Lewis Raymond Taylor (32) was born and bred in Hertfordshire and has gone from a convicted criminal with three prison sentences under his belt to growing his business ‘The Coaching Masters’ an online life coaching academy to a value of £25million and a 100% year on year growth rate.
Founded in 2017 The Coaching Masters is a multiple seven-figure online training platform and community that spans 71 countries. With thousands of subscribers, the online training platform qualifies coaches and helps them build their own freedom-based online businesses.
Turning adversity into an asset Lewis believes the difficult life experiences of his early life led him to his journey of self-discovery and an insatiable desire to help others. A victim of his abusive father left him with low self-esteem and scared of failure. After experiencing sexual abuse at the age of 11 Lewis set on a downwards spiral of crime and anti-social behaviour. At the age of 13, Lewis was arrested on multiple occasions for shoplifting, starting fires and criminal damage. At the age of 14, he had an Antisocial Behaviour Order. At 15 Lewis was expelled from school and by the age of 18, he was serving his first sentence in a young offenders institution. The following years were rife with violence, drug and alcohol abuse and destructive self-sabotaging behaviour. Regularly in fights Lewis experienced injuries including a broken jaw, knocked out teeth, and his oesophagus slashed with a knife. He was hooked up to an ECG machine due to cocaine use countless times. During this time he was diagnosed with three different mental health disorders including Antisocial Personality Disorder, Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, and Bipolar Type 2 for which he was prescribed antipsychotics. Lewis also suffered the trauma of his father’s death, finding him dead had passed away from pancreatic cancer due to alcoholism. Angry, restless and discontented Lewis tried to fill the void he was feeling with everything from drugs and alcohol to sex and gambling however nothing seemed to work.
At the age of 24 whilst serving his third prison sentence in seven years for violently attacking a man outside a train station during a verbal disagreement, Lewis found himself on the edge of his prison bed, sentenced to 18 months. Lewis credits this moment as his ‘Significant Life Point’ where he decided he had to stop blaming everything and everyone around him and finally start taking responsibility for his own life and happiness. He knew in order to change his life, he needed to first change himself.
In the following years, Lewis embarked on an enlightening journey of self-discovery. He worked with counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, and read every self-help book he could find. He took the decision to move away from friends and family and admitted himself into a six-month, fully intensive, live-in rehabilitation centre. He started and attended a 12-step recovery drug and alcohol meetings every single day. Lewis began volunteering for charities and quickly realised how much he enjoyed helping others but also how powerful his own experiences were. The adversity he had suffered and his healing journey to happiness felt like one of the best examples of life coaching training. He decided to become a qualified Life Coach and started helping people by connecting with them on social media. Within six months Lewis had built a solid client base and earned enough funds to travel to South-East Asia whilst coaching people online. Within only eight months Lewis was earning a six-figure income and by his first year in business, he was fully booked, with a dedicated online community of thousands of people and a monthly membership service designed to fulfil the demands of multiple clients.
Lewis’s reputation as a top life coach soon began to spread as he began inundated with requests from other life coaches asking for his secrets of how he was able to grow his business so quickly. Sharing his advice and experiences, other coaches started to see amazing results too. This is what led Lewis to start The Coaching Masters. Lewis became a Senior Accredited Coaching Trainer and together with his new co-business partners Liam James Collins and Jonny Mitchell built The Coaching Masters to become the seven-figure, international coaching training platform and online community it is today.
In addition to his work with The Coaching Masters, Lewis also travels the world as a motivational speaker and was recently named by Yahoo Finance as one of the ten top coaches in the world helping people thrive during the pandemic. He manages his team of over 60 remotely splitting his time between London and Bali. A big believer in helping others find freedom within coaching and beyond, Lewis and his business partners Liam and Jonny are prolific in their fundraising efforts for multiple charitable causes including mental health charities, children’s organisations and animal welfare charities based in the UK and Indonesia.
About The Coaching Masters
The Coaching Masters is a multiple seven-figure online training platform and community that spans across 71 countries. A rapidly growing platform, the business reports a 100% year-on-year growth with over $4m in revenue to date, a thriving online and offline community and 5000 customers from 71 countries. No outside investment up until April 2022, no debt, no investment, all organic growth. The business has recently been valued at an impressive $25m.
Often younger, independent thinkers The Coaching Masters attracts a new breed of life coach and provides world-class training helping more and more people who want to make an impact on the world but just require the tools and strategies to get started. The platform qualifies, accredits and helps people to become online coaches while also providing coaching and guidance on how to market and build their businesses. Based around a low-cost subscription fee model The Coaching Masters has become known as ‘The Netflix of coaching’ with 100s of hours of valuable, coach training video content with the option to upgrade for further qualifications to elevate your coaching business. The business also has launched Cafe Coach, its first branch in the digital entrepreneur hub of Bali. An offline hub for the coaching community, Cafe Coach is an inspiring place for other coaches to work, learn and connect with plans for other branches planned around the world.
The Coaching Masters is partnering with Europe’s leading crowdfunding platform Crowdcube this October giving savvy investors the opportunity to become shareholders in the rapidly growing ed-tech platform. The investment will allow the business to hire more talented team members, help scale and innovate new technologies to help serve their customers more efficiently and accelerate their marketing efforts to expand their user base internationally. The investment will also assist with the launch of their fourth sub-brand CoachApp. The new interactive app will connect coaches and coachees, help users grow with e-learning products including accredited qualifications, cutting-edge virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Last but not least, exchange coaching products and services securely and safely with CoachApp’s own marketplace.
