Career Coaching Secrets

How Nicholas Rustad Grew His Career Coaching Business to $250K in Revenue

• Davis Nguyen

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 In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen Doda speaks with Nicholas Rustad — career coach, IT executive, and co-owner of CoreTactic. Nicholas shares how he transitioned from a 25-year career in IT (including leadership at Accenture) into full-time coaching. He discusses lessons from launching his practice, how he found his niche as a diverse and openly gay coach, pricing strategies, how to leverage tools like HighLevel, Asana, and AI, and how he's scaling his business to $500K+. Whether you're a new coach or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with actionable tactics and inspiring advice. 

You can find him at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholastrustad/
And his website https://coretactic.net/


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

Get Exclusive Access to Our In-Depth Analysis of 71 Successful Career Coaches, Learn exactly what worked (and what didn't) in the career coaching industry in 2024: https://joinpurplecircle.com/white-paper-replay

Nicholas Rustad:

thinking about challenges, that's another one. How do I swim in the sea full of fish? And how am I special? So it's really important to have a niche. So I am a diverse coach. I'm openly gay. And a lot of my clients prefer that. They may be in the LGBTQ plus community or they're diverse in some other way and they want to work with someone who's diverse because we're having some challenges in this country about diversity right now.

Davis Nguyen:

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 Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen:

Welcome everyone to the Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. Today is a very exciting day for me because this is the very first episode of many that I'm looking forward to. And to help me go through this episode today and share some values as a career coach, I have a very special guest, Nicholas Rustad. Nicholas is not only a career coach, he is co-owner of CoreTactic, and you can find that on CoreTactic.net. I'm going to put that onto the screen so that you guys can see it. is, again, like I said, not only a career coach, he's done a lot of work in the IT leadership sector. And in the early days, he also used to be a senior consultant for Accenture. Nicholas, welcome to the show, first of all. And would you like to share some more about yourself and what inspired you to start your own career coaching business or even be a coach?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, Rexhen, thank you so much. I've always coached. Always. And I worked for 25 years in IT. Started on the help desk at the Pillsbury Company. I don't know if you know Pillsbury. They make flour. And ended my career as a senior executive. And then I got laid off, and that had never happened before. I had never been laid off or fired in 25 years. So I was a little shocked that it happened. And then I thought to myself, what do I really want to do? What do I really love to do? And it's helping people. It's coaching people. It's building careers, making sure that people have an easy transition between careers and also helping them grow their business a little too. So yeah, I love it. I absolutely love it and I wouldn't give it up for anything. So good question.

Rexhen:

So you mentioned that you always coached. Before that, is there a moment that you kind of like, before coaching, did you shift at any point or did you just start coaching from the start?

Nicholas Rustad:

Well, I was always coaching as a manager. I always had the highest retention on my teams. My leadership style is more transformational. I am there to support the team. I'm a servant leader. I want to make sure that the team is supported. And so I've always had great retention on my teams. And I just carry that into my practice. So I work with people on business psychology. How do we get through the interview the fastest, easiest way? And as you can see, I just published another book, The Behavioral Interview Advantage. It's on Amazon. So I want to help people get through that. And I thought, you know what? Let's just start a business. Let's get this going. I really am excited to do it. I've hired my own career coach. I hired an executive coach. I hired a personal brand specialist. That's someone that does resumes. And so I got firsthand knowledge of what the process is truly like. And then when I started, I did free services for a couple of months and I helped veterans, U.S. veterans that were coming back from war or from in-service because they didn't get as much career coaching as I would have expected when they entered the civilian world. So I did a lot of work with them and slowly grew my business. I use a system called High Level, which manages everything for me. So it's been a great ride. And I just, I can't wait to keep going.

Rexhen:

Thank you. Thank

Nicholas Rustad:

you

Rexhen:

for sharing that. And you just shared the nugget right there, like high level for anyone who doesn't use it. Great system. We use it too on our system. And Nicholas also showed me a fix for the email. So I remember I saw your email. We had a header issue and you knew how to work that around. I'm looking forward to that. And for anyone watching, this is going to be a great episode because Nicholas is not just a beginner. He's been coaching for so many years. Who do you serve? What is like your ideal target audience that you like to help and what transformation do you help them achieve?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, I work a lot with IT people, but I do have some requirements. Most of my clients, my demographic that I market to are over the age of 30. They have an undergrad college degree or a master's or more. They're in a professional white collar type job in corporate. And like I said, about maybe 80% of them are in IT, but I also have lawyers that want to get out of law. I have doctors that want to get out of medicine. I got teachers that want to get out of education. So I have a pretty eclectic mix of folks. I have also a celebrity from Hollywood. I have someone that manages all the royalties in Hollywood. Like I got some really cool people that I work with and that makes my job so much fun. So it's a good demographic. You know, I'm finding them on LinkedIn. So it just kind of marries nicely.

Rexhen:

Yeah. Awesome. So LinkedIn, is that like the primary channel where you find most of your clients or are there also other ways? Yeah,

Nicholas Rustad:

primarily I use LinkedIn. I have a service page and I use it as kind of a lead generation tool. So I offer low cost services through my service page so that they can see what it's like working with me. And about maybe, 10 to 20% of people convert to longtime coaching clients. And so it's been really great. The other system I've used kind of occasionally is called Bark, B-A-R-K, Bark.com. It's a lead tool. You have to pay for it based on credits, you know, before you can talk to anybody. And it can get a little expensive. So, but I love

Rexhen:

LinkedIn. LinkedIn is great. And in terms of LinkedIn, how do you exactly go about, besides having that service page, do you also do LinkedIn outreach or do you post a lot there? Is there a specific tactic that gets them attention to then go to have this service, like a small key service with you?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, I use High Level to manage my LinkedIn company page. And I've automated my posts. So whenever I do a blog post, it uses RSS and automatically posts it to LinkedIn. And then I have some reoccurring posts, you know, like every month or two months, some of these posts will go because we have to stay active online. If we don't stay active, we're not going to get followers. We're not going to, you know, people won't know who we are. So I try to stay as active as I can. I do a lot of outreach. If I see someone with that little green open for work on their picture, I'll message them. Say, hey, can I help? And it's been great. But LinkedIn is it, I think. And there's ways to automate some of this stuff. There's some tools that can automate things like Duck Soup and LinkedIn Camp and Phantom Buster. But be very careful if you use those tools. If you do too much work within LinkedIn in an automated tool, you'll get shut down. So there's a little warning. Don't get shut down.

Rexhen:

But yeah. It has happened with us too, in terms of LinkedIn getting shut down. Another tool we use is called Tripify. It does an automated connection and then follows a sequence of messaging. And then until someone replies, you can then get into a conversation, which for anyone might be helpful, feel free to check it out. And another tool that helps us a lot in LinkedIn has been recently is called Tricondo is just a tool that for anyone who has ever used Superhuman, it's just like it has a lot of shortcuts to message your inbox and just does it faster than you'd normally do it on the LinkedIn. But Nicholas just shared that he uses high level for that. So also another great tool. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to talk a little bit about also your goals and your growth journey. Do you have a goal you're working towards in the next one to three years?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, over the next one to three years, I want to find a partner, an equal partner that I can share the business with, find someone that can buy in, bring their own book of business. And I'm going to look probably for someone who has the skills that I don't so that we'd be a good fit. I'm not great at marketing, you know, that kind of stuff. I'm not great at, but I'm an excellent coach and I love my clients. But I'm hoping to grow. I'm hoping to probably double revenue by then. So

Rexhen:

yeah.

Nicholas Rustad:

as well.

Rexhen:

Apart from that, in terms of your goal regarding revenue, what does that look like for the next one to three years?

Nicholas Rustad:

Well, in order to understand the goal for revenue, you got to look at the past. So first year I coached, I think I brought in about 70,000. The second year was around 120. Now this year, I'm probably about 250. So I'm hoping to get it up to half a mil in the next two years. That's my plan. I think it's going to be easily achieved. But the trick is to make sure you have the right rate on your hourly rate for clients. And that can be very tricky depending on your demographic and where your clients live. I'm always tweaking that. I also have a marketing person that helps me a little bit with the finance side of it and figuring out my trajectory and forecast.

Rexhen:

Oh, cool. And when you say hourly rate, you mean the hourly rate which you pay your own coaches or the clients pay the coaches?

Nicholas Rustad:

The clients pay the coaches. My rate used to be $89 an hour when I started. Because I needed to build up social proof, I needed online reviews, things like that. And then over time, I went to $125, I went to $175, and now I'm up to $250 an hour. And I can command that rate because of my experience. Have

Rexhen:

you also considered a program-based payment type? Not by hours, but a full package?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, I do have, I have three options. I have a base plan option, I have a mid tier and a top tier. And there's different pricing, depending if you want to meet every week or every other week. And I think the lowest price plan is at 400. The highest is at 3500, I think so. And that's just a one time payment for however long you want to meet and how frequently. Okay, cool. So

Rexhen:

the reason I ask that is the past, even though we haven't had the podcast, I might also share it with you and maybe also link to the description of this video. We also did a white paper and I've interviewed many career coaches, executive coaches, leadership coaches on how they do their pricing. Some of them just do the hourly. Some of them have packages. So I don't know if that was a learning for you or you always started with a package from the start.

Nicholas Rustad:

I started off hourly, but I would sell a block of three or four hours. And I've transitioned now to a subscription service. So when you sign up with me, I ask that you make a three-month commitment. I'll either bill you monthly or every three months or every six months. But that is the best way to go. Set up packages for people. And the other thing is, don't create two, don't create four, create three. And people will always pick the middle one. I stuck out my middle finger there. Sorry about that. But yeah, so you always want to have three options. And they'll typically always pick the middle. So you want to make sure that's priced right.

Rexhen:

So yeah, the price anchoring should be correct. Yeah, I totally understand that. What is something that you have learned now, but you wish you had known when you started your career coaching business? What is like an unexpected lesson learned?

Nicholas Rustad:

A big lesson learned for me was understanding my value. We all have value. We all can contribute and help people's lives. And I didn't really know what mine was. So I had to do a lot of testing. It took me about a year to kind of refine it. Like I had talked about my rate going up. I had to figure out what that proper rate is. And then I kind of shifted from doing a lot of cold outreach to more referral business. Referrals are key. And you got to keep asking your customers for referrals and you'll get them.

Rexhen:

So would you say like in terms of like the revenue that you generate, is it... mostly coming from referrals or mostly coming from organic LinkedIn or LinkedIn outreach? The very beginning,

Nicholas Rustad:

the first year or so, it was all cold manual outreach. I was working 12 hours a day, every day. And now I'm to the point where about 50% of referrals, the other 50% are coming in from LinkedIn service requests. And then occasionally, if I need a bigger client, I'll go look on Bark, but they're very hard to find. You have to be very, very specific and careful.

Rexhen:

Yeah, and I'm going to move a little bit of challenges. All coaches will normally have challenges when they're starting their own business or even if they're doing it on the side. What is your biggest challenge that you're currently facing in scaling your own coaching business right now?

Nicholas Rustad:

The biggest challenge I have right now is automation. The best way to grow is to automate. So I am leveraging high levels automation capabilities, we're going to be putting in a drip campaign, we're going to be doing some stuff on the website. So if they click links, that's going to help, because there's not enough of me, I'm still working many hours. So I'm challenged, there's not enough time in the day, which means I need to figure out how to make the work more effective and more efficient. And so that I've been working on that a lot. So but that's been a huge challenge. Like I feel like I can't sometimes I can't keep up, but the more I automate, the better it gets.

Rexhen:

Yeah, that has helped us a lot too. Ever since we moved to guy level, before that we used to have many different tools that were working independently of each other. They were connected with like Zapier, but still not very well maintained. And the cost of that was more than just having high level that we've seen recently. But I've seen a lot of it is possible using high level. So yeah. That's a great tool to work on automation. Do you also utilize AI? Yeah,

Nicholas Rustad:

I do. I use the AI tool within HighLevel. I've loaded in tons of data from the U.S. Department of Labor, PayScale, Glassdoor, Salary.com. So my clients can use it to go look up salaries. job descriptions, titles, locations, pay in New York City versus Los Angeles. So AI is critical. And then I also use, I like Claude, claude.ai, because it was built off of training data. So it already has job titles, descriptions, what's involved in getting to that position requirements, and what training is needed, and salary information. So Claude is great. I really like Claude. Have you heard of Claude?

Rexhen:

Yeah. I like using it mostly because it writes a little bit better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT can be like anybody can notice that kind of text from ChatGPT. But Claude seems like more human a little bit. I've also been testing DeepSeq recently is very slow, but they say it's better and seems to be competing with the higher version of ChatGPT, which is like $120 a month or $200, which is the package that normally people don't get, but DeepSeek is a tool to look at Another question, as we talk about AI and how that helps, I wanted to ask, how do you currently handle balancing between delivering great results to your clients and managing the business growth side? That's the big

Nicholas Rustad:

conundrum. So I have found that people are more communicative in the mornings. So I'm online at 7 a.m. central time till about noon, and I'm doing outreach. And then in the afternoons, I work on the business. And if it's a big upgrade or a big change to my process or website, I actually have a lot of websites, I'll do that off hours and make that change. But I have to break it up, and I have to make sure I keep touching. You gotta touch all the bits, all the bits and pieces, right? The outreach, following up on messages, and then I get into business development. I'm going to be hiring a business development manager here pretty soon. Very talented young man. I can't wait to work with him. He's amazing. And so he's going to help with some of the business side too, which is really critical. But it takes time to be able to build up enough revenue so that you can bring in someone for help. And so that's not always the easiest decision to make.

Rexhen:

It's also hard if you don't hire to keep them both running. optimally business growth and delivering those great results to those clients. Thanks for sharing that. In terms of running your coaching business, for anyone who's watching this, what aspects, and maybe they can relate to this, what aspects of running your coaching business keep you up at night?

Nicholas Rustad:

Well, having worked in IT for 25 years, I was up worried every night that a system was going to crash and I couldn't get it back online or something bad would happen. But with career coaching, it's not that way. My big concern is that I'm doing everything I can to support my clients. And I always try to go above and beyond. I want to wow them with a little extra. So I worry that maybe I'm not doing enough for them. Or maybe I have a good system now for keeping track of my tasks, but maybe I forget to do something for them. So I've implemented a task tool called Asana, and that's been really helpful. So every client I get, they get a board in Asana, and I know exactly what I'm doing. It's hard to remember. I also leverage a note-taking tool called Fireflies, and that does all my note-taking. So before I meet with my next client, I go in there, read the notes, and then I'm ready to go. So that's really helped as well to make sure that I'm getting them everything I possibly can.

Rexhen:

Cool. So basically, the worry is more like delivering those great results. Yeah. And rather than... So you'd say that lead generation sales is not that much of a worry... other than like delivering those great results, because those great results are also going to be bringing in maybe more referrals and kind of like keeping the business going. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you got to do both.

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, all the time. Yeah. So but it starts to get easier. I'm starting to get conversions right off my website, which is starting to help. Coaching is a billion-dollar industry in the U.S., and it's continued to get bigger. And you can't just build a website and hope somebody goes to it. You have to advertise. It takes a lot of work because there's a lot of coaches. So that has been a challenge. Thinking about challenges, that's another one. How do I swim in the sea full of fish? And how am I special? So it's really important to have a niche. So I am a diverse coach. I'm openly gay. And a lot of my clients prefer that. They may be in the LGBTQ plus community or they're diverse in some other way and they want to work with someone who's diverse because we're having some challenges in this country about diversity right now. So the political climate has actually helped my business as a gay man, which is awesome.

Rexhen:

Even with the political changes recently, you'll find that sport much more needed, I think. You want to share a little bit more about core tactics for anyone who would be interested in maybe learning more about it?

Nicholas Rustad:

Yeah, for sure. So core tactic, I came up with that name because we all have a core of who we are, and I can teach you tactics to be successful. I may not be able to turn you into a CEO, but I can teach you the tactics to get to the next step to get there. so it's all about strengthening your core as a person and learning skills and then learning the tactics to get there and i just i love working with everybody so i even have some trump supporters as clients you know i mean i i love everybody so excited for people to reach out and i'd love to work with them i'm at Core Tactic.net c-o-r-e-t-a-c-t-i-c.net

Rexhen:

love it um The reason why I say that is for any career coach watching this, being able to communicate that clearly is very important, too. Being able to communicate what you do, who you help, and what your business means is important. I don't know if I

Nicholas Rustad:

did that, but I don't know if it was super clear how I explained it to you. Here's another approach. Here's another elevator pitch. I am a career coach, and I help people transition careers, and I help to reduce the stress of that transition. And that's basically the bottom line for me. That was

Rexhen:

even better. Okay, okay. That was even better. Cool. Now we're getting a little bit more into the closing questions. So in terms of advice to other career coaches looking to scale their business, scale their impact, what would be one advice that would be very valuable to them?

Nicholas Rustad:

I wish I would have written my books earlier. I'm finally on my third book and write a book right away. and go out to Amazon and publish it or find a publisher. It'll help to position you as a thought leader. And like I said, when we're working on our business, we have to touch all the pieces. We have to touch all the channels too. So books, recordings, videos, all sorts of stuff, and freebies on your website. You want to attract people and you want to offer something free, something valuable that they can really use. So on my website, you can get a free copy of this book. And that has really helped people. So the book that I just wrote is Behavioral Questions. So tell me about a time when. And it also is broken out by topic area. So if you want to ask a behavioral question about AI to a job candidate, you can use my book. Or sales. There's like 50 different categories. So it's really helped. But get a book out there right away. Meet some other coaches. Create your own little cohort. I was part of a group called Noomii, N-O-O-M-I-I, out of Canada, and they have a coaching circle. And I was coaching someone, and someone was coaching me, and it was awesome. You know, meet coaches. I think that's really important. The other advice I'll give to new coaches is you really need to figure out how you're going to fit into the market. And to fit into the market, you need to know what everybody else is doing. You need to be a customer of a coach. so that you can see how you were marketed to, and then you can use that to improve and create your niche and then market yourself. So,

Rexhen:

really important. Very cool tip there, especially about staying connected also with other career coaches. Apart from the book, which I really think is very important and helps you a lot, even with reputation and training your brand and your positioning, when you say connecting to other career coaches, how do you manage, how do you currently stay connected Apart from NuMe, is there any conferences you visit or any live events or maybe other sites other than

Nicholas Rustad:

NuMe? Yeah, there's a ton of sites. You can find a ton of coaches, of course, on LinkedIn. You can put in a coaching request and you'll get a bunch of coaches reaching out to you with proposals. But the other thing is, join your local Better Business Bureau. Join your local Chamber of Commerce. They have networking events. So I've gone to networking events. I have business cards. And I hand out like crazy. I want everybody to remember who I am. And I give them like two or three so I can pass them around. So that's one of the things you have to do, right? You have to have your face out there and keep talking about your brand because it's good practice too. So meeting coaches knew me was great. That was awesome. There's a lot of different groups depending on your interest. And you said you're from Albania. There probably is a group of coaches that like an Albanian career coaching group. There is a gay coaches group, a lesbian coaches group, black coaches, pink, purple, yellow, blue. Find those groups that you fit into and join them. And they don't have to be about diversity. They can also be about subject area. I know a career coach only works with PhDs and gets people into biomedical. So also reach out to me. I'm happy to connect with anybody around the world that's coaching or wants to coach. And if you go to my website, you can set up a free discovery call with me and we can

Rexhen:

chat. Yeah, I was just about to say that, actually. I was going to ask for your permission to say that. For anyone who's listening and wants to connect and learn more about your work, they can find you on your website, coretactic.net. They can find you on your LinkedIn, Nick Reston over there. And yeah, would be great too. And for anyone who has questions, because I want to improve the questions to this podcast as well, feel free to comment with your question because we're going to post this on YouTube as well. So feel free to comment on this video with a question and I'll make sure to find an answer to that and comment back to you and maybe get those answers for anyone else that might have similar questions like you. So yeah, Nicholas, this has been Great. And thank you so much for coming to our show today. It's very helpful. Very great tactics you shared today. Thank you so much.

Nicholas Rustad:

Thank you. Your questions are great. Challenging to answer. So thank you very much.

Davis Nguyen:

Thank you so much.