Ultimate Guide: How to Start a Coaching Business
The coaching industry is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2024. That’s huge!
It doesn't matter whether you want to offer career coaching,
Introduction to Starting a Coaching Business
Starting your own coaching business is a greatly fulfilling, especially for a lot of women who desire to start a business where they can earn a bigger income while deeply helping people.
A lot of corporate roles feel disconnected from real human connection so the huge transition of women switching careers to become coaches isn’t surprising. That’s why I went from marketing executive to plant-based health coach.
But, how does one go about starting a successful coaching business?
Most coaches today are really running an online business. In this article, I’m going to break it down, step-by-step in this ultimate guide so you get the full picture on how to do this yourself.
Steps to Starting Your Coaching Business
Step 1: Get certified
Depending on what type of coach you are, you will want to get certified at a coach training program. This helps you in solidifying your authority and leadership in your industry, too. If you are becoming a health coach or something that requires specialised knowledge, I recommend taking a certificate that will allow you to work as a coach.
In doing this, you not only protect yourself, as you’ll be able to purchase indemnity insurance, but you also can ward any questions of potential clients.
Now, if you have 5+ years experience in a particular field professionally and you’re now going out on your own as a coach, then you can use your professional credentials and/or experience as a qualification.
You may want to take some coaching or positive psychology courses on how to ask the right questions to help your clients get results.
Step 2: Define Your Coaching Niche
Here is where you are going to choose where your focus will be in your business and who you want to serve. This is really important to starting a successful online business as you don't want to pick a target market that can't afford or won't pay for what you're offering. This can look like defining your target market and then your niche. For example, if you’re a health coach (like I was), your target market might be people who want to lose weight.
But, weight loss is still a huge target market, we can niche this down further to postpartum mothers who want to lose weight, corporates who want to get active, lose weight and gain muscle or over 50s going through menopause who want to lose weight.
See, how weight loss alone is not specific enough?
We have to dive deeper into who exactly you want to help so that your marketing and sales can be focused on these people. When you narrow this down, you make more sales because you’re speaking to 1 specific person and it feels to them like you are in their mind.
People buy emotionally and so if a prospect believes you deeply understand their problem, they’re more likely to believe you also have a solution for them.
A lot of people worry that by niching down they’re “missing out on people”, but I promise you, when you niche down, there will still be millions of people in your niche.
Do some research into your target market by speaking to people you know, reading comments on YouTube videos of people talking about your topic and reading threads on Reddit.
This will help you understand what they feel their problem is and it will help you craft your coaching package and marketing in later steps.
Step 3: Develop a Business Plan
Developing a business plan will help you define your business goals and the steps you’re going to take to get there. Your business plan should include:
Company vision and mission
Target audience and niche
Marketing plan (and budget)
Sales plan
Step 4: Legal and Administrative
Depending on where you are in the world, set up your business correctly to protect yourself and your business. Google the requirements for your country.
Step 5: Branding and Marketing your Coaching Services
Create unique branding that makes you stand out. This means, choosing a name, logo and branding that will resonate with and attract your ideal client.
If you’re a life coach who helps women balance early motherhood and career, you probably want to stay away from anything that’s too hectic and chaotic as that’s their current situation and what they are aspiring to is more balance, calm and peace. Your branding should reflect that.
I used a value-based branding approach to create branding which is what I teach in my 1:1 coaching to help you build a timeless brand your ideal client loves.
Next, you’ll have to create a marketing plan that’s sustainable for YOU, which is something a lot of people forget. They see every coach (and their mother) on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and think that they have to do everything.
Personally, I completely disagree with this approach and encourage a complete opposite approach.
When you’re just starting out, you want to focus on ONE marketing channel. A channel that you love to use and find easy, something that you can sustainably create content for it. This could be a social media platform like Instagram or Facebook or this could be through SEO like starting a blog.
If you hate filming long videos, don’t choose YouTube. If you love writing, start a blog. If you’re great at networking and connecting with people, choose a referral-based or word of mouth method.
If you want to be successful online, pick something YOU love and can get really good at.
Step 6: Create your Coaching Package Offer
Create a coaching package that aligns with the greatest problem your ideal client has.
Your coaching package should focus on delivering a transformation.
Confused to clarity.
Self-conscious to self-confident.
You get it. You want to help your client change their life (in some way or another) and by doing this, your coaching package pricing is based on the VALUE you bring to this person’s life, not the number of calls or journal prompts you give them.
You also have to decide, how you're going to deliver this coaching. WIll it be through online coaching or in-person? Will it be a group coaching program or through online courses.
You also have to think about how do you want to run your coaching sessions?
Step 7: Getting your First Coaching Clients & Building your Client Base
I remember the feeling of getting my first client. It took a few sales calls before I got my first sale.
It was nerve wracking to get on those calls but I stuck to my script to ensure I had the greatest chance of closing the sale.
Getting your first client feels is that first big hump but once you have momentum, you will see clients start to find you many different ways.
The most important thing here is not giving up.
You must continue to book those calls and take the calls and PRACTICE SALES.
It doesn’t come naturally for everyone. For me, sales was one of the hardest parts of starting a health coaching business.
I thought the clients would just come to me and I had so many limiting beliefs around sales but I had to work through that and keep pushing forward to reach my goal, and you can too!
Another great method to making sure you always have enough prospects in your world is to build an email list and once you've finished working with them, get their permission to record their success stories or testimonials.
BONUS: Coaching Tools
You will 100% need coaching tools and automation to help you run this 1-person coaching business. I recommend:
Calendly: helps you schedule calls with clients and puts the call in the calendar and sends reminder emails before the call
Google Meet: this platform helps you run video calls. I prefer Google Meet because it doesn’t have a time limit like Zoom.
PayPal or Stripe: Helps you collect payments or payment plans from your client
Canva: helps you create professional and on-brand workbooks and PDFs for your database and clients
Starting your online coaching business is such an exciting time but there’s so much to learn and it can be very overwhelming. Thatý why signing up for business coaching can be the thing that helps you launch your coaching business before quitting too early.
When I was starting my coaching business, I thought I could figure it out all on my own. I struggled for months, working 12 hour days at my laptop trying to piece this whole thing together and it was painful. It wasn’t until I hired a coach that I established my business online, got my first paying clients and had the support and encouragement I needed to grow this business.
Now, with my 8 years of marketing experience, I help women launch their coaching business. If you need coaching and support to bring your coaching business to life, schedule a call with me and let’s chat about how we can launch your coaching business.