• 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.
  • Then she created a vetting process and a video strategy to get people to buy into her services.

When Jereshia Hawk began coaching in 2016, she was selling low-cost educational PDFs and online courses while working full time as an engineer for Consumers Energy. She was on track for a leadership position, but she climbed down the corporate ladder to become a full-time entrepreneur.

Hawk was dissatisfied with the underrepresentation of women of color in engineering and wanted to pursue a business that would address the racial wealth gap. She started planning her exit in May 2016.

"I asked myself questions like 'For the season that I'm in right now, what's the most profitable offer I can create?' and 'Where can I provide the most value with the capacity I have and at a price point that makes sense?'" Hawk told Insider.

With the answers to those questions, Hawk founded Leverage, an online coaching business for service-based women of color working as entrepreneurs and coaches. Hawk set a goal to earn at least as much as her former salary, which was around $80,000. Within 14 months her business revenue exceeded her corporate income, and she quit her job in July 2017. By 2021 she was earning more than $1 million in profit yearly.

To hit seven figures in profit, she used a qualification process, high-end pricing, and targeted marketing.

Getting started by identifying qualified leads

When Hawk started sharing business tips with her audience on Facebook Live, she received several requests from viewers for coaching. She was unfamiliar with the industry, so she researched the world of online education.

After launching her first offerings, she hired a coach of her own to help her refine her skills and her business model.

Hawk's next step was to identify the service she'd offer using skills she'd gained in her previous roles. She'd gained sales knowledge from working in food service, retail, and engineering. From her time as an engineer, Hawk learned how to create processes, find inefficiencies, and spot patterns.

But Hawk knew that if she wanted to produce the results she wanted, she couldn't just be a good coach — she also needed to find clients who best aligned with her offer.

"Identifying a qualified lead is a shift from 'Is this somebody I can help?' to qualifying people who have self-identified that they have a critical issue," Hawk said. "Understanding this difference is something that helped me a lot in the beginning."

Hawk found that her coaching program was attracting people who were recognized for their expertise, skilled in sharing their perspectives, and seeking opportunities for growth; she determined these were her most qualified leads. Among her most noteworthy clients is Kathy Romero, the event planner behind occasions like BET's "The Mane Event."

Hawk's marketing content is designed to reach prospects at different phases of awareness of her brand. Engaged prospects go through a qualification process that includes an application to determine where they are in their businesses. Hawk said she looks for clients who have a sense of urgency to grow their business and who are in a stable enough position to implement growth strategies.

Setting rates by practicing 'ethical charging'

Hawk said she bases the price of her service on the value she can deliver a client — a practice she calls "ethical charging."

She said that each time she raised the price of her program, she based it on an increase in the value she was able to provide.

When she launched Leverage, it was a four-month program that cost $5,000 and included two coaching calls a month. Hawk estimated she could coach her clients to enroll at least three buyers in their own programs and charge $3,000 or more. In her first cohort, she said, all her clients reached that goal.

Since then Hawk has reiterated her program and changed her price based on this kind of data from clients.

Now Leverage's 12-month program costs $15,000, or $18,000 with a payment plan, and involves group coaching calls in addition to one-on-one training and a written curriculum, which teaches clients how to market, sell, and scale their businesses, but also focuses on empowering them to maintain those results on their own.

Using video to draw in clients

Attracting clients who are able and eager to spend $15,000 on a coaching program requires careful and intentional marketing. For Hawk, social media plays a major role, and videos make up the bulk of her content. She said she focuses on video because social-media algorithms prioritize it and she believes it allows her to build trust with her audience quickly.

"People can hear you. They can see you. They can read your body language and know who's behind the camera," Hawk said.

Hawk hosts livestreams twice a month and turns those into Reels and other posts for her 41,000 Instagram followers. Hawk's videos answer questions about what it takes to start a group coaching program, what successful coaches should provide for their clients, and how to build intuition for business decisions. Hawk said she and her marketing coordinator create content to speak to clients' identities, values, beliefs, thought processes, and questions that influence how they make their buying decisions.

"We create content almost like a beehive, where we have the honey and prospects want to come to us, versus us acting like sharks and attacking people," Hawk said.

Hawk said that maintaining that humanity and addressing the needs, concerns, and apprehensions of her qualified leads allow her to make them feel comfortable making the investment.

"We treat our social-media platforms like a baby Netflix. We know that if a prospect can consume about four hours of content, they're pretty much ready to make a buying decision," Hawk said. "So we try to create bingeable content that aligns with how they're privately taking action. And then we engage in either a DM conversation or have a sales call to have a dialogue and understand their needs."

Hawk even views prospects who engage but choose not to commit as a success. She said marketing isn't about getting everyone to say yes but about getting people to make the right decision for them. She added that when prospects say no — often because they don't see the value of the program or don't have a need for the offering — she uses that insight to redirect her marketing strategy to attract better leads.