Being a business coach can be a very rewarding career. You get to work with a large range of businesses and you can actively help them to grow. If you know that you want to be a business coach, but you’re not quite sure how to get started, here is our guide that should get you on your way.
The first thing you need to decide is what sort of coach you’re going to be. As far as a business coach is concerned, there are two main options. You can decide to be industry specific or you can offer more general business guidance. We have broken down the two options to give you more detail.
Industry Specific
This is ideal for people who have spent years working in one particular industry and know it inside and out. The insight you could share with other businesses in the same industry will be invaluable. You could have spent 30 years working in manufacturing or finance, for example, and have built up a very deep knowledge of it. You could easily set yourself up as an industry expert and gain multiple clients who will benefit from that level of experience. You’ll be able to go very deep with one subject matter, making you stand apart from a lot of competitors.
To master this, you need to build a solid reputation for what you do. You need to make sure you communicate your niche well and consistently demonstrate the knowledge you have in that area. This is all about relationships.
Networking is one of the best ways to build relationships, but if you’re going to be an industry specialist, we recommend making sure you are very selective about where you go networking. For more information on how to maximise the benefits of networking, read our networking blog.
General Business Experience
Our Founder, Lisa Wight, was a small business owner herself and was successfully running several businesses. This gave her a wealth of knowledge and experience that she could share with other small businesses. Coaching people who are in a similar position to you is extremely advantageous. You understand the journey your clients are going through, and you can see the issues that they might be heading towards but are not aware of. This is more about having a holistic approach to business rather than being an absolute expert in one particular area.
One of the assets that can make you very successful here is to have good connections around you. You have the knowledge to guide your clients on the right path, and you can be their confident and sounding board. Then align yourself with experts in particular areas, such as finance, law or marketing, to ensure that if your clients need that extra level of support you have someone you trust to introduce them to. You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just need to be someone your clients can rely on to help them navigate their way through business.
When you’re starting out, it can be hard to win new clients as you won’t have any previous case studies or testimonials to share. But you have still worked in business. You still have relevant experience.
Look back at statistics and stories from your time in business up to this point. Leverage your past and don’t be afraid to share. Over the next few days, we encourage you to make a list of all the results you’ve achieved in business and then write stories around them. What did you do, why did you do it, and what was the outcome? Create a library of information and some headline stats you can reel off should someone enquire. For example, could you say you helped to grow a business by 20% in a year? Did you help to save 30% of time through streamlining processes? Also, see if you can find stories for different industries. This can really help with lead generation conversations. You need to be able to demonstrate that you have relevant experience.
To help you on your way, please do check out our other blogs. We have information on:
- Finding your niche
- Maximising your return on investment in networking
- How to generate leads
- Advice on whether franchising is a good option
We hope all this information helps.
Next Steps
If you’d like some support in building a structure for your client meetings, please do take a look at hubbix. New business coaches can get to market quicker by using hubbix to run their client sessions. Here’s how:
- It assesses your client’s business
- Provides the structure for your client sessions
- Saves you hours of preparation time
- Gets to the heart of matters quickly
- Helps to keep your clients accountable
Check out our FREE 30-day trial to see for yourself why hubbix is a great option for new business coaches.