How to Start a Coaching Business

Thinking about starting a coaching business? Here are two things you should know before going any further.

One, serving a wider audience isn’t necessarily better. Some of the most successful coaches today are specialists.

Second, it’s tough to build and scale a thriving coaching business while maintaining your own work-life balance.

You need a niche, and you need a plan for scalability.

If you’re drawn to coaching, you probably enjoy helping people figure things out, improving their lives, and showing them how to reach their highest potential.

But there are thousands of ways to do that beyond traditional coaching fields.

In this article, we’ll share how you can connect with more clients right from the start – and build a scalable coaching business while training exactly what you love.

What is a Coaching Business?

Coaches share their expertise, advice, and guidance to help people transform their lives. 

Coaching shouldn’t be confused with counseling. While many coaches help their clients achieve goals similar to counselors, the main difference is that coaches tend to focus on business goals as opposed to personal improvement.

Types of Coaching

Specialized coaching businesses work with a specific type of client to accomplish a specific goal.

A generalist coach may specialize in B2B lead gen techniques for small businesses or give workshops on digital marketing techniques. Specialized coaches narrow their audience down to a specific business vertical in which they have expertise.

They may know better than anyone how to sell renovations or be a solar business expert. In short, they are experts in their field and coach others on how to build a successful business in that market.

At RapidFunnel, we work with specialty coaches from almost any industry you can imagine, and all of them have ONE thing in common; they’ve mastered how to sell within their specific business vertical and know how to teach others to duplicate that success. 

Below are some different types of business-related coaching practices and some ideas of what else you’ll need to consider before making your decision. 

Career Coach

A career coach empowers professionals at all levels to make informed career decisions. A career coach works with clients on taking action and being accountable to themselves. 

These coaches generally help clients grow within their current career, transition into a new job, or help people start new businesses in a specialty area. 

Business Coach

A business coach works with individuals or teams within organizations to achieve business goals and objectives. Business coaching can overlap with other coaching niches, such as leadership or executive development. 

The overall goal is to support the client to reach and exceed their desired business outcomes.

Executive Coach

An executive coach assists executives, managers, and high-potential leaders in reaching their full potential. Often, these coaches help clients lead and develop their teams and organizations. 

Executive coaches may also assist with communication skills, conflict management, or how to handle underperforming teams. Sometimes, they’ll also work with leaders to help them with work/life balance.

Marketing Coach 

A marketing coach helps clients develop marketing strategies to build their company’s brand and attract customers. They act as mentors and advisors to train individuals on the best marketing activities to grow a business’s revenue. 

A marketing coach provides support, but the client owns the implementation of the marketing strategy and plans. This coach may help individuals understand and develop content marketing, social media marketing, lead generation, or search engine optimization. 

Niche Business Coaching

Are you an expert on, for example: developing online courses, starting an auto repair shop, catering company, or a wine business… and want to build your own niche coaching business to help others find success in the same field?

The right technology will help you at every stage, from connecting with more clients to scaling into bigger-ticket coaching programs.

AST helps your clients stay focused and execute on the proven processes you’ve created, via a personalized platform filled with your coaching and training content – increasing their success and your monthly recurring revenue. 

Starting a Niche Coaching Business

There’s never been more demand for specialized coaches, trainers, and consultants than there is right now. 

If you have excellent people skills, and a genuine desire to help others succeed by teaching them what you know, you can start a coaching business. 

Before you do that, here are a few steps to help ensure your success. 

Keep Your Concept Simple (and Specialize!)

Once you’ve narrowed down the type of coaching you’re going to offer, it’s essential to hone in on who exactly you’ll help with your coaching business and how. 

Be clear about what you’ll offer and how you’ll offer it.

Think about your unique selling point (USP). What makes you different from the competition? What do you offer that no one else does?

Simplifying your service can help your niche coaching business stand out.

Conduct Market Research

It’s essential to conduct market research before you launch your coaching business. 

Too many coaches make the mistake of targeting as many clients as possible, which wastes time and money. It’s better to figure out which customers want your services to reach them more effectively.

The first step is figuring out who your target audience is, what they want, and how you can help them. 

For example, if you’re coaching people to start a daycare business, you don’t want to waste your time and resources marketing to people who are opening craft breweries. 

You want to know how to reach your ideal clients and where to find them so that you can target them.

The results of your market research will help shape your coaching business, informing decisions such as what your coaching/training program will look like, your specialized service offerings, your pricing structure, your unique selling points, and your marketing methods. 

To be as thorough as possible in your market research, start by answering a few basic questions:

• Demand: What’s the current demand for your niche business? Who’s looking for what you’re offering, and where do they live, network, or gather socially? 
• Economic indicators: Does your target market have the money required to buy your services?
• Pricing: What is the minimum you need to charge to make a profit? And how much are they willing to pay? 
• Location: Does it matter where they live? Is your business regional or national?
• Saturation: How many coaches are already offering something similar?

Answering these questions and finding ways around potential obstacles before starting your coaching business will help set you up for long-term success.

Always Overestimate Costs

Countless start-ups have crumbled under the pressure of mounting costs. That’s why it’s important to give yourself plenty of leeway. 

Chances are, you’re going to overspend (at least in the beginning). So, prepare for the worst and organize your business finances around that.

This will give you plenty of room to work without breaking the bank. It also means you’re ready for any unforeseen costs.

Understand the Commitment

Many people quit their 9-5 job to start their own business because they want control over their schedule. And while this can certainly happen, it won’t always be the case. 

In fact, even if you’re going for remote coaching, you might find that you’re working even harder than you were before. That’s the nature of running your own business. It likely won’t always be that way, but when starting a new business, plan on working overtime in the beginning.

It takes commitment to launch a new coaching business. Doing the groundwork now will help set you up for future success, and a more flexible work-life schedule.

Be Open to New Ideas

Flexibility is key to starting and running a successful coaching business. All the planning in the world cannot prepare you for every eventuality, and despite your best efforts, you may find that your business model needs to be modified or rebuilt to work effectively. If this is the case, being open to new ideas is essential. 

Developing a concept into an actual business involves a lot of trial and error. Your ability to adapt will help you continually improve your niche coaching business.

Create a Coaching Program

Creating a framework for your coaching programs will improve efficiencies and deliver better results for you and your clients.

If you want to move beyond one-on-one sessions and build your coaching business to reach a wide audience – training programs are essential.

When you have established programs, you’ll be able to spend less time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks and more time strategizing and refining your coaching materials. 

Before you sit down to begin designing and creating a coaching program, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the specific focus behind your coaching program?
• What challenge is your target client looking to solve? Where are they struggling?
• What will your client be able to achieve through your program?
• How will you help them grow their business and succeed?
• What tools can you offer to help them connect with and grow their client base?

You also need to decide how you’ll deliver your program. One-on-one sessions with your clients are not scalable.

• Will you offer training videos, PDF guides, or audio to help your clients better follow your program and stay on top of their tasks?
• How will you manage your content? (Hint, you will need a professional coaching website.)

This is where the right technology can have an incredible impact. With the right tools, you can deliver excellent content, impactful lessons, and lead clients through your program to real success – without extra demands on your time.

We help the niche coaches we work with roll all their best training content and sales tools right into the RapidFunnel App. It’s like handing your clients a personalized digital toolkit with the exact steps to follow for success. 

With your branded version of the RapidFunnel App, you can offer:

• Sales content organized for clients to follow 
• Videos, lead capture pages, and surveys
• Personalized Digital Business Card
• Prewritten email campaigns, texts, and push notifications personalized for your clients’ businesses
• Your coaching and training modules, in App
• Follow-up sales materials (such as referral forms)
• Event and webinar invitations
• And anything else you want to add! 

When your clients go on their own sales calls, the App leads them through the exact proven processes they learned during your training using your words and your methods.

Keep Everything Organized

Make sure you keep your training materials organized. If you create something once, you should be able to use it again and again as you build your client base. 

The RapidFunnel App includes a Coaching section where you can keep all your training videos, PDFs, and audio coaching sessions in one place. It’s an easy way to keep everything organized and accessible, right in the App. 

The Resource Library is where you can add the best customer-facing sales content – designed by you – that your clients can then use to help build their own business. Everything is instantly shareable via email, text, or on social. 

The App notifies your client when someone clicks on what they sent and uses real-time tracking and analytics to list their most interested leads, for the easiest follow-up ever.

Scaling Your Coaching Program

Once you find a formula that works – you’re ready to scale.

There are many ways to keep building on your success, including group training, asking for referrals, sharing case studies of successful clients, and more!

If you’re wondering if you could become a niche coach, it’s important to remember – people are looking for your expertise. What you do is unique and puts you in a fantastic position to target your exact audience and help them succeed, while growing your own coaching business.

To learn more about how the RapidFunnel App helps niche coaches connect with clients and grow their business visit us at https://rapidfunnel.com/coaches-trainers-consultants/.