Grow Your Coaching Business Thanks to This New Guide

Having trouble scaling your coaching business? Many other owners do too, but we’ll save the day. Read on for our guide on how to scale a coaching business.

The impact of the coaching industry is at an all-time high, with some companies from this sector valued at more than $11 billion. One of the reasons that the industry has soared is that the enterprises have scaled their operations.

This brings us to your pain point – you’re having trouble trying to grow coaching business. You had some success initially, but you’ve hit a brick wall. Your profit is stagnant, and you can’t seem to respond to growing customer concerns.

Don’t throw in the towel just yet. We’ll give you an in-depth tutorial on how to scale a coaching business that will help you elevate your organization.

What Is a Coaching Business?

The idea behind the coaching business setup is pretty simple – an expert in a topic offers advice and courses to people who want to learn about that topic.

This broad-stroke definition clears the way for the creation of all sorts of businesses within the coaching niche. Leadership coaching. Fitness coaching. Heck, even coaching people on pet care or finding the perfect tenants for rental properties. The possibilities are only limited by two things:

• What you know
• The size of your potential audience

The challenge most run into when they try to grow business coaching comes from the traditional model. You charge clients for one-on-one time with you, meaning you’re limited by the time you have in terms of how you scale the business. We’ll cover this in more detail below, but let’s just assume you hold eight one-hour sessions per day, charging $100 for each and working five days per week.

There’s your hard limit – $4,000 per week.

While that sounds like a solid income – and it can even get you to six figures over a year – you can’t scale this traditional coaching model beyond increasing your rates. You just don’t have the time, meaning you’ll always hit a ceiling in terms of the number of clients you can take on.

All of this leads us to a big question…

Can You Even Scale Coaching?

In a word – yes.

However, it’s in scaling that most coaches find their biggest challenge. That’s because most start with the one-on-one coaching model we just described. Effective and simple, this model is fairly easy to manage. You schedule appointments with clients and block out time for sessions.

The problem lies in the fact that your time is limited. If you work an eight-hour day as a coach, with each session lasting for 45 minutes, plus an additional 15 minutes for preparation, you’re limited to just eight sessions per day. Therein lies the enemy of scaling – you can only do so much with your time in the one-on-one setup.

Your goal is to move away from a model that is entirely based on your time. That doesn’t mean you should abandon one-on-one coaching. In fact, it can become a valuable part of your new model that’s available to clients who are willing to pay a little more. Rather, you must integrate that starting model with a process that’s repeatable and evergreen, providing you with a passive income source through videos and course content on top of the one-on-one coaching.

So, to repeat what we said earlier, it is possible to scale a coaching business.

But to do so, you have to recognize that the traditional coaching model has limitations. The steps we’re about to share are designed to overcome those limitations to give your model unlimited growth potential.

How Do You Scale a Coaching Business?

You might think you’re the only coach having trouble scaling their company, but the reality is entirely the opposite. As this report by McKinsey Digital claims, 78% of the organizations founded in the last decade or so failed to scale their operations.

Many factors can explain their struggles, such as the inability to adjust to evolving customer needs and larger expenses.

The following tips will help you address all those problems so you can grow your coaching business:

Tip No. 1 – Give BlurBay a Try

A large part of scaling is about increasing profits and lowering expenses. You want something that helps you kill two birds with one stone, and it’s hard to do this with a website.

Building and polishing your website is expensive. The more features you have, the more you’ll have to pay professional developers. In some cases, you may need to fork out upwards of $50K per year to keep your platform going.

And if you use a generic website builder, you’ll hardly have enough bells and whistles for all your clients.

Since having a website isn’t sustainable enough, you should look for an alternative. Look no further than BlurBay. By creating a BlurBay account, you can upload your content without building a fully-fledged website. The platform stores all your posts, where audiences can access them for a price you set. The commission is just 5%, allowing you to maximize your income and minimize outlays.

BlurBay is perfect for all types of companies, but it’s geared toward coaching businesses. From life coaches to fitness instructors, different kinds of coaches converge here and utilize the pay-per-view format to scale their enterprise.

If you join the lineup, you’ll increase your brand awareness and customer engagement for a fraction of the price of running a website.

Tip No. 2 – Change Your Mindset

Mindset shifts are essential to grow your coaching business. This one is especially tricky for coaches since many of them fall into the trap of centering their services around them.

In other words, you shouldn’t talk to your clients and prospects about how great a coach you are. You should make it about them and discuss how you can help them solve their problems.

At the same time, you don’t want to lose sight of your goal, which is scaling your enterprise. Scaling your organization means making your money. And the only way to make money is to start thinking like an entrepreneur.

Yes, you are a coach who helps people overcome different problems. However, you’re not a charity organization that does this for free. You need to understand that you sell services and that you need to polish your offerings consistently to grow.

Tip No. 3 – Start Small With Your Courses

Your own expertise can be one of the most significant dangers you face when trying to grow business coaching.

Why?

You know so much – and you want to get your knowledge out there – that you start by creating a mega-course. It covers everything. It’s your magnum opus. And it leaves you with nowhere to go once that course is out in the wild. What you’ve delivered provides everything you could possibly teach to a client.

Now, you may charge a ton of money for that mega-course, but the reality is that you’re still going to hit a ceiling because only so many people will be able to afford it. Worse yet, those who can afford the course will consume its content and disappear off your radar as you have nothing else to show them.

The point is simple – don’t show clients everything from the off.

Starting small and building up to more advanced courses is a better route for scaling. For instance, create a “First Steps” course for your niche that covers your expertise in broad strokes. Every topic you cover in that “First Steps” video is the inspiration for a course – or even a collection of courses – for which you can charge money. So, instead of having on big course, you build a network of courses, each more affordable than a mega-course, and each feeding into, or following on from, a different course.

You keep your existing clients in the fold with this model.

And when it comes to new clients, you give people options in terms of where they jump into your content. If somebody only wants to learn a specific thing, they don’t have to pay for a huge course to get it. They spend less on a specific course rather than walking away entirely.

Tip No. 4 – Prepare Yourself for the Unexpected Pitfall of Scaling

The idea of scaling your coaching business is exciting. Growth is on the horizon. You’ll be making more money – and helping more people – than ever before.

But let’s take a step back for a moment.

You’re helping more people. With that comes a much greater administrative burden that you need to manage. Early on in my coaching career, I ran into this problem first-hand. I started pumping out videos and offering memberships, which was great for my cash flow. What I didn’t anticipate was that with each new member came an onboarding process. Forms had to be filled and filed. They needed registering in my systems, along with ongoing admin work to check in with progress and keep the client onboard. Each new client created about an hour of admin work when they signed up, along with about 30 minutes each per week.

That soon built up.

It’s all of that admin work that can be the death of an otherwise successful coaching business. Getting a handle on it is all about two things – hiring the right team and getting the right technology.

We cover the team aspect – specifically, hiring staff to handle admin – later. As for tech, the first step is simple: start using it. According to HR Magazine, just 45% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use some sort of tech to help with admin, with about a third saying they use no technology at all. You need to be different if you’re going to handle your admin burden effectively. Start simple with calendar apps for appointment scheduling. From there, build automation processes into your administrative work. For instance, creating standard emails that are sent out automatically whenever a client signs up, makes a purchase, or reaches a milestone saves you a lot of time in sending those emails yourself.

The point is simple – admin will build up as you scale, and you need to find a way to overcome it so you can focus on your money-making coaching activities.

Tip No. 5 – Set Boundaries With Your One-on-One Clients

Let’s touch on something we mentioned earlier – keeping your one-on-one clients.

While making evergreen offerings that all clients can use (more on that later) is essential, you’ll have clients who value a more personalized experience ahead of course content. They want to jump on calls. They want to hold sessions. And in some cases, they’ll want to be able to email you with questions whenever they have them.

All of that is fine as long as you establish one thing – boundaries.

A lack of boundaries in your one-on-one coaching is a time sink from which you may never escape. We’ve seen this ourselves in our own coaching offerings. A client starts off sticking to their scheduled sessions, with the occasional emailed question. But slowly, scope creep starts happening. The client’s sessions start running over and they start sending more and more emails. You get bogged down in their work – often sacrificing work with other clients in the process – and, often, you’re not charging for the little bit extra here and that additional question there.

Eventually, you start burning out and your other clients grow unhappy.

By setting boundaries at the beginning of any client relationship, you tell the client exactly how much of your time and effort their money buys. That sets the stage for scaling simply because it gives you more control over your time. You’re able to focus on other clients – and formulate additional materials – while your existing clients are satisfied working within the boundaries you create. 

Tip No. 6 – Make Evergreen Offerings

One of the most important requirements of scaling is making sure your coaching business can accept more clients. You can take multiple alleys here, such as releasing new products or services now and then. While this can help, it’s also time-consuming.

A better way to address your scaling concerns might be to release evergreen offerings. These are less dependent on time than standard products or services because they apply to pretty much any period. As a result, you don’t need to modify them to accommodate your target audience.

The most common form of evergreen coaching products might be books. It takes a bit of time, but the result pays off. A good book can be marketed to your existing customers and attract new ones with minimal input on your part. Plus, books allow you to set up speaking gigs, conferences, seminars, webinars, podcasts, and other events where you can further promote your services.

Tip No. 7 – Hire a Virtual Assistant

The larger your enterprise, the greater the burden on your shoulders. If you have a small team, you may need to carry out administrative duties yourself, distracting you from your money-making activities.

The solution is to hire a virtual assistant. You can outsource a variety of tasks to this person, including calendar management, answering your phone, social media management, and travel planning.

Additionally, a virtual assistant can help your coaching business operate, even when you’re not very productive. The key to making the most of their services is to find a qualified person with the following traits:

• Next-level communication skills – Many times, your virtual assistant may need to step in and talk to your clients on your behalf if you’re sick or on a family holiday. They should communicate with your customers professionally and understand where your clients are coming from.
• Admirable project management – Whether you’re a life or fitness coach, you probably work with lots of clients. As you scale your company, it can be hard to monitor their progress and enter their information in spreadsheets. A virtual assistant who can handle multiple projects simultaneously can save the day.
• Technology know-how – Suppose you’re an online coach. You may use several social media and apps in your day-to-day routine, which is why your virtual assistant should be tech-savvy. They should be well-versed in all your platforms, allowing them to schedule podcasts, webinars, Q&A sessions, and other events.

Tip No. 8 – Enhance Your Skills

You’ve attracted a lot of clients because they like your services. You’ve made a difference in their lives, but just like they’ve made progress, you should too. The key is to invest in high-quality education.

Lots of courses can help you hone your skills and provide your clients with greater value. For example, if you’re a cooking coach, consider taking a masterclass in alternative cooking methods. Different cuisines can also be a great pick. If you specialize in Italian food only, try to expand your portfolio by learning more about Greek or Turkish cuisine. You’ll be able to target more people with your coaching business.

This is a specific example of how you can elevate your skill set. There are other, more general courses you can attend to scale your business more easily:

• Project management (unless you hire a virtual assistant)
• Leadership
• Problem-solving
• Communication and active listening
• Creativity
• Digital marketing (e.g., search engine optimization and logo design)

The better you are at your job, the more easily you’ll tackle growing business challenges and adapt your coaching business to the evolving landscape.

Tip No. 9 – Use Lead Magnets

Wait, so what’s a lead magnet?

The idea is simple – you build a landing page to which you send people via online ads. On that landing page, you host a piece of content, such as an eBook, that you offer free of charge. Key here is that the book has to provide something of value to your audience. If it doesn’t, nobody will want to download it.

So, you make the book available for free download with one condition:

The downloader has to provide you with their name and email address to grab the content.

Now, you have an in with that downloader. They’ve established an interest in what you do by virtue of them downloading the content you offer. From there, you can plug them into an email marketing campaign – starting with a welcome email before moving into more sales-related emails – to gently push them toward buying your coaching courses.

Rinse and repeat for different courses, each with its own lead magnet, and you have a powerful marketing strategy. Most importantly, you also have a scalable marketing strategy. If you’re not getting the number of prospects you need to fuel your growth, you can pump more marketing money into your ads. They’ll reach more people, your landing page will get more traffic, and, ultimately, you grow your coaching business using the increased number of leads.

Tip No. 10 – Get on Top of Your Numbers

Upskilling in leadership and creativity is great.

It means your content is going to be more valuable to your clients, which ultimately leads to more money in your bank account. But it’s in money management – specifically the costs involved in acquiring clients – that many prospective coaches fall down.

You have to master your numbers if you’re going to succeed as an online coach. There are two that are especially important:

• Conversion Rate
• Cost Per Client

Your conversion rate is simply the percentage of people who purchase a coaching product from you based on the traffic that you attract. For instance, if you have a video uploaded on BlurBay that attracts 200 visitors per month, with 10 of those visitors buying the video, your conversion rate is 5%. Understanding this rate allows you to tweak your marketing strategy. You’ll know how many people need to buy your video for it to become profitable. With your 5% conversion rate to hand, you also know how much traffic you need to attract.

As a loose example, if the video needs at least 50 buys to make a profit, your conversion rate numbers tell you that means you have to attract at least 1,000 people to the page. Thus, you understand if you need to scale up your marketing or whether the techniques you’re already using will suffice to generate that traffic.

Speaking of marketing, that’s where cost per client (CPC) comes in.

This is another simple number – it’s how much you spend to get one client. Returning to our video example, let’s say that your marketing campaign that attracts 1,000 visitors, and thus nets you 50 sales, costs $500 to run. Dividing that number by 50 gives you a $10 CPC, which is pretty low. Still, what you need to do then is build that CPC into your expenses – which include making the video and any equipment you purchased for it – to see if it’s truly profitable. Put those numbers against the money generated by the video, and you get a better picture of your profit.

Let’s say you charge $20 for the video. That means 50 buys lead to $1,000 in revenue. Your CPC tells you how much of that is eaten away by marketing, with the rest of your costs being built in to ultimately tell you whether the $1,000 you generated is enough to cover the investment made in the video.

It can all start to feel fairly complex. Still, staying on top of these numbers helps you to consistently tweak everything from your marketing spend to the cost of your videos and programs until you hit a sweet spot of profitability.

Tip No. 11 – Automate Whatever You Can

The more time you can steal back from tedious manual processes, the better able you are to grow coaching business so your processes keep pace with your desire to scale.

But what does that mean?

Introducing automation – at strategic points in your processes – can free up your time so you can focus on the important business of drawing more people to your courses. So, where can automation apply in a coaching business?

• Appointment Scheduling – Rather than booking appointments by hand – or email – use a scheduling app to handle it for you. These apps can show your availability to clients, allowing them to book a slot, after which the app gives you a notification and reminders. Your only job is to show up for the appointment.
• Email Marketing – You could start fresh with every email you send, writing it from start to finish and spending a good amount of time doing it. Alternatively, you could use an email marketing app to send out emails you’ve pre-written – with personalized details plugged in – to prospects and clients based on the actions they’ve taken. For instance, the lead magnet above is a prime candidate for an automated email sequence that welcomes a downloader and then moves into providing more value while pushing them toward your course offerings.

There are plenty more candidates for automation within your coaching business. Our tip is to take a look at your existing processes. If there’s something that takes a ton of time to do and isn’t directly related to selling or providing your courses, it’s probably a good candidate for automation.

Tip No. 12 – Upgrade Your Client Onboarding System

One of the reasons your business might be at a standstill is that you’re having a hard time signing up clients. There could be several culprits, but the first thing you should look at is your onboarding system.

The key to scaling your coaching company is to have a fully functional, smooth platform that allows prospects to join your service within minutes. It should simplify all onboarding aspects, all the way from setting up the initial meeting to letting your clients choose their plans.

To take your onboarding solution to the next level, be sure it has the following elements:

• The name of your coaching service and a quick explanation of how it helps people
• Why you started the enterprise and how you approach your clients
• Services provided by your business and their price (be transparent; no hidden fees)
• Terms and conditions of working with you (a copy your customers can download)

A robust onboarding system can optimize your business and help it scale in many ways. For starters, it eliminates the hassle of prolonged onboarding processes, allowing prospects to purchase your plan effortlessly. Additionally, by functioning like a well-oiled machine, the solution doesn’t require your input. It does this administrative duty for you, so you can turn your attention to other business aspects.

Finally, a transparent recruitment platform reduces the uncertainty of signing up for a new service. If prospects have only recently heard about you, knowing what to expect from you makes them more comfortable. That’s exactly what a well-thought-out system accomplishes.

Tip No. 13 – Don’t Rely on “The One”

We’ve all been there as coaches, especially in the early days.

You’re scraping and clawing for every client that you get. But you’re still finding your feet, meaning your retention rate is low and clients are sometimes quicker to leave than they are to join.

But there’s that one client. The one who seems to value your advice so much that they stick with you through thick and thin. You come to rely on that client as your main source of income and they become the foundation of your scaling efforts – no matter what you try, they’ll still be around.

Until they’re not.

Relying on “the one” in any capacity could damage your attempts to scale. And that goes for every aspect of your business, not just a single client. Relying on one revenue stream, such as one-on-one coaching, for instance, means that you’re in the doldrums if a handful of your clients leave. The same goes for relying on one super popular video.

To scale, you need multiples.

Multiple great clients, multiple revenue streams – videos, courses, memberships, and more – and multiple videos. It even pays to have multiple VAs and other options within your tech stack because you never know when one of them might fail. Reliance on “the one,” whatever that “one” may be, means you’re always in a vulnerable position.

Tip No. 14 – Balance Higher Prices and Special Offers

We’ve mentioned that having an entrepreneurial mindset is essential to scaling your coaching business. You need to realize you’re a type of salesperson, so low-balling your services might not be the best long-term strategy.

This can hinder your growth on many levels. Think about it – you do all the work to attract and get your clients to subscribe to you. Once they’re finally onboard, you find out that all your efforts generate minimal profit. Over time, you become less and less motivated to carry on, which is a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, a recipe for scaling is to increase your rates. If you’re an educated and experienced coach with a steady customer base, you have every right to bump up the price. Your customers already recognize the value of your services, so they won’t mind staying on board for an extra dollar or two.

Just don’t go overboard and raise the cost by, say, 50% because it may make you look like you only care about making money.

On the same note, discounts are also a viable scaling strategy. If you offer lower rates to particular groups, they’ll be more likely to buy your services. Some of the people you can consider for a discount include:

• Senior citizens
• Students
• Military
• Firefighters
• Police officers

These are just a few general groups that receive discounts at most companies. You can add/remove categories, depending on the nature of your coaching business. For instance, if you’re a fitness instructor, you may offer special deals to people with diabetes or other conditions.

Tip No. 15 – Get Some Affiliates in Place

Affiliate marketing is a great way to grow coaching business client bases for two reasons:

1. You essentially build a network of salespeople who can advertise your courses using their own platforms.
2. You don’t have to pay those salespeople anything unless they make confirmed sales, essentially making it a commission-based model.

So, how does affiliate marketing work?

You create a product or service – such as one of your coaching courses – and build an affiliate program around it. That involves creating a special hyperlink that you distribute to your affiliates, which they can use on their blogs, socials, or whatever platforms they have to advertise you in whatever way works best for them. The link you provide delivers tracking data so you can see when somebody clicks and, crucially, when they buy. Whenever a sale is made, the affiliate gets a small percentage and you get a client you can upsell to other courses.

And best of all:

It’s a scalable marketing model.

If you need more clients, you advertise for more affiliates, with each person who joins your network only getting a set percentage based on the clients they attract. The strategy is so powerful that 31% of content publishers say it’s one of their top three revenue sources, with 9% saying it’s the top.

Grow Coaching Business Processes and You’ll Scale Successfully

There’s no need to be apprehensive about the future of your enterprise. Scaling your organization is relatively simple if you have the right mindset. Adopt money-making, and cost-cutting solutions, invest in yourself, and look for help whenever necessary. If you can do this consistently, your company will be more successful than ever, but on a larger scale.

The key lies in choosing platforms and technologies that can scale with you as you grow, meaning your focus lies on removing limitations. For instance, BlurBay’s model of pay-to-view videos and course offerings means you’re no longer limited by the one-on-one coaching model you may have used in the past. You can also grow your coaching business through automating manual tasks – saving time in the process – and making evergreen offers that you can keep selling long after their publication date.