Starting a SOCCER ACADEMY Business in the U.S

Hey coach, welcome back to the channel. If you haven't yet, make sure you subscribe to stay up to date with all the latest content that we put out. Now today I want to talk about how to set up your soccer academy business in the US. Every single day I get questions from coaches who are based out in the United States or North America and a lot of coaches what they ask me is, Leo, I'm in club soccer at the moment. I'm looking to step away from that environment and I'm looking to start my own soccer academy business in my local area. How can I do this? What do I need and what are the steps you would recommend? So these are a couple of questions I get every single day from coaches who watch our YouTube channel and reach out to me via either email or we get on a zoom call or they WhatsApp me to my business number. So I want to break this down into four simple steps and these four simple steps are steps that I share with coaches who I speak to. These are steps that you can use in whatever sport you're in. This video is soccer specific but really and truly if you have a basketball business, if you have a baseball business, these steps can be used for whichever sport you are in. So the first step is you have to set up your business legally. So what I always recommend to coaches is get legal advice on what is the best way to set up a business in your local city. So do a bit of research, go onto Google, look at all the qualified CPAs in your area and see if they offer a free 15 to 20 minute consultation call where you can jump on a call with them and get any questions answered that you may have with regards to setting up your business legally in your local area. There's a number of ways you can set up your academy. You can set up for profit, you can set up a non-profit, but the best thing to do before anything is speak to a CPA because they will be able to guide you on what is the best steps for what you are looking to do. Now the second one is once we've set up the business legally, now we need to look at setting up a business checking account for our soccer academy. So again, what I would do is I would look at the banks in your local area, in your local city, your local town, and go in and speak to someone about setting up a business account with them. A lot of banks at the moment, they provide a lot of promotions, offers for entrepreneurs that are looking to start a business and open an account with them. If your high street banks isn't an option, then also look at some online banks. There's companies out there like Stalin, Revolut. These are just a couple of many that offer services and products for entrepreneurs to open up business checking accounts with them. There's a lot of banks that do promotions offer, but it's a case of just shopping around, doing some research and finding out which is the best bank for you and your company. Once we've done that, the next step is now we've got to purchase business insurance. Now if you are based in the United States, then you know insurance is important for everything we do in the US. People need medical insurance. People need personal insurance. People need insurance for everything because the likelihood of people getting sick, injured or sued is very high in the US. What I always recommend to coaches is to purchase business insurance for a couple of reasons. First reason is because if you are at a training session, you're working with a client and they accidentally fall over, break their arm, break their leg or get really injured, which requires them to go to a hospital and get operated on, then those expenses that that family has to incur as a result of that injury during your sessions, there have been cases where parents then look to sue the coach or the coach's company for the liabilities. So if you have insurance that just protects you, you and your business from that ever happening in your business. Now the chances are that a parent sues you are very, very slim, but I know cases of coaches that have been sued from parents at camps or clinics because there was some negligence from the coach during the session. So just be careful, protect yourself and it's worth the investment to get insurance, not just in the event that a parent might look to sue you for an injury, but also the second reason is that if you look to hire out an indoor facility such as a school or a local youth center or a YMCA to run your sessions out of, they will require you to have business insurance. In the event that one of your clients accidentally smashes a window or something gets break during the time that you and your academy are using that facility. So the chances are no place will hire it out unless you have business insurance. So business insurance is the third step to getting started with your soccer academy business. And the last one, once you have all the legalities set up, once you have business insurance set up, once your bank account is up and running, the fourth one I would look for now is a consistent location to run your training sessions out of. So if you have to use a local park, a couple of things to consider, make sure that that local park is suitable to train clients out of. Also make sure that local park is available all year round to do your training sessions. And also make sure that local park doesn't require you to have a permit to use it. Now if they do do require you to have a permit, then make sure you go through the steps needed in order to obtain a permit and be able to train clients out of that public park. There's a lot of parks across the United States that do require you to have a permit to use that facility. So make sure that you have everything in place in order for that to happen. Now, again, if you want to use a park, that's great. But if you live in Massachusetts, if you live in New Jersey, if you live in Illinois, if you live in the more northern states, then the chances are when it comes to winter, it will be very difficult to use a park because of weather, right? It either snows, it either rains and the conditions to train on those on the, on that surface is very, very limited because of the weather. So you might need to transition your business then to an indoor space throughout the winter months to keep your business going. Okay. So that's why I always recommend coaches. Make sure that you do your research on venues, locations, facilities that you can use all year round so that your clients are coming to you for the training. You're not having to go to different places across the town to do your training session because not only does that waste a lot of time, but that also is costly for you and your business as well. Okay. So set place, set location that you can run your training training sessions out of each week. Okay. And make sure that you are able to use that facility all year round for your training. Okay. So if you want to get in contact with me to discuss any of the, the four things that I mentioned in this video, visit the description below. You'll be able to either set up a free 15 to 20 minute zoom call through there, or you can send me questions to even my email at make money coaching sports at gmail.com, or you can send me a WhatsApp message to my number, which is found below this video in the description. Okay. Thank you for watching. And again, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, make sure you do that to stay up to date with all the latest content.