How To Grow Your Coaching Business

Whether you are a business coach, a health coach, or a life coach, there’s a good chance you’re working with a small number of clients one-on-one. And while working with individual clients is rewarding, it limits how much you can earn and how much impact you can make. It also limits your freedom.

If you are interested in taking your coaching business to the next level, know that a small one-person company isn’t the only model available to you, even if your business is centered around your personal brand. You can take steps to grow your coaching business and enjoy the rewards of increased influence, income, and free time.

In this article, we’ll list the main strategies you can use to scale your coaching business while still keeping clients happy.

What does scaling your business mean, and why does it matter?

Say your business is going well. Then, overnight, it starts doing too well. You have double or triple the clients coming your way. Would you be prepared to handle the sudden high influx of demand for your services?

If you’ve only ever worked one-on-one, then you probably would not have the capacity or capability to take on all the extra work. As CEO and business news publisher Anita Campbell notes here, scaling has everything to do with capacity—the amount of work you can take on—and capability—your ability to do the work. For your business to scale, you need to have the bandwidth and the systems, infrastructure, and staff to accommodate your growth.

Attempting to scale your business without adequate planning and preparation can have disastrous consequences. You might get confused, lose track of clients and orders, struggle to deliver on your promises, and leave customers feeling upset and frustrated.

How do you know it’s time to scale? “The manual processes that were fine when you were small now won’t let you move fast enough. You’ll be either putting out fires or desperately trying to keep your head above water,” says Campbell. 

How to grow your coaching business

Ready to grow coaching business? Here’s how you set the stage for growth.

Assess and plan

The first step to making changes is assessing where you are now. Anita Campbell recommends creating a detailed sales growth forecast with a breakdown of how many clients you want to impact, as well as how much revenue you want to generate. In parallel, she suggests creating an expense forecast, because scaling your coaching business will likely make expenses to go up. 

Break down your process

Next comes breaking down the process you use with clients.

In a blog post titled The Secret to Scaling Your Coaching Business, branding expert Ryan R. Hoten explains how recruiters and coaches can unpack their processes using a formula known as D.I.C.E., where D stands for Define, I stands for Integrate, C stands for Create, and E stands for Engage. Using the D.I.C.E. process, coaches can understand how to scale their business as well as how to level up their content and generate more leads.

Coach marketing expert Taki Moore, who wrote about the accelerators that help you scale your coaching business fast, calls this “unpacking your IP” (where IP stands for intellectual property). “Unpack the content out of your head and stop reacting to a client. You can start leading them instead,” he said.

Package your “IP” as a book, mastermind, webinar

The easiest way to impact more people without putting in more hours is to turn your intellectual property into a product that clients can consume in their own time. A seminar, lecture, workshop, or book only needs to be created once but can be viewed a million times.

Alternatively, you can scale from one-on-one mentoring to group coaching. “Creating a group program allows you to be able to enroll multiple clients every month and deliver structured group coaching sessions with multiple clients on each call,” says business coach Robin Waite.

Secure cash to fund your growth

Scaling your coaching business will likely require a money investment. To be able to grow, you may need to hire additional staff, incorporate new software, or purchase new equipment.

If you don’t have money saved for this purpose, you might be able to get a bank loan or a grant from an institution that helps small businesses accelerate their growth. In addition to researching opportunities for getting a loan or a line of credit, you may want to explore creative ways to overcome cash constraints. 

Secure new sales

Scaling your coaching business only makes sense if you can get more clients, so it’s crucial that you think about how you will generate more sales.

Do you have a process for lead generation? Do you have a system for tracking and managing your leads? Do you have staff to follow up with and close leads? Do you have a system for processing orders? What about a billing system to ensure invoices are sent and paid for in a timely manner? Closing more deals will require having all of these things.

Hire staff or outsource

Another crucial element of scaling your coaching business is ensuring you have the human resources to grow. To grow your team, you can either hire employees or outsource certain tasks or processes. Both will require that you decide which aspects of your business you want to keep under your responsibility and which ones you want to delegate.

Campbell notes that third parties often have “the staff and the investment in systems that enable them to be much more efficient in handling a function than your company.” Rather than try to do your bookkeeping internally, you might be better off leaving it to the pros and focusing on what you do best.

Taki Moore seconds this. He thinks one of the biggest impediments to scaling your coaching business is thinking you have to do everything yourself. “We don’t have to do all of the heavy lifting. We want to get it [your business to a place] so that you just do the bits that you’re great at, and have other people help you with the rest.”

Invest in technology

Technology is essential to scaling your coaching business and automation in particular is a key area to focus on. “Automation can help you run your business at lower cost and more efficiently by minimizing manual work,” says Campbell. 

TextExpander, for instance, is an application that companies frequently incorporate when preparing to scale. Fast-growing businesses use TextExpander to give team members easy access to accurate, up-to-date information and to speed up communication for the purposes of lead generation and nurturing as well as customer support.

Figuring out how to grow your coaching business is worth it

If your coaching business is doing well, consider exploring the ideas listed in this article to set the stage for sustainable growth. You may want to start by incorporating TextExpander into your workflows.

TextExpander helps people in fast-growing companies communicate faster. To explore how TextExpander might help your coaching business, click the button below to sign up for a 30-day FREE trial.