Ep127 Transcript: 3 Considerations When Starting a Coaching Business – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: Would you like to start your own coaching business? In episode 125, I talked to Bernadette McClelland, who went from bankruptcy to becoming a superstar coach for Tony Robbins. In this episode of quick fix Friday, I’m going to dive into three considerations you need when starting a coaching business.

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Starting a coaching business is a great low cost way to start a business. And you may have an idea for a business. You may have some experience that you want to help other businesses with. You may just decide that you like coaching and want to get deeper into it. So I want to give you a couple of things to think about here as you consider your coaching business.

The first thing is, do you want to have your own true business where you are responsible for everything you’re responsible for the marketing and all of the business expenses and all of the decisions, or would you like to be a business coach and not have to worry about that and be in someone else’s ecosystem.

So that’s an important thing to think about because if you just like coaching and you really enjoy it and you really feel like you’re good at it, but you don’t want to deal with all the hassles of the marketing and the invoicing and everything that goes along with having a business, then you may want to be in someone else’s ecosystem.

And there are plenty of businesses that need coaches inside their system. They have members and they need people to come and help and coach those members. They may have a system themselves that they have developed and they need to hire outside coaches because they themselves can’t do all the coaching.

So for that, you might look for bigger programs. You may have experienced someone, you may have taken a program from someone and you realize that there’s coaches inside that system and you can eventually apply to be one. I know that’s the case for a lot of programs I’ve taken. And I think that’s a good way to become a coach without having to worry about the hassles of actual business ownership.

That being said. Owning your own business is awesome. You do get to decide all the things. That’s an upside and a downside, but I think it’s a fun thing to do if you have the stamina and if you’re able to really organize and make sure that you’re doing the marketing as well. Cause that’s a big piece of it, making sure you have customers.

So consideration number two is, do you have the expertise you need? Do you have some system that you have created that you are going to work with? Some framework that you’re going to work with? Or do you want to take an official course or maybe buy a franchise in that case.

So those are two different possibilities as well. If you feel like you need some systems and if you feel like you need a framework like Tony Robbins coaching provides, there’s lots of other coaching systems or franchises like Action Coach or plenty of other places where you can get some sort of certification and already built system.

Now, the advantage of the already built system is that you’ve got all kinds of ways to help coach people. You’ve got all the things in place that you need and a lot of times they also help you with some of the marketing systems as well. The disadvantage of signing up for one of these systems is it can be a big initial investment.

So if you don’t have that big initial investment to make, you may want to start on your own depending on if you have an actual framework that you want to walk someone through.

And consideration number three is how quickly do you need to ramp up and get started? Because I think a coaching business is a great thing you can start on the side or as a little side gig side project and grow that as needed. Now, Bernadette was in a place where she needed to go from zero to 60 pretty quickly.

And so I think in that case, a built in system with some built in marketing help can be a great way to go. But if you are starting on your own and you’re having to build your own clientele, That might be a good case for starting it as a little side gig and growing that, making sure it’s got legs, making sure that you’re getting clients, making sure that you’ve got maybe some referrals coming in, some testimonials coming in, and it could easily be built in a part time way.

That’s how I started. I really just built my business very small to start with, really bootstrapped everything and started out with just a few hourly clients that I was working with and fit those in as I was also raising my children. So I was consulting during nap times, which was always interesting, but I made it work and I grew it to something that I had no idea would be possible right now. It’s a flourishing, amazing full time business. So that can definitely happen. But those are just some considerations that you might want to think about.

Another little bonus tip here is that you don’t have to invest a lot of money for your coaching business. And I would say you may want to ramp up slowly so that you are profitable right from the start. That’s the way I started as well. I really like the fact that you don’t have to have a fancy website. You can have something very simple. That’s easy to create just a one page website, or maybe I know a lot of people who don’t even have a website at all.

They’ve just worked with their LinkedIn profile, for example. You don’t have to have all these certifications and credentials. Of course, they could help you in certain ways. There’s lots of ways to get certified. There’s all, there’s the international coaches federation that has memberships.

There’s all different ways to really learn, get some sort of certification, but you don’t have to have that in order to get started. It can help to have a community. I think that’s helpful thing to do to have a community to lean into, but that doesn’t need to be something that’s really expensive. It could be something informal people, who are already doing what you want to do.

Just being able to tap them and connect with them and ask them questions, I think is a really great way to get started. And then as you grow, maybe it’s time to invest in a little more training, maybe some certifications, maybe something a little bit more formal. But there’s lots of different ways to go with this. And what I love about this business is it is very flexible. It can be all kinds of different things to different types of businesses and it’s a great business.

So if you have not listened to episode 125 with Bernadette McClellan, definitely go and do that right now.

Hope that was helpful and make sure you grab the free guide top tools for late starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.