Syed Naimath 6 years ago
Professionals with a zeal to help others find their way through life, are setting up their own life coaching business. In this article, we’re going to talk about how to become a life coach, what this business is all about, the pros and cons of running it all on your own, and every little step you need to take for making it successful.
Take it as the only guide you’ll ever need to refer to.
People in the endeavor to fulfill their dreams and desires often find themselves in a fix. Sometimes the situations or challenges are tough nuts to crack. Life coaching gives people the needed push and motivation to accept these challenges and come out of them with the best possible approach. However, do not confuse life coaching with counselling. It is far more than a problem-solving, mentoring, or counselling service for people who find them lost and dismal at any point in life.
The best way to define life coaching is that it is a process that helps people achieve their dearest goals – professional success, fulfilment in relationships, gaining fitness, in a planned manner. A life coach is someone who can help create an action plan for their clients to make their life simpler, stress-free, and successful.
If you believe that you have what it takes to guide people unleash their hidden potential, and assist them at every step in the journey towards improvement, this profession is for you. As a life coach, apart from doing meaningful work that provides internal satisfaction, you can make good money too.
While as a beginner you won’t be earning megabucks, slowly as people start valuing your service, you can start charging a fee amount based on your market reputation. If you’ve just started out you can expect to earn anywhere between $10,000 and $25,000 for a first few years.
The only myth that you need to shake yourself out of is that this business will make a millionaire out of you overnight. People won’t leave you a hefty check just for blocking your time. They want results. And, once they see that you deliver on your promise money will start flowing in easily. But all this takes time. Most coaches have to spend a decade in the business and put a lot of sweat into their work before they break the 6-figure mark.
Whether you are considering taking life coaching as a business or are someone looking for life coaching services, it makes sense to understand how it can benefit. Let’s read through some of the advantages that individuals can reap with life coaching.
Helps people understand their strengths and weaknesses: A life coach helps people find out their plus points and pain points. This strength-weakness analysis is the first step towards holistic improvement. Individuals get an idea of their ‘blind-spots’. Life coaching then helps individuals discover solutions or a vision using which they can overcome the negatives and develop on their positive skills.
Encourages people find innovative ways to their problems: Life coaching does not feed morals and generic motivational solutions to individuals. Each individual needs to come up with solutions to their own problems and then work with the coach to work out an action plan that ‘best’ solves the problem at hand.
Allows individuals to make mistakes (and learn): A good coach would always be open to hear out the client’s recommendations. He would also be flexible enough to allow the client to follow his own heart, find their own way out, make mistakes and learn from them. This instills confidence in people who’ve come for life coaching, and gives them to motivation to keep working towards improvement without being pushed back by failure.
It’s not ‘easy’ to be a life coach. Also, it is not a one day job to find the best life coach. There are some drawbacks of life coaching that both aspiring life coaches as well as people considering to opt for life coaching services must understand.
No guarantee of results: Life coaching as a business is propelled by word of mouth and branding. People opt for only the best-in-industry life coach. However, even the best of coaches fail at times. Moreover, a life coach is only a guiding force. Individuals have to work on their improvement with complete commitment. Sometimes, people don’t put in their best effort and the who life coaching exercise fails. The result is hence disappointing for the life coach as well as for the client.
Stress for the practitioner: Every new client is a blank slate for the life coach. He cannot rely on his past laurels and results, and has to work out fresh approaches for each client. The life coach’s success is about delivering consistently on his promise. Under such occupational stress it is common for life coaches suffer insomnia, heart problems, and other health related issues.
Conflicting goals and ideas: It’s tough to break people’s ego that always tell them that they know better. This is one challenge that a life coach has to break again and again. Clients often come up with unfeasible ideas and solutions, which the coach might disagree with. While it is easy for clients to disagree with the coach, it is important to understand he will always try his best to help you crack your challenges. On the other hand, sometimes a coaches big ego might not make the client comfortable enough to get along.
If after going through the advantages and disadvantages of this business you feel that this profession suits you, you can consider thses types of life coaches and decide which one of the following niches to practice:
Each of these coaching styles has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, private coaching pays the highest. However, group coaching makes the job a little less stressful for the coach, and sees higher participation from a large chunk of those people who want to reap the advantages of brainstorming. You need not follow just one approach and can use a mix of coaching styles, depending on the client’s requirement.
You might be great with people, and would have learnt a lot on the go. But to make your life coaching business more reliable in the eyes of your clients, it is good to have a life coaching certification in place.
There are plenty of life coaching certification and courses you will find online. But to make sure you’re choosing the right one for your business, here are a few things you need to do:
Some of the top courses in the industry currently include:
Here comes the interesting bit – coming up with catchy life coaching business names. Remember though that this is as much challenging as fun. How do you begin shortlisting a name for your business? Something that resonates deeply with your values and also makes an impression on the client?
Let’s begin with some ideas that you could use and some mistakes you should avoid while shortlisting life coaching business names.
The two most common mistakes to avoid while coming up with a name for your business:
Another thing that you should give serious thought to while naming your business is whether you want to name it after your own name? Well, if you’ve already got a reputation in the market you can, without a thought, opt for this strategy. I mean if you are a Kylie Jenner, you can easily start any business in your own name and people will recognize your brand in an instant. But what if you are not? How can then you come up with a name that’s not too cryptic, not cute, yet interesting or impressive?
The internet has made life really simple for everyone. You can take help from online tools to come up with catchy life coaching business names. Tools like namestation are a smart choice to go for to generate names online. Just enter the keywords for your business and the name generator will spin up interesting names. The best thing is that most such tools are free!
Just like any other business, your life coaching business also needs a plan or blueprint. This plan should be a detailed and in-depth document about what your business is about, what’s your vision and mission, how do you plan to impart your services, what would be your product/service, how do you wish to differentiate yourself from the competitor, what will be your business structure etc. Let’s go through a quick template that lists all the points that your coaching business plan should cover:
Description of the company
Market analysis
Sales and Marketing Strategy
Financials
You need to have a detailed description of all the components in your life coaching business plan document. For example, your company description should state clearly your vision, mission, objective, products, as well as member names.
Here’s an example of how you can create a company description for documenting your business plan:
‘XYZ Coaching LLP, has been founded by Mr X. who will run the business with his partner Mr. Y. Mr. X was previously a youth counsellor and after 10 years of service has decided to run his own coaching business. XYZ coaching is aimed at helping young adults become better individuals. Our vision is to become the best youth counselling business in the NY area. The mission is to provide affordable counselling services to young adults from all walks of life. We plan to impart group counselling services to youngsters and encourage a participative approach in problem solving.
Similarly, you can elaborate on your financial, operational, and market analysis components as well.
As discussed, you need to specifically state in your business plan the type of life coaching services your business will offer. There are a good number of life aspects that life coaching services can target. As a life coach, you can choose a specific aspect in which you can offer your expertise. Some examples are listed as follows:
The stagnation that hits a people mostly in their mid-thirties can be a tough challenge to overcome. With the help of career coaching, people can overcome any obstacles that hold them from making the right career moves.
For any business, the toughest goal is to get the first client. How, when, and where can you possibly get the first client walking in to your office? If you are a well known name in the industry, it won’t take long before people start to find out about your business and industry presence; however, if you’ve just made a start how do you start getting clients as a life coach? Here are a few things you need to do to reach out to people and let them know about your services:
Think of your website as the face of your life coaching business. A website will serve as a medium through which your potential audience will know who you are, what you do, and what services you have to offer. While creating a website, you’ll need to keep a few things in mind.
These are just some of the basic things that you need to keep in mind while creating a website for your life coaching business. For getting clients as a life coach, having a website in place is just one step. There are a number of other techniques and tactics that you must explore. And, having a marketing plan in place can help you get a better understand of how you can achieve this objective.
Whether you’re starting up your life coaching business or planning to market an existing one more aggressively, start by setting up your website.
The easiest way to go about doing this, is choosing to set up your business website on WordPress. The content management system makes it pretty easy for you to get all the basics of your website in place. But the one thing you need to do, is choose a theme that suits your business brand the best and build on it.
Here are some of the most chosen life coaching business website themes you can get started with:
But with the increasing competition in this business, just getting the basics in place is not enough. You need to build a site that is optimized to perform and create a reputation for your brand. This may involve changing a lot of things in the theme to incorporate your brand vision, and that’s when you might struggle doing it all on your own.
While the first choice that everyone makes, is to hire an in-house developer, looking for a person with competent skills and an understanding of your vision, is time consuming and might come at a higher cost.
That’s where outsourcing your life coaching business website needs makes for a smarter choice. Plugmatter, offers premium WordPress maintenance service to businesses such as yours. With WordPress experts onboard, proactive maintenance and prompt reactive support, the team makes sure that your site is always at the top of its game.
Cutting down the time it takes to look for a developer and the operational costs of having someone in-house, Plugmatter continually works with you as your business scales.
An understanding of your who your competitors are and what your target audience wants is key to your success as a life coach. Your market plan must clearly define both these components and what will be your strategy to win a bigger market share in a highly competitive market. This is how you can beat competition and win customers, without having to spend a million bucks:
Hold events and webinars: Connect one-on-one with people and talk about your business, its objectives, and how it has proved to be beneficial for clients. As a life coach you can hold webinars and events on subjects such as the need of coaching for corporate executives. Now, the point here is how do you market your event or webinar? You could use an email marketing software and send out emails to your contact list. You can also use Linkedin to promote the webinar or event that you are about to host. Also, your website is a great medium to inform your visitors about upcoming events and webinars. Use a sticky header to notify every visitor about the webinar/event that you will be speaking in.
Blog and guest post: You need people to read about your business on the web. Having a blog on your website and publishing content regularly on it for educating and engaging your visitors, is important. Of course, you must make your blog content SEO friendly. This is the only way in which you can get your content ranking on the first page of Google. Also, you must publish guest post on popular websites of your niche that already have good website traffic. Getting a backlink from popular websites means wider reach and higher probability of more traffic flowing to your website.
Encourage people to write reviews and testimonials: User-generated content is the best social proof that validates the quality of life coaching business services. Ask people to rate you as a professional coach and encourage them to leave reviews on your website that others can read before signing up for your coaching services.
Promote, promote, promote: Social media has made everything really easy and quick. Want to complain about a defective product being delivered? Just spread out a word on social media and the company will come back with a genuine apology as well as free replacement. Similarly, if you want to want to promote your business, social media channels are the best resort. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest – all these social media channels allow both organic as well as paid promotions. Twitter hashtags get the message out in no time to the right audience.
You can also run engaging contests and trivia to attract new users and to make them aware about your business. There are just too many ways in which you can promote your business using social media. And, if you think that this is something that you can’t do on your own, it would be wise to invest in a digital marketing agency that can help you promote your life coaching business better.
Automating marketing
Sooner or later your client list will grow, and this is when you will need to automate some of the functions. The good thing is that automation is no rocket-science and can be easily managed with the help of some smart tools available in the market. Ontraport is one such tool that helps you automate your marketing campaigns with ease. So, whether you have to promote an ebook or run a webinar, Ontraport can help you spread the word, gather emails, get the audience, and track the success of your campaign.
Automating payment/billing
As the cash flows get complicated you will realize that the age-old diary keeping practice needs to be replaced with something that is more efficient and accurate. You can automate your payment system with the help of tools like Zuora. With your payment system automated, you can focus on the core requirements of your business.
Automating support
Chatbots are a big advancement in customer support services. More and more businesses are investing in AI based chatbots to answer customer queries, inquiries, and to assist them with solutions they need. In the life coaching business too, you can leverage ‘live chat’ as well as ‘chatbot’ services to promptly engage with your clients.
This post covers all aspects of life coaching business, right from how can you come up with interesting business names to how can you automate different aspects of it. Though there is a lot more to life coaching than what we have covered in this post, you can rely on this blueprint to get started with your endeavor.
Life coaching business gets more attention & conversions with an online presence.
If you are an existing or a new life/business coach who wants to start an online business & looking to grow your business then you should have a beautifully designed, mobile-friendly & responsive website with WordPress maintenance service, which will bring you more leads & conversions.
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