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Wondering how to start your life coaching business from scratch?
Today, I'm sharing five things to keep in mind that will help you on your business journey including the things to avoid in the beginning and what to do if you get frustrated or confused along the way. Hello, I am Nikki Berkel. I'm a marketing and online business strategist for life coaches.
My first coaching business failed, but my second business was fully booked within just two months, so I'm excited to share with you what I learned along the way so that you don't make the same mistakes and you can have a successful coaching business the first time.
Making the leap from being an employee to owning your own business is terrifying. And unless you've ran a business before, it can be really confusing to know what steps to take to start your life coaching business.
When I first started my life coaching business, it was the first time in my life that I had ever had to sell anything. It was also the first time in my life when I didn't get that super cushy direct deposit in my account every two weeks. As you start to grow your life coaching business, you are going to have a totally different journey than mine, but there are still a few things I can share that will help you start your life coaching business from scratch and do it quicker.
So before we dive in, I want to ask a little bit about your journey on starting your life coaching business. Is this the first time that you've ever had to market yourself or do you already have some kind of sales or marketing experience?
Just comment below and let me know, are you to new marketing and sales or not?
The FIRST Thing to Keep In Mind As You Start Your Life Coaching Business from Scratch
The first thing to keep in mind as you start your life coaching business from scratch is that you are going to need a ton of practice. My life coach teacher, Martha Beck told us “coach your face off”. And boy is that good advice.
As a new coach, you might be so excited to think that your coaching tools are super cool and so helpful, and mix that with the desire to make money and earn a living from coaching and that can have some people kinda trying to skip through these foundational pieces that I'm going to talk about in this video.
So keep it in mind. You're going to want lots of practice. They have that 10,000 hour rule. I don't believe in the, like in the exact science of 10,000 hour rule, but I do think it's a great reminder of if you're a coach and you've been doing it for a few months, you're gonna need more practice than just a few months.
It's not that you can't get paying clients yet. It's just that practicing will help you build confidence. And it will also help you uncover who you're meant to coach and what problems you want to help them solve. And if you're someone who gets confused about how to choose a niche or find a target market for your life coaching business, I have a free resource for you. Just click here to grab my free download 7 Steps To Guarantee a Profitable Message and Market. It's the same process I take my clients through to make sure their coaching offers sell.
The SECOND Thing to Keep in Mind Before Starting Your Life Coaching Business from Scratch
The next thing to keep in mind, as you start your life coaching practice is you are going to need to learn and therefore practice to learn how to make offers. And if you haven't marketed yourself before, this is a scary part, right? This is talking about money, talking about putting yourself out there, talking about facing rejection and all kinds of things.
And so it's going to take a lot of practice for you to get comfortable with that. Your coaching services unfortunately will not sell themselves. It would be really nice if you could throw up a quick website, put a link to your calendar and just have your calendar fully booked right away, but that's not usually how it works.
It's a great idea to practice selling your coaching offer. Even if it's free and it's practice clients. That still gets you in the action of making offers and putting yourself out there. And if you're new to marketing in sales in the online space, there are things called conversion rates. So a conversion rate can exist like at a website, how many websites visit you and then turn into a lead or a client. If you send somebody to a landing page, what percentage of them entered their email address so that you can send them something. When somebody looks at your sales page, what percentage of them actually sign up for a call? Things like that.
And it can be really easy to take those numbers and percentages personally, like why isn't everyone signing up for this thing I'm offering? Why isn't everyone answering my emails for coaching offers? Don't take it personally. It really is a numbers game. And I think it helps to know this in advance.
So if you know that you are going to make coaching offers to a lot of people and that not that many of them are going to say yes, I think it's good to know that in advance so that you can have that expectation versus if you're sending out offers and you're expecting everyone to say yes, and then that doesn't happen. It's really disappointing. It can really be a big blow, big hit of rejection. So get lots of practice making tons of offers. That way you could increase the number of people saying yes and not get down by the larger number of people that are saying no.
The Third Thing To Keep in Mind as You Start Your Life Coaching Business from Scratch
The next thing to keep in mind, as you start building a life coaching business from scratch is something I call “don't create the problem, wait for it to be a problem”. Now, let me just tell you, I am a crazy organized person. I'm a planner.
I love to plan everything out. And sometimes those things can actually pop up in perfectionist ways that can slow me and maybe you too down from really doing the things that we need to do to move forward in your business. So here's an example. You might be thinking, oh, I need a website right away to start my coaching business. Well, let's figure out if this really is a problem?
Are there people right now that are waiting to go to your website or being directed to your website so that they can learn more about your coaching? Well if you're in the beginning phases, I'm going to guess, no. So unless you're sending traffic or people to a website, then that's not actually a problem yet. So if you wait for it to be a problem, and I don't mean problem, like in a negative way, but rather problem as a hint that something needs to happen next would be when someone asks, do you have a website?
When that happens, you can say, oh, I'm having it built soon. And then that is your aha that it's time build website. Also, I'm going to link to When To Create Your Website, which has four questions to answer that will help you know if you're ready to build your website.
Don’t Get Caught Up In These 5 Things In the Beginning
The next thing to keep in mind when you start your life coaching business from scratch is to not get hung up on these 5 things. Now don't get me wrong. These things are important at a specific point in business. But if you are in the beginning phases, they are not important yet. I'm talking about :
your website
a logo
business cards
your business name
content creation
If you are the kind of person who gets really jazzed up or excited by doing one of these things or creating some of these pieces, go for it. I mean, who am I to stop you? But seriously, do not let yourself get hung up on them, spending a ton of time and money quite yet. And definitely do not let them get in the way of the things that are really going to determine the success of your business, like making offers and finding a coaching solution to sell people.
Use This Mindset Tool When Starting Your Coaching Business Gets Hard
Okay, so here's the mindset tool that I mentioned earlier. Now, if you happen to be a Martha Beck coach who’s watching this, then you have probably already learned this, but if you're not, or you're not familiar with this tool, you are going to love it.
You can use it in way more areas of life than just what I'm suggesting right now. I would really love to sit here and tell you that starting a life coaching business from scratch is easy, but I can't. There are definitely challenges and there's a lot to learn. But this framework for coaching tool by Martha Beck will really help you. Here's the general process. I'm going to break this example into these four sections.
We'll start with identifying a circumstance, then figure out what thought you might have about the circumstance. Then take a look at what feeling is being caused by that thought. And finally, see what actions you're taking because you're feeling that way. So here's the example we're using.
If things start to get hard while you build your life coaching business from scratch, let's say you are feeling super frustrated because you have just emailed a whole bunch of people with your coaching offer and nobody said yes. It really seems like nobody wants to buy your coaching services.
Then this leads to you binging a pint of ice cream and believing that you'll never make it as a successful life coach. Using the framework, let's break it down. The circumstance is you've really emailed 50 people and none of them said yes.
The thought that you're having because of that circumstance is nobody wants to buy your coaching.
The feeling that's caused by a result of that thought is you are frustrated. And the action caused by feeling that frustration as a result of that thought is over-eating ice cream and believing that you won't become a successful life coach.
So now we've identified the single thought “nobody wants to buy my coaching”. And at first it might seem like the act of emailing 50 people and having none of them respond as a yes would be the thing that's causing frustration.
But it's really the thought about the circumstance. So it's the thought that nobody wants to buy your coaching as a result of you emailing those people and nobody's saying yes. So now that you've pinpointed the thought to work on, that's where you really get self coaching involved, or you can contact another coach, maybe me and get coached around that thought because those thoughts are going to impact your results.
If you believe, if you are really convinced that nobody wants to buy your coaching, what kind of actions do you think you're going to take as a result of that? Yeah, eating the pint of ice cream and believing that you're going to fail.
So when you can work on dissolving or changing that thought for yourself, that will help you move forward much, much faster, and with a lot less suffering. So be sure to remember this, you are going to face challenges.
As you start to build your life coaching business, you can handle them. These challenges will help you grow, and they're preparing you for the next step of whatever is coming next.
Do you need more guidance on gaining clarity about who to coach or what market to choose? Click below to download my free guide 7 STEPS TO GUARANTEE A PROFITABLE MESSAGE & MARKET. It’s the same steps I take my clients through to help them make sure they have a coaching offer that sells.
FREE GUIDE!
Feel confident when you introduce yourself to people as a coach.
Know exactly what to put on your website so clients want to work with you.
Uncover a profitable target market you love to work with.
Figure out what to charge your first or next client.
Learn how to work through the fear of putting yourself out there and marketing.