How to Launch Your Coaching Business from Scratch

Hi, I'm Robin Waite, The Fearless Business Coach, and I'm here to tell you all of the things you need to know before launching your coaching business. All in all, I've been working as an entrepreneur for almost two decades now and I've been working as a successful business coach for six of those years. Throughout this time, I've been training coaches, consultants, and freelancers to be successful and more importantly, to understand their worth. With this, I'm asked so many questions such as, so what inspired you to become a business coach in the first place? Why should I invest in you? How much do you charge? And things like that. All of these things are integral to know before becoming a business coach. So where do you start? First of all, you've got to understand why you were doing it in the first place because most people fall in love with the idea of becoming a business coach and strive to be somebody who is looked up to and respected, but when you become a business coach, you're immediately put into a position of power and clients come to you with the faith that you can help fix their business and make it a huge success. Therefore, you've got to leave your ego at the door. I see too many business coaches who come out of, for example, corporate world and because they've helped big businesses, they automatically assume that they're able to help small businesses to grow, whereas actually a small business turning over less than six figures, less than 100K, is a completely different animal to ones which are, you know, multinational corporates. So once you've left your ego at the door, there's two fundamental qualities that any business coach should have and those are fearlessness and empathy. Half the time clients are coming to you because they have nowhere else to go. As I'm sure anyone else here can relate, sorting out finances and talking money can be incredibly stressful, especially when things aren't going to plan and as a business coach, not only do you need to be comfortable having those hard conversations, you need to be the best at it. You need to put yourself to one side for the moment and focus on what's best for the client and be absolutely confident in yourself that you can help your clients to achieve those goals and strive towards those goals plus more. You need to stretch them. It's no good just being a shoulder to cry on because you're a business coach, not a therapist at the end of the day, unless you are a therapist of course, and if you yourself do not believe that you can transform your clients' businesses, then ultimately you're going to fail or struggle at least as a coach. Next you've got to niche down and understand your unique selling proposition, your USP. So it's no good just being the UK's best business coach. Sure, you might well be a brilliant coach, but I bet you any money that if you go onto Google right now and type in the UK's best business coach, it will gather pages on pages of coaches who think exactly the same thing about themselves. Look back on your entrepreneurial journey and what got you into business in the first place. How can your previous experience help you now successfully market yourself as a business coach? So let's take Claire as an example. Claire is an incredibly talented beautician and salon owner looking to branch out as a business coach. She's a smart woman. She does her research. She realizes that just being a female empowering business coach isn't enough to help her break into the coaching industry. She realized she needs to niche and based on her own experience at owning many reputable salons, Claire researched the market for salon owners needing coaching and mentorship. But of course, she finds a lot of coaching companies offering services specifically catered towards salon owners, but not as many coaching services as she did when she looked up female business coaches. So this will not only enable clients to find you faster, but niching also increases the chances of you attracting your dream client. With clients comes money. So my next piece of advice would be to draw out what your financial goals would be within your business and measure the capacity that you'll need in order to achieve them. So for example, if you're looking to earn say £5,000 per month, you've got to be realistic. As a coach working on your own, you're going to actually struggle to earn that amount of money within a month on an hourly rate. And that would mean you'd have to work over 160 hours per month and have an extremely successful lead flow rate. And that's where you've got to start to think about being strategic. It's really important that you don't charge by the hour. Instead, you need to opt for an outcome results based pricing model. So if you turn to your client and say, for a grand in six months, I promise to double your business's revenue or profits, all your money back. There are so many benefits to outcome based pricing. So for one, you'll end up with a buffer in your bank account. And as we know from recent events, such as the pandemic, business can go from one extreme to the other. And having the money upfront eliminates the number of customers you would need on an hourly rate to reach your goal. Having clients pay upfront means that you have a buffer in your bank account and will eventually allow you to plan and pinpoint the exact amount of money that you should have coming in each and every month. Hopefully enough money to cover all of your expenses and also make sure that you're earning some cash as well. This in time will save you any trouble at times when your business is slow. As you've already prepared for the worst case scenario. And what I'd recommend is that you get to a point whereby you've built up three to six months worth of operating overhead in a savings account. So another thing I talk about is money back guarantees. In all my years as a business coach, having helped thousands of clients, I've only ever had two people ask for their money back. People don't view money back guarantees for what they are. They see them as a vote of confidence in yourself as a coach and the results which you get. So as long as you can provide the results to your clients that they're looking for or the next big thing, you'll come to find that people don't tend to ask for their money back because they're getting good value for money. This feeds into what we spoke about earlier on about your confidence and your ability to provide great results as a business coach. My final tip is around investing in business coaches yourself. So if you haven't already, you do need to look towards investing in your own business coach. As you probably already know, business coaches are fantastic for when you're looking to start a new business. And not only are they able to provide you with the basic understanding of running a coaching business, but you will also be able to learn different coaching styles and techniques for your own coaching practice and working with your own clients. And when searching for your ideal business coach, make sure that they are highly skilled in communication, subject matter knowledge, problem solving, and most importantly, listening. This increases the chance of a great trustworthy relationship between the two of you. And if you're unsure where to find a good business coach, try searching online, go to some local networking, or come and ask me. Local networking meetings are a great place for you to start as you can gather first-hand personal experiences about many business coaches from like-minded business owners. The best thing that you can possibly do is actually ask other businesses which business coach they used. If you're still unsure about the qualities it takes to be an excellent business coach, one of the books that I would highly recommend looking out for is The Prosperous Coach, which you can see here by Rich Litvin. The Prosperous Coach methodology massively impacted my ability as a coach and transformed my coaching practice, and to me, it's the Bible of business coaching. Every business coach needs to get hold of a copy of The Prosperous Coach. This has been my personal advice for launching a coaching business. If you enjoyed this video, do be sure to give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. That would help us out immensely. If there's something that you would desperately like for me to talk about that I haven't covered yet on this channel, then please do drop it in the comments below. I do read all of the comments and reply to them as well personally, and I'm always happy to share any resources which you need access to. All my details are going to be listed in the description below, but for now, have a great day folks.