How to become a coach
Do you want to know more about how to become a coach? What is your reason for becoming a coach?
Are somebody who has early retirement coming up and want to stay busy.
Or maybe you feel like you just want to give back to society.
It may be that you are looking for a change in career or want to start your own business.
Whatever your reason for wanting to find out more about how to become a coach, there are a number of things you need to bear in mind. Have you ever had your own business before? Many people want to start in business, but don’t know how to start or what to do. It doesn’t matter whether that is a coaching business or any high street franchise, you must have a clear idea about how you are going to make your business a success before you start.
5 Things to consider on how to become a coach.
1) Firstly, you will need to consider which training you need to do, so that you are able to be the best coach you can to serve your clients best. Luckily we have you covered for that with the NLP and coaching course we offer. There are many providers who will be all too happy to take your money and unfortunately, you won’t be any the wiser. The fact is you don’t know, what you don’t know. So be sure that you train with a reputable coach trainer, who is also active in the coaching field. Somebody who can walk their talk and assist you on your journey to creating a successful coaching business. Do your due diligence and ask your intended provider about their credentials.
2) Next you should consider where the funds are going to come from. Meaning, the money you need to train, start-up costs (like website, business cards and other marketing necessities.) You also need to think about how you are going to support yourself whilst you are building this new career. How much money do you want to make each month? How many hours do you want to work? Thus what is your hourly rate? How will you pay the bills until you are earning that? How long can you survive whilst building your business? Saying that I want to help people is a lovely sentiment, but it does not pay the bills. Unless of course you don’t need to make money, in which case, you still have other things to consider to make the business a success. So there is a lot to think about from a financial point of view, when you look into how to become a coach.
3) So you have done your top notch coach training, you have some money in the pot to support you as you start your business. What’s next? In starting any business, you need to have a clear goal of what it is that you want to achieve. What is your why? Why are you choosing to do this business and what do you want to gain from it? You need to be very clear about your purpose. You see when the going gets tough, and in business it often does, then it is your “why” that can help you through the tough times. If you went to run a race that was not really important to you and you started to get tired, then you may simply just give up. However if you have trained for the last 6 months, because it has always been one of your goals to complete the marathon, then you are much more likely to push through the tough parts of the race as you focus on reaching the finish line. When we do things that we don’t have a passion for, then we will be much more likely to give up when the going gets tough.
4) Who is your target market? How are you going to reach your potential clients? Is there a need for your service and is there a sufficiently large enough market for what you want to deliver? Example if you wanted to do business coaching, then it would be useful to know how many businesses there are in the geographical area that you want to coach. If you are tied by such an area. Nowadays you can do lots of coaching via Skype and that may not be such a stumbling block as it may have been a few years ago. What benefit are going to bring to the business owners and how are you going to stand out from other business coaches so that the clients want to work with you? You need to be clear on your market. This can change in the future as markets often do. An example of that is Kodak who in 1998 had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper in the world. A few years later they went bankrupt as the market changed. There are many such cases n business as companies did not change with the times. That being said, you need to start out with who your audience is. Who do you want to serve? What is your niche? Don’t try to be all things to all people. Become the expert in your field. You’ve heard the saying jack of all trades and master of none. Be the go to person for your product or service.
5) The next thing you need to think about is how are you going to get those clients? The interesting thing is that in recession, most companies cut their budgets for training and marketing. When things get tight financially, people stop spending money on marketing to their potential clients, which means that they are bringing in less business. This is a slippery slope as less business often means less profits and without profits, businesses don’t stay in business very long. How are you going to market and what have you got available to market your business? You don’t need to spend thousands on advertising. You simply need to be smart on how you get in front of your target audience. Here are some ways to increase your profits. Some ideas in marketing would include, networking, Facebook advertising, blogging and your website, other social media platforms. There are many ways to market. The question is how to get in front of your client. If you are doing business coaching, then putting an advert in the local school magazine is probably not the best place to be spending your advertising budget. Unless of course the parents in that school are a high percentage of business owners. Of course if you were providing a service for things to do on school holidays, then the school magazine would be a great place to market. Test your marketing and if something works, then do more of it. If it does not, then stop.
Free coaching course.
These are some of the things to consider if you want to know how to become a coach and to become a success. It rings true for other business types as well. The point is that you are prepared to have the best chance of making a success of your business. We have created a free coaching introductory course for you, to help you decide to come do the coaching training with us.
If you would like to find out more about how to become a coach or you would like some business coaching, then feel free to contact us. I have a lot of experience in both running my own businesses, as well as coaching a variety of different types of businesses owners of the years.
