she used to transform from a new entrepreneur into a million-dollar coach.
Shifting from expert to teacher to coach
For coaches, expertise is the product. Hawk struggled at first to package her knowledge in a way her clients could connect with and replicate. As her client list grew, Hawk learned how to deliver knowledge based on what people already understood and which gaps she needed to fill for them.
“In the very beginning, you have to go from being an expert to learning how to be a good coach,” Hawk told Insider. “You have to become consciously aware of where your competencies are, know how to articulate them, and learn the practice of meeting your clients or prospects where they are instead of where we assume they are or where we wish they were.”
Hawk refined her ability to teach by spending a lot of one-on-one time with clients through “done with you” training, where she worked alongside clients to reach