Lisa Wight, the Founder of hubbix, shares her top tips for what to do when starting out as a business coach.
1. Do be clear about who you are
One of the first things to do is get clear on your story and your experience. Whatever you plan to do, how you share it with clients will impact your potential success. Look back over your experience and pull out the stories where you can say positive things and you can share statistics. Facts show credibility.
2. Do sort out your target audience
When you first start out, it’s vital to figure out who you can best serve. It’s usually people who have been in similar situations to you. If you’ve been in corporate your whole life then you are probably in a good place to support multi-million corporate level businesses. If you’ve been in small businesses, then look at how you can help small business owners. The two approaches are very different, and you need to understand them to offer the best support. Working out where your strengths are is a crucial first step.
When you’ve considered your strengths, now consider your desire. Just because you can serve a certain subset of people doesn’t mean you actually have to. Blending together your aspirations and your key abilities will present to you the perfect target audience.
3. Do find your niche
Having a niche and being more specific about what you do can actually help you grow. You simply can’t be everything to everyone, and if you try you’ll be nothing to everyone. So once you’ve figured out who it is that you want to serve, it’s important to then find your niche and decide how you can best serve them. For more information on finding your niche, read our Guide to Building Your USPs blog.
4. Do set your pricing
You can’t start working with people without knowing what you’re going to charge them. If you’re completely new to business coaching, my advice would be to look at your target audience to help you set your pricing. Look at the hourly rate based on who you want to serve and roughly charge around that. For example, if you’re working with plumbers and you know their hourly rate is £70, I would charge £70 per hour because it’s an easy formula for your prospect to make. That’s the best place to start. Then when you build case studies and testimonials and your credibility grows, you can increase your pricing. But take it step by step.
5. Do think about lead generation
If you want to start getting leads, then the first step is to determine where your target audience hangs out. Offline or online networking is always a really good way for business coaches to get off the ground. This means you’re having lots of conversations with lots of people, and it helps to refine your sales pattern. Once you’ve refined how you speak to people you can then start taking it to online conversations and other methods of generating leads. But wherever you go and whatever you do, you need to work out where your prospects are and go to them.
6. Do get testimonials
Other people sharing how great you are is much better than you telling people how great you are, so the sooner you can get testimonials, the better. And keep asking for them regularly. Even if you’ve just had one session with a client, ask for a testimonial. What benefit did they get out of it?
As you build your testimonials, don’t forget then to share them. Whether it’s as part of your networking sales pitch or across your social media, sharing what other people have said about you builds credibility.
Whilst this is our list of what to do, we also have a blog that shares the pitfalls to avoid. Take a look at our What Not To Do blog to get the full picture.
Summary
Whatever sort of coach you want to be, you need to figure out what you’re offering, who your clients are, what your pricing is, and then you need a structure for taking them through a process during your client sessions. It just so happens that hubbix can help you with that. How structured are your meetings? Do your clients leave with action plans? Find out more about how hubbix could streamline your client sessions.