How many women do you know who make a million a year, but don’t consider that their biggest achievement?
Pam Featherstone and Shweta Jhajharia both found themselves topping the ActionCOACH global top 100 list in the last 12 months.
This list recognises the top performers in the world’s number one business services franchise* and with gross client income of over £1 million each, these women have consistently taken spots one and two when the results come out each quarter.
BETTER LIVES
By any business standards, Shweta and Pam have excelled, but neither of them became an Action Coach to create personal financial wealth. Both of them were driven by desires to learn more and create better lives for the business owners they would help.
Pam took home Global Coach of the Year after becoming the first UK coach to smash the £83,334 per month barrier in personal client income. It wasn’t just that this amounted to a staggering £1 million a year in income, but her growth is staggering too - she reached this in October 2014, just two and a half years after training to become an ActionCOACH Business Coach.
“I have been through the trials and tribulations of business and understand the emotional roller coaster that owning a business can be,” Pam explains. “This gives me a unique insight and provides me with great passion for helping others.
“When I retired, I was approached to help several business owners and absolutely loved the positive impact my support was having. So I decided to come out of retirement and start a new business in a new profession. I liked the business concept of ActionCOACH and was impressed by the support I would have access to by joining this franchise.
“For me, coaching is both a huge privilege and a huge responsibility. My clients let me into their lives and their businesses. I’m proud that I have maintained 100 per cent client retention since starting my ActionCOACH business.
“As well as my clients and community gaining benefit from my coaching, I also support the B1G1 charity, which is buy1, give1. So while we as business owners work on achieving more profits, a better work-life balance and improved team results, those less privileged benefit too.
“I give part of my profits to the B1G1 project, which has over 600 schemes in over 40 countries. For example, when an owner comes to group coaching, it provides fresh drinking water for a child for a month.”
Shweta joined ActionCOACH in 2008 - in the middle of a recession - growing her business quickly to become the most successful ActionCOACH practise in London in 2009. She is now rated in the top two ActionCOACH franchise partners globally.
Shweta found the fact her ActionCOACH business would be based on mutually beneficial relationships to be particularly motivating - her business and financial success, as an ActionCOACH, would ultimately depend on her clients’ success.
“My purpose is to create more choices and freedom for businesses by helping them develop a commercial, profitable enterprise that can work without them,” Shweta says.
In 2013 Shweta won the British Franchise Association’s Franchisee of the Year Special Judges’ Award for her outstanding success and was a finalist in the bfa Female Franchisee of the Year Award 2015.
In 2015, the APCTC judges’ panel simply could not ignore the achievements of one coach and presented Shweta with the special award in recognition of services to coaching.
She helps over 100 small and medium-sized enterprises each year to grow their businesses across 16 London boroughs and plans to expand her business and leadership in the business coaching industry by hiring employee ActionCOACH business coaches.
FAMILY TIME
Shweta says: “Most importantly, I still have time to be a big part of our son’s life and each award he gets, be it for sporting or academic achievement, gives me more fulfilment than all my awards put together.
“I also like to give back to the franchise network and I understand the challenges female entrepreneurs face in running a business and raising a family, so I regularly support other female ActionCOACH leaders across the UK.”
Julie Wagstaff, ActionCOACH UK Recruitment Director, says: “Women are finding more and more that business coaching is a fulfilling vocation. In 2015 just under 12 per cent of our new coaches were women, but in the first quarter of 2016 that has increased to nearly 44 per cent and we’re really excited by that.”
