The Coaching Money I'm Leaving on the Table

Originally published on LinkedIn, 25 October 2026.

At least once a month, someone tells me I should be running a coaching business.

The list of people saying it is long and honestly a bit flattering. Business advisors. Family. Friends. Industry peers. People I respect and love. The pitch is always some version of the same thing. You've got twenty-five years in the industry, seven salons, a franchise programme, a Goldman Sachs 10KSB certificate on the wall. Package what you know. Put a price tag on it. Make yourself an extraordinary personal income.

And they're not wrong. I could. Very comfortably.

I've done the maths more times than I want to admit. There is a real number sitting there. Serious money, on the table, waiting for me to reach out and take it.

I'm not going to. Not this year. Not next year. Probably not for the next five.

Here's why.

My franchise partners have paid to be inside the Mooeys network. What they've bought isn't just the brand, or the systems, or the pretty branding. They've bought the twenty-five years. The mentoring. The mistakes I've already made so they don't have to make them. Every hard-won lesson from running seven salons through minimum wage hikes, NI changes, government curveballs and a whole industry trying to figure out what the hell it even is anymore.

That is their edge. That's what makes the franchise fee worth what they paid. And if I turned around tomorrow and started selling the same thinking to any random salon owner willing to hand over £200 an hour on a Zoom call, I'd be quietly betraying the people who bought it properly.

I'm not going to do that.

So my managers, my franchise partners and the therapists coming up through our own training programmes get all of it. Every idea, every framework, every awkward honest conversation about what's working and what isn't. That's where the bulk of my mentoring energy goes and I love it. Watching people grow, professionally, financially, personally, is one of the best bits of running this group. I wouldn't hand it over to someone else if it paid triple.

Now here's the bit that surprises people, because "I don't coach" isn't the whole picture.

I take consultancy days. Not many of them. But I take them when someone is building something I've actually done the reps in and where helping them doesn't take anything away from my own network. Product development. Training programme design. Using AI to its full capability in our industry. Launching a franchise. Structuring a group of salons. These are areas I know inside out and I can genuinely shortcut months, sometimes years, of someone else's guesswork.

I say yes when I can actually help, and when helping doesn't cost anyone inside my own network. I say no when it does. That's it. It's not about being precious. My energy is finite and it has to go somewhere useful.

The other bit of external work I do is the one people find most confusing, because it doesn't look commercial from the outside at all.

I co-host business retreats with my friend Katie Godfrey. Marrakesh, Marbella, Dubai. Next up is Dubai in April and Bali in October. I'm not paid for it in the traditional sense. Katie covers my travel. I turn up, I coach, I sit with brilliant women, I share whatever I have that might actually help.

I do it because it fills my cup like almost nothing else does. The women Katie attracts are the cream of the crop (outside my own herd, obviously). They're hustling, they're building real things, they employ hundreds of people between them, they contribute properly to the economy. They are brilliant businesswomen who are seriously passionate about what they're building. And they're not doing it alone. They've got Katie in their corner as their mentor, and they've got each other, which is exactly what more women in business need and exactly what most of us go without for far too long. Sitting in rooms with them, listening to what they're wrestling with, offering whatever I can add to what's already there, is one of the most nourishing things I do all year.

It's also how I give back to an industry I love. This industry has extraordinary humans in it, quietly building things nobody outside the trade takes seriously enough. The retreats are one of the small ways I get to lift them up close.

Focus.

I'm building a brand aimed at a £10m valuation and an exit by 2031. That is the game I'm playing right now. Every hour of my week that goes into building someone else's business is an hour that doesn't go into mine. And whatever you focus on grows. If I'm pointing my attention at other people's salons all week long, my own group isn't growing at the pace it needs to grow at for the numbers to work.

So yes, there's coaching money on the table. Real money. And I'm choosing to leave it there.

Not because I don't rate the model. Coaching businesses are brilliant when they're done properly and I've watched people I respect build them into significant assets. It's just not the business I'm building right now, and I've watched enough founders try to build two things at once to know how that ends. One thing wins. The other one quietly dies. I'm not risking the £10m one for a side hustle, however profitable.

The coaching business is on the shelf. Not forgotten. On the shelf. It'll come. Probably after the exit. Probably as a book, or a proper programme, or something that isn't a diary full of hourly calls. But it's a next-chapter piece of work and I'm still very much writing this chapter.

Because internally I still needed a way to develop leaders properly, I built Leadership Circles.

For years we ran the same thing every other salon group runs. Three-day management training. Big room, big energy, big notebooks, everyone out of the salons for the best part of a week. And then real life kicked back in, and honestly, about 20% of it stuck. The rest evaporated within a fortnight. It was overwhelming for the team, expensive for the business, and it wasn't moving the needle enough to justify what it cost.

So I killed it.

Now we do it monthly, in bite-sized chunks. One topic a month. Every topic tied to a KPI we actually track. Every topic delivered separately to each of our three leadership tiers, framed around what they can actually influence at their level. Supervisors learn with supervisors. Managers learn with managers. Franchise partners and salon owners learn with each other. Same subject, three completely different conversations, because a supervisor moves a KPI in a completely different way from a franchise partner.

No motivational fluff. No away days in a hotel. Just a monthly rhythm that fits around actually running salons. And it's genuinely changed the business. More ownership. More accountability. More managers running their salons like they're theirs, because functionally they are.

Micromanaging gives me the ick. It also stalls every person underneath it.

I want my team to make decisions. I want them to make some wrong ones. Not carelessly, not repeatedly, but when the intention comes from a good place and the judgement was off, I want them to have made the call and learned from it. That is where the growth actually happens. That's where confidence comes from.

If I'm the smartest person in every room in my business, my business will never be bigger than my own head. And my own head is finite. The whole point of building leaders is that eventually they lead. Leading means making calls without me in the room, sometimes getting it wrong, and then getting it more right next time.

I've spent this whole piece explaining what I say yes to and what I say no to, and the honest reason is that I know exactly where I'm going.

£10m valuation. Exit by 2031. A brand that outlives me. A group that runs without me. A couple of books somewhere in the middle. And, eventually, a proper piece of work that shares what I've learned with the wider industry. Once I've actually earned the right to write it.

Everything I say yes to right now has to feed one of those. Everything I say no to is protecting one of those. That's the filter. It's a boring filter, but it's the one that gets me where I'm going.

So no, I'm not taking the coaching money. Not yet. It'll still be there when I'm ready. And by then I'll have something much bigger to say.

How am I actually going to get to £10m?

Watch this space.

Lots of love, Amy x