5 Secrets Successful Business Coaches Know About Building A Coaching Business

Do you want to become a small business coach? Here are some secrets that the best business coaches know about building a coaching business.

Coaching is all the rage today and becoming a business coach is seen as a very lucrative enterprise. The adoption of online training is also expected to boost industry revenue growth.

Considering that most entrepreneurs understand the importance of hiring business coaches for entrepreneurs, the market value of the business coaching industry is expected to reach $20 billion by 2022.

However, becoming a business coach and starting a coaching business as a successful and competent coach is not that easy, even if you have prior business expertise.

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Contents

What Successful Business Coaches Know About The Coaching Business

If you want to be a successful business coach, you need to know the secrets that the best business coaches know about the coaching business.

#1. Successful business coaches view coaching as a business

Most people are good at at least one thing. They may be passionate about a specific subject. Perhaps they put in a lot of time, effort, and energy and managed to become skilled in at least one of them.

All of us can be experts in at least one area of expertise. The problem is that just because we’re an expert in that area doesn’t necessarily mean we can start coaching companies and become successful coaches.

This is the mistake too many wannabe coaches make. They get all excited about the fact that they know their stuff. In fact, they brag that they’re the very best experts when it comes to doing certain things.

This may well be true, but the problem is that if you look at your coaching business as something that you do on the side, you are doing yourself a disservice and are setting yourself up for eventual failure.

Too many hopeful coaches think that just because they are naturally good at something they can dispense high-quality services whenever they want, based purely on their own terms. While this might work in some cases, for most people it doesn’t.

If you view your service as more of a hobby than a vocation or a business, it should not come as a surprise if you’re unable to build a powerful personal brand and your coaching business fails.

The truth is if you’re serious about making money as an online coach, you have to wrap your mind around it. You have to commit to it and, yes, you have to treat it as a business. A real business means you have to lay out the difficulties you’re struggling with and solve them one by one.

Unfortunately, a lot of would-be online coaches never manage to do this. They’re just focused on how passionate they are or on how many people they can help with their expertise.

This is all well and good, but until and unless you view your coaching activities as part of a business, chances are you will continue to struggle and may not make the kind of money you had hoped for.

You have to run it like a business; you have to make hard decisions and you have to set it up in a systematic and methodical way. So, take this Free Coaching Quiz to find out if you have what it takes to be a successful coach.

You will get access to information that will step you through the often difficult and confusing process of setting up a successful online coaching business. It is definitely not for everybody.

However, if you have the right plan, you can definitely go a long way in increasing your chances of success. You owe it to yourself. You don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to figure things out the hard way.

#2. Successful business coaches super-specialize to make real money

A lot of people are under the impression that if you want to be a successful coach, you only need to speak well. You only need to have a nice speaking voice, and you must have the right facial expressions.

You have to make the right gestures at the right time with the right people to produce the right results. A lot of this does seem to make sense.

After all, a lot of coaching is dependent on having good interpersonal communication skills, sending out the right message, and making sure that you get your message across.

All of this is very easy to understand, but this is one of those concepts that are easy to understand, but hard to implement.

Because no matter how convinced you are that you’re a super-genius expert in your area of expertise, that doesn’t automatically translate into making any real money in your coaching business.

A lot of things have to happen between point A and point B for you to achieve the kind of success you’re looking for. Firstly, according to PwC, individuals or organizations using coaching expect their coaches to be certified or credentialed.

Most coaches find this discouraging to hear, but it’s the cold, hard truth, and the sooner you wrap your mind around it and make peace with it, the sooner you’ll position yourself for success.

So don’t waste another moment. Wrap your mind around what I’m saying. Focus on specialization. This is the key. You cannot be a jack-of-all-trades. You cannot be everybody’s best friend.

Focus on what you know, become an ICF-certified business coach, and you’ll knock it out of the park. It’s not rocket science, because if you truly know your stuff and you’re able to create results in the lives of those who seek you out for answers, you’ll stand out.

You’re not that random person spouting out theory and anecdotal garbage. There’s too much of that. People could care less about that. They are not going to pay real money for that kind of shallow expertise.

Become the real deal. How do you do this? Specialize in a body of knowledge that is an inch wide and drills miles deep. Know everything about it. Know it like the back of your hand.

If you’re able to communicate this clearly and, most importantly, deliver results in the lives of people looking for answers within your area of expertise, you’ll be a hero to them.

Very few people who are trying to succeed as business coaches even bother to do that. They just focus on hype, on building the right connections, and other shenanigans. They refuse to do the heavy lifting.

If you, on the other hand, do the heavy lifting, and the heavy communication, it will make all the difference.

#3. Successful business coaches use video coaching to earn passive income

As a business coach, you need to connect personally with your prospective audience. Make sure that your body language, facial expressions, your gestures, and your speech all line up to send the right message.

It’s all about openness, understanding, and curiosity. In other words, you’re the coach. You’re the guru.

You are the teacher and you have to project positive emotions so your students will not only view you as authoritative, as somebody who knows what s/he is talking about but also as an ally.

That’s the kind of mindset you want them to develop when you start offering coaching for small business owners. You want them to look at you as the solution to their problem. As somebody who stands head and shoulders above everybody else.

While everybody else is talking like a high school teacher or college professor, here you are talking like a flesh-and-blood human being. Of course, they will want to learn from you!

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Today, video coaching is the key to connecting with people while earning money passively. Think about it. You write the video script once. You shoot the video once. However, every time somebody signs up for your online business course you earn money.

If you do a really good job expressing your personality and your willingness and eagerness to help people through your expert knowledge, while recording that message, you’ll be able to earn a passive income.

It’s not unusual for people to earn six figures off videos they recorded several years ago. You can earn in your sleep or while traveling all over the world, while the money keeps coming in. What’s not to love about this business model?

In fact, by 2025, the global e-learning market is expected to reach $325 billion, which means more people will be buying online courses than ever before.

With the growth of online education, creating and selling an online course is now one of the best ways of earning a passive income. With your own online courses, you can set up a truly passive online coaching business.

Learn how to create and sell a money-making course with these online course creation tutorials and business coaching tools that will help you leverage your knowledge and expertise the way the experts do it.

#4. Successful business coaches build a powerful personal brand

I’ve talked to a lot of online coaching business owners. A lot of these coaches really know their stuff. In fact, many of these individuals have developed a high level of expertise due to many years of passionate curiosity regarding their areas of expertise.

When it comes to raw knowledge and the willingness and eagerness to help people learn such specialized knowledge, these people really have it made. They really know their stuff and they’re at the top of their game.

The problem is most of these people continue to struggle with their coaching business. They really can’t understand why this is the case.

If all it takes to be successful is to know your stuff, these business coaches should be making five to six figures every single year. Sadly, they’re not. There is a missing piece.

The problem is simply becoming an expert and knowing your stuff is just part of the battle. Most of your activities as a business coach, regardless of your competence and experience, must involve building your personal brand.

Knowing your stuff is important and is definitely the first step in building any kind of credibility, but you also have to market yourself. Having a product to sell is one thing. Making, sure enough, people hear about your amazing product is another.

Too many coaches think the selling process is ‘beneath’ them. It’s no surprise they continue to struggle. If you’re truly passionate about your personal expertise, you shouldn’t be shy about letting the rest of the world know.

You have to remember that there are so many other experts out there. There are so many people trying to make money as business coaches. You have to figure out a way to stand above the crowd. You have to find a way to get noticed.

Unfortunately, if you just focus on what you know and keep it to yourself, you’re not doing yourself any favors. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to build a powerful brand.

So many coaches fail in building a personal brand because they don’t have a systematic and methodical plan. You just have to know how to do it the right way.

If you want to build a solid coaching brand without breaking the bank, these personal branding tutorials will help you learn how to create, strategize, launch, and build a personal brand.

#5. Successful business coaches keep learning to remain marketable

I don’t care how much of an expert you think you are. In fact, I don’t care how much of an expert other people think you are. You may have won all sorts of awards. You may even be at the top of your game.

But none of that really matters if you allow your knowledge to stagnate. There is no shortage of top business coaches that have fallen by the wayside in the coaching business. These people used to be the ‘go-to’ experts in their fields.

It’s as if they have dropped off the face of the planet. Believe it or not, even seemingly ‘bulletproof’ expert brand names can become obscure because they did not upgrade their knowledge.

For whatever reason, they allowed themselves to vanish in the background instead of constantly being front and center in their industry by discussing the latest and greatest niche trends.

You may be thinking to yourself that you’ve figured out everything there is to know about your niche. That may very well be true, but you have to constantly challenge and upgrade your knowledge to make sure it is cutting edge.

Otherwise, your inflexibility is going to cut into your coaching business’ continuing marketability. The coaching industry keeps changing with new findings and research into how our brains work and how we learn new things.

If you don’t stay updated on these coaching industry trends you shouldn’t be surprised if your mentees think your knowledge is outdated or behind the times. The moment they start thinking of you and your small business coaching services in those terms, you might as well kiss your coaching business goodbye.

In fact, don’t be surprised if sales for your business coach services and books drop off a cliff. That’s how important it is to stay up to date, especially today when you have the internet at your fingertips.

Regardless of how long you’ve been doing business coaching and mentoring for a living, you need to constantly upgrade your knowledge and stay on top of your game, or it will be only a matter of time before younger competitors leave you in the dust.

The last thing that you want is to feel that you’re going to have to catch up or that you have to work doubly hard to stay in place. You need to be both methodical and systematic about it and get the right guidance to become a successful business coach and mentor.

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Priya Florence Shah

Priya Florence Shah is a bestselling author and an award-winning blogger. Check out her book on emotional self-care for women. Priya writes short stories and poetry and chills with her two-legged and four-legged kids in her spare time.

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