Start Your Career Coaching Business

On Wednesday, April 3, we did a special training called "Creating a Profitable and Flexible Coaching Practice: The Top 3 Mistakes New Coaches Make and How to Avoid Them". We have share the audio of that training here! Here's just a taste of what you'll hear: One technique we use in our business to generate happy clients, 99.8% of the time! (This makes sure we help people get the results they want) How to create flexibility in an actual coaching business (it can easily turn into just a job if you don't do this!) The specific differences between coaches that make $27,000 and 100,000+ (they are not what you would think) The biggest reason why coaching practices fail and what to do about it. How to get started if you're determined to make career coaching your path

This is Become a Career Coach: An Audio Guide to Creating a full time coaching business.   Do you enjoy helping other people? Do people keep coming to you for advice? Or do you keep finding yourself in career Do you find that you just can't stop helping other people in the areas you enjoy? adding in more Freedom, Flexibility, Travel, Help others, Control of their lives, Do work they love doing. Make a big impact in someone's life. If becoming a career coach or growing a career coaching practice and experience the flexbility and exhiliration of helping people in that very direct way that a coaching practice can bring then here's what I would suggest to you.   If all of the above are true OR even just one, it's probably a safe bet that you would enjoy coaching full time tremendously. This podcast is the audio companion to the Ultimate Guide to Creating a Full Time Coaching Business that allows you Flexibility (even if you're short on time). You can get this guide by going to UltimateGuideToCareerCoaching.com to get this ridiculously helpful guide.

There's this secret to business success. Only it's not really a secret. It's actually more like great advice that nobody really actually does, because they don't see the value in it. It's like when you borrow your Dad's truck and it's slick out and he warns you that it's really slick and that you will have to go really, really slow and drive differently than you normally do and you shrug it off and say "I know, I know" but then less than five minutes later you've run the truck into a dumpster and you can't quite figure out how it happened. You know the feeling...Wait. You've never done that? Oh… me neither! Anyhow it's this thing that most people know they're supposed to do and they give it lip service but never really do it and then wonder why it's so hard to figure out what you should be doing to grow your business. What is this big "non-secret" that is the business equivalent of exercising and eating right to keep from being fat? It's called your "target market"... also called your niche, ideal audience, avatar, target customer, and your "wheezy" (ok, I made up that last one!)

If I say the word offer, there is a massive difference in what the Craft Coach thinks vs what a successful profitable coach thinks of. Here's what pops out when I ask the Broke Coach that question about "what's your offer?" "Oh… I uh… I give them 6 Skype sessions with me for $697." Then I guess I must stare at them in disbelief for a moment because it's always followed by something like "but I was thinking about doing an 8 session package for $997 and raising my prices a bit" We tend to think about an offer as the "stuff" we are giving them OR the time we are spending with them. That's one direction you could go. Which is better than going nowhere If you choose to, you can trudge down that painfully long winding road to profitless transactions that empty out your heart and cause you to question if you're really cut out for "helping others". And if you like that sort of painful despair, by all means. Keep on going down that road. Please! If you're not the sort of person that likes running headlong into a wall again and again, let me propose a different way. What if instead you sold outcomes or results? Because that's what people are really buying anyways. Or in the case of the Broke Coach; not buying!

Most coaches that want to have a "digital presence" want to jump right into this piece! I can't tell you how many coaches I've talked to that have already started creating an e-book, or video series, or even writing an actual book without understanding who it is that they're talking to OR what these people actually want and how you can help (your offer!) The rest of the coaches and consultants that haven't already started blindly creating something are instead left wondering "What should I do?"   Eventually they decide on a video series or something else without ever knowing if that's what is going to work well. So they go thru the trouble to make it and find out it was a bad idea in the first place. Now if you already know your target market, who they are and what they want and need, you already have the information to answer these questions, but with a much higher degree of accuracy than our Broke Coaches. I'll show you how this works but first let's define what a Client Attraction Magnet is and why you would want to create one.

You've now got your Client Attraction Magnet, you can describe the people in your target market better than they can and you just plunk yourself down and wait now right? Well not exactly! There's one more piece of the puzzle here: Traffic   Traffic, in this case, simply means bringing your Client Attraction Magnet to live human beings that likely need your help. Where do you get these humans from? Do I need to shop local? Can I grow my own? While I don't want to discourage you from raising mini humans for the purposes of having them download your Client Attraction Magnet later on, there is a better way! Remember everything you now know about your target market? All that work you did early on? Well part of what you did was also learn where these people hang out, who they follow what they click on. What websites and podcasts and blogs they pay attention to. Where do these people meet in real life? Now is where you get to use that info and plunk yourself down in one of those "streams" of your specific peeps!There are several different ways. The main ways I recommend are to Buy, Build, or Borrow

Systems are the best!   You don't have to think about it when you have a system. You don't have to waste precious time and energy when you have systems and best of all: When that system is automated you don't even have to lift a finger to keep benefitting from it day in and day out! We have some automated systems that we built years ago, that still, to this day, are making it easy for potential clients to get help, get to know us and be prepped to buy from us all without breaking a sweat (or even waking up for that matter!) When you take the upfront time to build a system that delivers your client magnet, follows up on your behalf AND even schedules potential clients to your calendar automatically, you have the ability to spend your time on other things! You can focus on making sure your current clients are extremely successful. Or it makes it realistic (and possible) to build a business on the side of your full time job. Or later if you run a coaching business full time it makes it feasible to travel or take vacation without wondering where the next set of clients is going to come from or if you're going to have to return their email to set up an appointment. It allows you to work on your business instead of in your business.

Everybody has somewhere to start for you. It usually begins with buying their "thing" to help you get started.   Here's what I would suggest. Start with the steps that I've outlined in this guide. What you don't have to spend time doing Who do you actually want to work with (and can help the very most) How to package an offer that gets clients (because it isn't what you think) Creating a Client Attraction Magnet (because….well isn't it obvious The not-so-magic trick of getting people to come to you! How put it on auto pilot so that you can spend your time on coaching (and traveling!) Avoid what Broke Coaches do like the plague and you will find that your coaching business rises out of the out of thedismal abyss and your fellow coaching friends you make will be coming to you asking what you're doing. Trust me, it doesn't take much. Ever since we had our first $3000 month years ago, people have beating down my door and asking to pick my brain on what we're doing. That's how low the bar is. But you don't have to stop there. Once you know how to grow a $3000 a month business, you can easily do $5000, Once you can do $5000 simply changing your prices can get you to $8000 a month.