One of the most common challenges most new life coaches face is not knowing where or what to spend their time and energy as they start their coaching business.
This was the case for me and for the first six months of being a life coach, I wasted a lot of my time, energy, and money doing things that didn’t make a difference in my business and left me high and dry when it came to money and paying clients.
In my first 6 months as a life coach I made a whopping $125.
I’m not sharing this to discourage you, but if you can relate and you’re not making money in your business yet, chances are that you’re doing the same thing, focusing on all the wrong things.
But, we’re gonna change that today.
After coaching a lot of new coaches and helping various types of entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, I’ve noticed that those that are successful in their businesses focus on the actions and behaviors that directly impact their bottom line.
Which is what we’ll be discussing in today’s article.
When it comes to starting and growing a profitable coaching business, your success comes down to three important things.
Drum roll please….
1. Your Offer
You’ll soon find out, if you haven’t already, that everyone has an opinion about coaching offers. Some people will argue that you’ll never succeed as a coach if you don’t have a specific niche and design every single detail for your target audience, while others will tell you that it doesn’t matter.
I’ve tried both approaches and my business took off when I stopped listening to all the “experts” online and started listening to my gut, my intuition, whatever you want to call it.
Do you want to be a general life coach or are you passionate about a specific challenge people are facing?
As fluffy as this sounds, this was a game changer for me. I went from $125 to several thousand dollars in a matter of a few months.
If you’re just starting out and you’re feeling overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, here’s what I did.
I started thinking about how I could help people. What’s something I could relate to, felt strongly about, and could potentially help others get results in.
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What problem can you solve?
My first offer was helping young professionals stuck in soul-sucking jobs find more meaningful careers.
This is the offer that took me from $125 to 5k in my business.
It was something I could relate to (we’ve all had jobs we hate, I was familiar with a lot of different industries, and I knew I could help other people find more meaningful jobs (I’d had over 25 in my short career).
Your offer might be something totally different.
The key takeaway here is that your offer should solve a problem or pain point in your clients life.
I helped people get out of jobs they hated.
After working with me, my clients were in jobs they enjoyed. They didn’t dread every morning and felt like they were making a difference and doing something that mattered.
Is Your Offer Easy to Understand
Having an offer that’s easy to understand is a gamechanger.
The simpler you can keep it, the easier your life will be.
And, the easier it will be to start signing paying clients.
Let’s stick with my first offer as a coach: I’ll help you figure out what makes you happy and then we’ll find a job that aligns with your interests.
Simple, straight to the point, no fluff.
This made it easier on me when it came to telling people about what I did as a coach and how I could potentially help them.
It wasn’t filled with superfluous words and information. And, as a result, it sold.
As a new coach, you’ll likely be tempted to over-complicate your offer, but trust me when I say that simplicity is your friend here.
The easier your offer is to understand, the more likely you are to share it with the world, and potentially sign a new client.
When you’re starting out, simple makes you money. Complicated doesn’t.
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Do You Understand Your Offer?
One thing I learned selling six-figure technology deals is the importance of knowing what you’re selling.
Whether you have something specific in mind or you’re gonna start your coaching business as a general coach, know your offer well.
What a lot of newer coaches run into when they start are very complex offers that they have trouble explaining and don’t know what problem they’re actually solving.
And, trust you me, if you don’t know wtf your offer is, your potential clients won’t either.
This as you might’ve guessed will leave you with nary a dollar to show for your efforts.
When you’re thinking about your offer keep the following in mind.
- Your offer should solve a problem
- Your offer should be simple, so much so that someone who’s never heard of life coach would understand it
- Your offer should be something you care about and/or are excited to talk about
Once you have an offer that you feel good about, continue to refine it so that it makes it simple to understand.
A few questions to consider:
What problem does my offer solve?
Who would benefit most from hearing about my offer?
How does my offer help my potential clients?
How excited am I about sharing my offer with the world?
How can I make my offer even easier to understand?
These are a few questions that will help you determine where you stand with your offer and how you can potentially improve it so that more people understand how you can help them and why they should work with you.
Get in the habit of evaluating your offer regularly and I promise you that you will start seeing a stronger response to your offers to help.
2. Telling People You’re a Coach
Okay, so we’ve talked about your super simple offer, what’s next?
Now that you have an offer you feel good about, it’s time to share that you’re a life coach. Because if people don’t know about you, how in the world are they gonna work with you?
This sounds super simple.
Go out into the world and tell everyone about your coaching offer, right?
But it’s actually one of the hardest things for many new coaches.
This was what I put off the longest. I’d work hours on my website and all the other things that didn’t directly impact the amount of money I made as a coach.
But, actually telling people and then offering to help them, nerp! Hard pass.
As I mentioned earlier, this cost me a lot of time and money in my business.
The best approach here is to rip the bandaid off.
As a new coach, it’s very likely that you feel like a fraud. You might believe you can’t get your clients results, and that if you tell people that you’re a coach, you’ll get laughed out of the room.
And, this prevents most of us from ever sharing that we’re open for business when we’re new.
Which only prolongs the amount of time it takes to find your people and start getting paid as a coach.
And, the only way to get over this fear is to grab the bull by the horns and start doing it.
Start telling people you’re open for business and sharing how you can help them.
You’ll probably be nervous, mess up, and fumble your way through the first few times.
But the only person who’ll notice that is you, because most people have never talked to a life coach before.
And, as you tell more people about what you do, you’ll become more and more comfortable with yourself as a life coach and your offer. And, eventually you’ll be able to talk to anyone about what you do without giving it a second thought.
But to get to that point, you have to start. Like right now.
It doesn’t matter if you make offers to help people online or in person, the most important thing is that you start sharing that you’re a life coach.
Not only is this crucial for building your confidence, it is the single most important thing you can do when you’re starting out because the more people you talk to, the greater your chances of making money in your business.
And, the sooner you make money as a coach, the less likely you’ll be to give up on yourself and your dreams.
The takeaway here: Start telling as many people as you can that you’re a life coach. Go to networking events, join coaching groups online, post on TikTok, start a blog, podcast, or YouTube.Get the news out there, I’m a life coach and I can help you!
3. Being Intentional About Success
The last thing that I’ve noticed over the last two years of working with other coaches and entrepreneurs, is that those that are most successful don’t leave success to chance.
They are intentional about everything they do, including their thoughts and beliefs.
So, what does this mean?
When you’re starting out, you’ll brain is going to freak the fuck out. It’s gonna tell you all kinds of shit to get you to stop what you’re doing and turn back to what’s most familiar, even if it makes you miserable.
Here’s why: Your brain views this new adventure of being a life coach and growing your own business as very, very risky.
And, since it can’t predict the outcome (because this is new), it’s going to try and stop you no matter what it takes.
Here’s why.
Our brains have evolved to keep us safe from danger. They see anything that’s unpredictable as dangerous and try to stop us from doing it.
This is good in some cases like picking up a venomous snake or jogging on a major highway in the middle of the night, but not so good in other cases, like following your heart and starting your dream business that could potentially change the world and everyone you encounter in wildly positive ways. .
Which means that when it comes to following our heart and doing something risky, we have to override the warnings and do it anyway.
I’ll spare you all the research on how our brains work, suffice to say that from here on out your job is to start being aware of your thoughts and beliefs when it comes to you succeeding as a life coach.
Because it’s your thoughts and beliefs that will either move you closer to making money as a new coach, or keep you from it.
So how does this work? And, how do you do it?
As an entrepreneur and coach whenever I become aware of a thought or belief, I ask myself the following?
Would Justin that making 5 million dollars a year as a life coach be thinking or believing this right now?
If yes, I’m gonna keep believing and thinking about that as hard and often as I can so that I can reinforce it and get to 5 million dollars in my coaching business.
If it’s not something that Justin at 5 million dollars would believe, then I start getting curious about the thought.
For example, when I was a new coach one of the most common thoughts I had was “I’m never gonna make money as a life coach.”
And, this belief kept me from making money for a few months.
It’s when I brought awareness to this belief and then asked myself whether or not this was moving me toward 5 million dollars in my business or keeping me from it and that’s when I realized it was keeping me from it and knew that I needed to kick the idea that I couldn’t make money.
To change this belief, I got curious about it.
Why couldn’t I make money as a life coach?
Why couldn’t I succeed?
And, then I started playing around with the possibility that I could make money. Other people have done exactly what I wanted and started in the same exact spot.
Why couldn’t I?
And, then slowly, I started believing that I could make money as a coach. I started taking more action, I learned as much as I could about starting a coaching practice, and hired my own life coach.
And, guess what?
Things started a changin’ around here.
I started seeing results and eventually I started making money in my business.
All because of a single thought.
Your thoughts and beliefs will determine the amount of money you make as a coach, so watch them like a hawk.
Get in the habit of monitoring your beliefs about your business and your ability to succeed because your success as a coach depends on it.
Do these three things consistently and I promise you, you will make money as a life coach.
