Chances are you decided to became a coach for noble reasons; to help others, to share your expertise, or because you’ve had some business success that you’d like to impart.
But if you walked into your coaching business with your mentoring hat firmly affixed what would you advise yourself to do to guarantee success?
Here are the top three coach’s tips for a coaching.
Think like a business
Yes coaching is about listening, mentoring, strategy and guidance, but above all, it’s a business. And as a business coach you should employ similar strategies in your business that you would advise others to use.
That means setting goals and having a plan, knowing your strengths and marketing them, streamlining your processes and procedures, and charging what you are worth.
It also involves knowing your competition, staying ahead of innovation and industry trends, training where necessary, and outsourcing when required, whether that’s bookkeeping, blog writing or website design.
Time management
It would be a fairly safe bet that when you’re coaching, you advise business owners to look at how they spend their time and account for it. You probably also suggest they work on their business not in it. And the same strategies should be applied to your coaching business.
Remember that good old saying about the builder’s house that never gets finished, well your coaching business should not suffer a similar fate.
Much of coaching is about time management, involving making calls, following up, reading business plans and honing them, and marketing your services. Often these are tasks without billable results, but they’re essential to your business development and your time should be accounted for accordingly, with set periods allocated to paperwork, marketing and follow ups.
Sell yourself
At its core business is all about sales; selling a product, selling a service and in a coach’s case it’s about selling a solution. If you’re spending your time explaining what a coach does, you’re wasting it, and should instead be talking about the solutions that coaching and mentoring can offer a business.
You should also be utilising those sales techniques that you would be so willing to share with your clients – like networking, putting in hard yards on the phone and identifying your demographic then marketing effectively to them.
The final word
Business coaching provides a wonderful opportunity to share your expertise, unique skills and assist in the success of others, but the key to ensuring it’s a viable business for you is to practise what you preach.
