CoachWeb and the CSP: A Sustainable relationship

For a CSP, to have the nationally renowned “CoachWeb” system for their coaching workforce costs approx £5,000 per year (dependent on the level of sophistication they want their system to have).

This article is designed to outline how to turn that £5,000 a year outlay into a sustainable relationship through the different income sources available using the system.

Affiliates

Any organisation within your county can pay an affiliate rate and use a bespoke version of the system to manage their group of coaches and collect data using the system. The type of organisation this might include is:

• A local authority
• A CSP
• A private Coaching Company
• A HE/FE institution

On the £5,000 package there is a 50/50 income split of the £600 per year affiliate license fee of the system. The CSP gets £300 per year for supporting coaching queries of the affiliate partner and CoachWeb get £300 for providing technical and training support.

Training Fees

Each CDM will receive training from the CoachWeb team on the use of the system. The CDM will then in turn have to provide training to any affiliate users and coaches. A nominal fee can be charged for this, in the past this has ranged from, £50-£150.

Coach Fees

In most of the pilots this hasn't happened yet, but coaches could be charged for the maintenance of an electronic CV on CoachWeb and targeted information they receive. If there was a package of benefits coaches could be charged, for example, £5 per year for their profile and support.

CSP's using CoachWeb to sell branded merchandise

There are 2 options here, one would be to partner up with a brand like CoachWise and offer to sell their products on your version of the CoachWeb system in return for a percentage of the income.

The other idea would be to initially pay for branded t-shirts, fleeces, shorts, tracksuits and then sell them at reasonable prices. An outlay of £1000 would get you approx 100 t-shirts, if you sold that many per year and made a £4 profit on each one you could expect at £400 profit each year.

Supplying coaches for contracts

CoachWeb can be used to either:

1. Send a job advert out to a targeted pool of coaches or advertise on every coaches homepage
2. Quality assure a small pool of coaches and use them to meet contacts of employers in your area.

With 1), once you have a critical mass of coaches you can charge say £10-£25 per advert and email for customers.

With 2) if you choose to quality assure a small group of coaches, you can expect to earn approx £3 per hour in profit. If you delivered 500 hours of coaching that could earn £1500 per annum.

Selling of targeted marketing

Private training providers are always looking for people to get onto courses. CoachWeb will allow you to target market groups from geographical areas or with specific interests. Commercial companies, rather than paying for generic flyers, can get to their target market at the cost of £25-£50 per email, or setting up annual costing's of approximately £200 per year for a maximum of 10 mail-outs about their products and services.

As a CSP, the following might be an example of the income and expenditure for the first 3 years of CoachWeb:

Year	Expenditure	Expenditure amount	Income	Income amount
1	CoachWeb Licence	£5,000	5 affiliate licenses	£1,500
			5 affiliate training sessions	£250
Total Cost Year 1					£3,250
2	CoachWeb Licence	£5,000	2 Further affiliate licences and licences from original affiliates	£2,100
	Merchandise expenditure	£1,000	2 training sessions	£100
			Merchandise income	£1,500
			Advert income	£375
			Coaches Membership Fees (100 coaches @ £5)	£500
			Targeted marketing contract	£200
Total Cost year 2					£1,225
3	CoachWeb License	£5,000	5 renewing training sessions and 7 affiliate contracts	£2,350
	Merchandise expenditure	£2,000	Merchandise income (profit £1,000)	£3,000
	Membership package	£2,000	Advert income (30 adverts at £25 per advert from private firm plus 2 targeted marketing contracts @ £200)	£1,150
			Coaches Membership Fees (400 coaches @ £5)	£2,000
			Supplying contract for coaches (£3 profit on 600 hours of delivery by 10 Quality assured coaches)	£1,800
Total PROFIT Year 3					£1,300

So as you can see, from the above there are many ways or making the CoachWeb license fee sustainable with using multiple income streams to pay for the annual license fee.

Also, if as hoped the payment for the CoachWeb license can be picked up by a national organisation, CoachWeb can then become a productive income tool, with profits in year 3 being able to reach to over £5K using the system.

A CSP could then use this to subsidise coaching courses, mentoring opportunities and many more benefits for their customers and coaching workforce.

This money could also be used to work towards sustaining coaching posts at a CSP to continue supporting coaches, following the end of current funding in 2012.

For more information on the above, please speak to Rob Burchell, our project coordinator on 07763400321.

27 November 2009