10 Things You Should Do to Start a Home-Based Coaching Business

10 Things You Should Do to Start a Home-Based Coaching Business

A coaching business is a business in which an expert uses their skills, knowledge, and experience to assist others in making positive changes in their personal or professional life. A coaching business works as a relationship between two people: the coach and the coachee. The coach helps the coachee transform a certain area of life. Many of us are familiar with business coaching and life coaching, but they are by no means the only types of coaching businesses out there. Starting a home-based online coaching business offers many benefits for an entrepreneur coach, such as control over the schedule, time savings, lower startup costs, opportunities for professional growth, and tax benefits. On the other hand, every online coaching business faces challenges and questions like how to get clients for life coaching or how to choose the best coaching platform. Below we’re offering tips that provide an answer to the question “How to start a life coaching business based in your home?”

Some of the tips to help you start a coaching business include defining your coaching niche, creating a coaching plan, obtaining the necessary certifications, setting up your home office properly, investing in technology and tools that make the business easier, establishing your personal coaching brand, developing coaching packages, marketing your coaching business, providing excellent customer service, and continuously improving your skills and knowledge. 

1. Define Your Coaching Niche

Defining your coaching niche and effectively communicating with your target market is one of the keys to success for a home-based coaching business. Defining your coaching niche helps you attract a particular audience that is drawn to your offering because it fits their needs. 

The coaching niche you select is based on the challenges you want to assist your clients in overcoming. There are a number of lucrative coaching niches available, including but not limited to

The first step to defining your coaching niche is to think about your skills and passions. Consider what kind of coach you are interested in being and whether you have any specialized experience or knowledge.

A properly defined coaching niche enables you to specialize and position yourself as an authority in your field, someone who offers the solutions a certain demographic is looking for. Defining your coaching niche and audience results in paying customers and a successful coaching business. You are able to attract a more qualified audience and turn away clients you don’t actually want to work with by defining your coaching niche from the start.

2. Create a Business Plan 

The next step after defining your coaching niche is to create a business plan. Creating a coaching plan makes it easier to focus on the key elements that make your coaching business successful. A coaching plan adds professionalism and serves as a road map for your business objectives in coaching. Additionally, having a coaching business plan is mandatory if you’re looking for funding. A good business plan covers the following:

3. Obtain Necessary Certifications

Obtaining coaching certifications is not required, but it’s certainly an added advantage. Obtaining the necessary business coaching certification improves your coaching, gives you useful tools, boosts your credibility, and makes you more marketable.

Having experience, skills, and knowledge in the area you want to coach in is definitely an advantage but additional training is always a big plus. The International Coaching Federation (ICF), for instance, offers a 125-hour training course. Associate, Professional, and Master certification levels are available through the ICF. Additionally, having a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctorate Degree in counseling is a big plus. 

4. Set Up Your Home Office

Set up your home office to provide maximum benefit to your client along while at the same time making sure it is equipped with all the tools necessary for coaching.

The first step when setting up your home office is to choose a suitable area within your home to host face-to-face coaching sessions. You need a place that’s private and has good lighting and cozy seating. 

A good internet connection is the first thing to consider if you plan on holding online coaching sessions. You need a reliable laptop and platforms like Skype and Google Hangout or WebEx and GoToMeeting for group coaching. Keep in mind that the audio and video quality must be impeccable; otherwise, both you and your client risk feeling uneasy, and the purpose of your coaching session is disturbed.

5. Invest in Technology and Tools

Every home-based coach must invest in technology and tools that make the business easier. A laptop, a strong internet connection, and course materials are considered basic necessities.

Prospective clients need a place to learn more about your coaching business, and there is no better place to promote and sell your coaching services than on a website. Create articles that are client-focused and explain how you are able to make people’s lives better. Make sure to post testimonials to increase your credibility and provide tools on your website so that users are able to schedule appointments on their own. 

Additionally, consider investing in tools for maintaining client data and records, billing, and accounting to make the entire process seamless. 

6. Establish Your Brand

Establishing your brand is a great way to help your clients relate to you and trust you more. Establishing your personal coaching brand presents you as a thought leader in your niche, boosts your credibility, distinguishes you from the competition, communicates the message you want people to know about what you have to offer, and makes it simpler for you to market your coaching business.

The following are the steps to establishing your brand:

7. Develop Coaching Packages

Developing coaching packages helps you draw customers more quickly and effortlessly. Think about how you want to help and what your target audience needs when developing your coaching packages. Consider the coaching package’s features and benefits, as well as the timing and cost.

Deciding how ​ much to charge for your services is one of the most crucial decisions you’ll need to make when developing coaching packages. Charging too little results in your business being unprofitable, whereas overestimating what your clients are prepared to pay leads to being unsuccessful in the long run. Knowing the averages in your niche is helpful when setting our prices, and benchmarking data is a good place to start.

8. Market Your Coaching Business

Marketing your coaching business helps you attract new clients. The marketing strategy for your coaching business must therefore be well-thought and engaging.

Obtaining your first client is the hardest, so make sure to use both your professional and personal networks to spread the word about your coaching business. Think about providing free 30-minute coaching sessions to entice people to try your coaching services out. Create a blog or start writing articles that offer advice in order to get attention and credibility for media and other blogs. Offering workshops is another excellent approach to attracting customers.

Having an online presence is a must for coaches so you must build a website for your coaching business. Be sure to carefully consider the layout and content of your website, emphasize your experience and credentials, and include testimonials from satisfied clients. Use social media sites and, if necessary, seek the assistance of social media marketing professionals to help you create effective campaigns for your home-based coaching firm.

Lastly, don’t forget to create a captivating logo for your company to imprint on your website, business card, pamphlets, brochures, and other marketing materials. 

9. Provide Excellent Customer Service

Providing excellent customer service is important because it inspires customer loyalty and makes employees’ jobs easier. By providing great customer service, you are able to recover customer acquisition costs, retain talent, and foster brand loyalty, which in turn, helps your coaching business grow. The top six tips for providing great online customer service are:

10. Continuously Improve Your Skills and Knowledge

Continuously improving your skills and knowledge is a must if you want to stay relevant and consistently provide top-notch services. Trends in all industries are shifting faster than ever, and practically every aspect of coaching and teaching is susceptible to ongoing innovation. These changes mean that coaching skills, knowledge, and styles can quickly become outdated. Not improving your skills and knowledge makes it difficult to connect with potential clients, results in your existing clients becoming less engaged, and creates a feeling that your career isn’t moving forward.

The best time to improve your skills and knowledge is when you are in high demand and feel at the top of your game because that’s when you are easily motivated and absorb new ideas. Additionally, it is a good time to think about improving your skills and knowledge when you are new to coaching, when your clients are not as engaged as they used to be, or you have been operating in the same way for a long time. 

What Is a Coaching Business?

A coaching business is a business where you help individuals change their lives by using your knowledge, guidance, and advice. 

How to become a business coach? A coaching business is something most people are able to do but being a good business coach requires a combination of business knowledge, coaching experience, and communication skills. 

There are coaches in practically every sphere of life, including business, parenting, sports, life, career, relationships, personal finance, and productivity. What is business coaching? Business coaching is a type of coaching in which the coach guides the client in pursuing their professional goals. 

Coaching is a highly personalized process that is based on the client’s needs as well as the coach’s knowledge, abilities, and skills. Coaches help clients change their perspectives so they are able to find new ways to accomplish their goals by using a variety of communication techniques (such as listening, questioning, focused restatement, clarifying, etc.). 

How Does a Coaching Business Work?

A coaching business works as a relationship between the coach and the client (coachee). The coach helps the client transform a certain area of life. There are many moving parts to a coaching business so here are a few tips to rely on if you’ve been wondering how to start a life coaching business:

How to Determine the Niche for a Home-Based Coaching Business?

Determining the niche for a home-based coaching business is an ongoing journey, which is refined and developed even further as you gain more skills, knowledge, and experience. Be open and confident to change when determining the niche for a home-based coaching business. Ask yourself:

Determining the niche for a home-based coaching business is not easy. However, trying to coach is impossible.  Finding your niche and sticking with it is the best thing to do to ensure client satisfaction and long-term success for your business. 

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What Are the Benefits of Starting a Home-Based Coaching Business?

The benefits of starting a home-based coaching business are extensive and include:

One of the biggest benefits of starting a home-based coaching business is that you are your own boss. You are able to get up at 5 AM and begin working if you are a morning person or choose to focus on your next client after the family has gone to bed and when the home is quiet. Maintaining flexible hours is not possible when you are dependent on an office complex. Additionally, you are responsible for all other aspects of your home-based coaching business, including your coaching programs, pricing, branding, marketing, etc.

Your increased flexibility and the ability to reclaim lost time is another exciting benefit of launching a home-based coaching business. The typical American commutes for 348 hours a year. You have those extra hours to reclaim control of your personal life with a home-based coaching business since you don’t have to spend hours in traffic getting to and from work every day and working from 9 to 5 every day.

Your start-up costs are greatly reduced if you work from home. You are able to start working on your plans right away without having to invest in furniture, sign a lease, or set up a business phone system, computers, or other office equipment. Make do with your home computer for the time being, borrow a copier or printer from the library if you don’t have one, and use your cell phone.

You assume a variety of roles when you are your own boss, including sales director, marketing specialist, strategist, business development manager, and more. You gain knowledge about and expertise with all facets of running a coaching business as a result, which increases your marketability and provides opportunities for professional growth.

Keeping your home and business under one roof has a number of tax benefits. A portion of the running and depreciation costs for your house are deductible as business expenses. The deductible is a portion of your mortgage, real estate taxes, insurance, utility bills, or maintenance costs for your home.

What Are the Essential Tools and Resources for a Home-Based Coaching Business?

The list of essential tools and resources for a home-based coaching business is a great way to get organized and prepared to handle all of the responsibilities of running your own business. Many of these tools and resources for a home-based coaching business help you onboard clients, receive payments, communicate effectively, and promote your coaching business. The essential tools and resources for a home-based coaching business include

Calendly is a scheduling platform that allows you to easily book coaching sessions. Calendly syncs with your calendar to prevent double bookings and has features like automatic reminders (by email or text), custom questions to gather information beforehand, a minimum scheduling option that enables you to ensure that no last-minute appointments are made, and a billing feature that enables you to collect payment for your coaching services.

Zoom is a communications platform that allows you to connect via audio, video, chat, and phone. Zoom is simple and free to use with one person and for up to 40-minute sessions with many people. You can share your screen for presentations and webinars and record a session if you’d like and share it with your clients. 

Google Workplace is a collection of cloud computing, collaboration, and productivity tools that allows you to save all of your coaching documentation in one location. You are able to access Google Calendar, Google Drive, Docs, Cheers, Google Meet, and other services if you have your work email via Google Workplace.

Freshbooks is online accounting and invoicing software that manages payments, time tracking, and invoicing. Freshbook offers a clean, simple, and understandable picture of all of your financial transactions and has many automation features that allow coaching businesses to spend less time on accounting. 

Stripe is a fantastic choice for taking payments online without any hassle, especially if you want to accept payments from abroad. Additionally, it works with credit cards and offers a service for money transfers from your bank account to your Stripe account. It’s one of the easiest payment gateways to set up with a large number of developer tools, plugins, and the least amount of code required to integrate.

One of the best tools to use to expand your home-based coaching business is a self-hosted WordPress blog. You have countless options for the look and functionality of your coaching business website when using a self-hosted WordPress blog. Your blog turns into a potent marketing tool that draws readers to your expertise and insights while at the same time providing them with information on how you are able to help them.

A Facebook profile for your company is the final online teaching tool to have. Use it to build your social media presence, set up Facebook ads to promote and expand your business, as well as Facebook Messenger to communicate and engage with clients. 

How Can You Market Your Home-Based Coaching Business to Attract Clients?

There are 5 main ways to market your home-based coaching business to attract clients, including building social media presence, writing quality content, incentivizing referrals, email marketing, and paid advertising. Attracting the right clients for your online business coaching program is crucial if you want to be successful. Here are five ways to market your home-based coaching business to attract clients:

Build a strong social media presence

Every major social networking platform is useful for marketing your home-based coaching business but LinkedIn is the best place to establish and grow business connections.

Starts by optimizing your LinkedIn page for social proof, which highlights your accomplishments and the satisfied clients you’ve served in the past. There are still strategies to enhance your LinkedIn profile to highlight the value you provide for your target market even if you’re just getting started and don’t have many achievements related especially to coaching. Opening your “about” section with a strong fact about your prior accomplishments that demonstrates the value you are able to provide to potential clients. 

Create quality content

Creating useful, high-quality content is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche and show potential customers that you are the kind of expert you claim to be. The following are some examples of thought leadership content that works well:

Consider publishing your articles with high-authority publications like Forbes, HubSpot, and Entrepreneur. These popular online business journals accept guest contributions from writers with a solid history in their industry. Getting started with an outreach approach is usually difficult at first but once you’ve produced a few quality posts, creating winning pitches becomes much simpler, resulting in a devoted following of supporters who are willing to highlight your expertise through social sharing.

Incentivize referrals

Word of mouth has always been a powerful marketing tool and referrals are one of the best sources of new clients for your home-based coaching business. Referral programs take many different forms but when it comes to coaching, certain strategies are more successful than others. There are several typical strategies for encouraging referrals: offering a small commission for each referral; rewarding people who make referrals with free or discounted services; and partnering with other coaches whose client base is likely to need your expertise.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a powerful channel to promote content and keep your audience engaged with your coaching brand. Effective email marketing has many moving parts but it is a good idea to start by personalizing your email content. Using customer names in your greetings, adjusting send times to specific audience segments, and tailoring content to client habits and locations are all small adjustments to a basic email campaign that makes a huge difference to your success and promise substantial rewards for a small time investment!

Paid advertising

Email marketing, networking, and content creation are all effective sources of new business but they do require substantial time and effort. PPC ads require a higher upfront investment but they help you generate business more quickly by putting your name in front of the people who benefit from your service the most and bringing them farther down your sales funnel. PPC platforms like Google Ads provide a plethora of demographic targeting and reporting features to assist you in focusing your campaigns and preventing money from being wasted on ineffective clicks.

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The four legal considerations you should be aware of when starting a home-based coaching business include

Your company is perceived as reputable if the fundamentals are in order from the beginning. Additionally, you guarantee your own protection in case something goes wrong. Making sure you follow the right processes from the start helps you avoid time, money, and stress in the future, making your life as a coach much easier. Here are four legal considerations to be aware of when starting a home-based coaching business include

Coaching agreement

A coaching agreement is a document that outlines the terms and conditions between you and the users of your platform. A coaching agreement ensures that you and your clients are on the same page and offers clarity around important subjects like

Privacy policy and terms of use 

The risk for businesses that operate online is considerable so you want to ensure that you are doing it right. It’s usually a good idea to have terms and conditions for your website. Additionally, you need to set up Website Terms & Conditions to specify basic guidelines and disclaimers for everyone visiting your website, as well as a Privacy Policy to specify how you gather, store, handle and use personal client information.

Pricing and payment

Just as a coach-client relationship must be based on mutual trust, so too must pricing and payment terms be open and transparent from the beginning. You must be very clear about what your client is expected to pay and the various payment options available to them. Additionally, you must be clear about the currency you charge in if you plan to expand your coaching business internationally.  

Cancellation boundaries

Setting cancellation boundaries is crucial. Making sure that clients show up and don’t call you an hour before a coaching session to cancel is important. Make sure to put procedures in place that, for instance, state that the clients do not get a refund if they fail to give a 48 hours notice (or whatever you decide to include in your agreement).

What Are the Common Challenges Faced by Home-Based Coaches and How Can They Be Overcome?

The five most common challenges faced by home-based coaches include

Every home-based coach has different experiences, so there is a possibility that your problems and struggles are different from those other coaches are facing. Here are the most common challenges faced by home-based coaches:

It is the coach’s responsibility to set a clear objective for the coaching session, identify obstacles to the client’s progress, and develop a tactical action plan that aids the client in achieving their objectives. Every coaching session needs to have a clear objective that the coach and client are working towards. Setting clear objectives enables the coach to evaluate the session’s effectiveness and establish measurable indicators for gauging the client’s progress. Additionally, it is important to consider the client’s input regarding what they anticipate from the session in order to ensure that both the coach and coachee get the anticipated results. 

A healthy coach-coachee relationship is built on effective communication. It’s important to ask questions that help you fully comprehend your client’s difficulties, goals, attitudes, and strengths. It is your responsibility as a coach to relax your client and encourage them to open up by demonstrating a calm, confident approach. You must first get to know the client in order to be able to coach them effectively, so pay attention to them, learn about their persona, and work to build a solid rapport.

Professional coaches are not expected to provide clients with pre-packaged solutions for any problems that need to be resolved. Their primary responsibility is to allow the client to find such solutions through the coaching process. Instead of providing the client with the answers, the coach acts as a guide to help them find their own route.

Many coaches make the error of not immediately assigning accountability to the client or acting as the client’s accountability partner. The best solution is somewhere in the middle. Avoid outlining your client’s obligations and instead, collaborate with them to determine what accountability means to them. Taking on responsibilities that aren’t yours only increases the stress you feel as a coach. Make it clear that the client is responsible for taking action and that the coach is there to support them.

Launching a home-based coaching business is an important step, both in terms of realizing your goals and in terms of the new obligations and duties it entails. There are many responsibilities to take on in order for your company to survive and grow, including managing clients, office work, and business-related tasks like marketing, finances, networking, etc. ​​All of these things seriously interfere with your ability to manage your time. Many coaches struggle to prioritize their jobs and find it difficult to handle many obligations. Striking a healthy balance between work and life is crucial for your growth and development. A wise method to manage your most valuable resource – time – is to use business tools that assist you with efficient planning, limiting distractions, and more.

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What Are the Types of Business Coaching?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the type of business coaching that is right for you. So, what are the types of coaching to keep in mind? The five most popular types of business coaching include

The type of business coaching that is best depends on several factors, including your goals, skills, and previous experience. Let’s take a look at the five most popular types of business coaching:

Executive leadership coaching is for leaders who wish to excel at their jobs. Executive coaches help their clients develop particular leadership abilities, such as the ability to think critically or manage their emotions, so they are better equipped to make decisions that have a large-scale impact on the organization and employees. The purpose of coaching engagements is to assist executives in making sense of and using assessment data to construct a growth strategy that is unique to them and addresses any potential interpersonal difficulties.

Transformational coaching is a type of business coaching that facilitates substantial transformations in people’s lives and organizations. Transformational coaches collaborate with their clients to determine their objectives, create action plans, and implement long-lasting changes in their personal or professional lives. Transformational coaching is used to help people establish new businesses or change occupations, or support businesses in changing how they operate.

Integrated coaching is a powerful strategy that is used to reinforce the principles taught in leadership training. For instance, a company can sponsor growth programs for high-potential managers while at the same time offering them incorporated coaching sessions during the program. These are frequently two- or three-hour blocks of time where participants apply what they have learned from each course while at the same time reflecting on what they have learned.

Team coaching concentrates on enhancing the entire team’s performance rather than individuals. Team coaches help teams improve their overall performance by identifying their strengths and weaknesses, setting goals, and creating action plans. The coach supports a team’s participation in their work, observes them at work, or offers constructive feedback. Team coaching is especially effective for teams who are just starting out or are having trouble collaborating. 

Virtual coaching is a remote coaching session made possible by technology, where employees receive flexible, personalized training and the coach and coachee collaborate to achieve objectives.  The key advantage of virtual coaching is that it gives businesses access to some of the greatest online trainers worldwide, not just local ones. As a result, companies have a wide selection of skilled trainers to choose from, and you have the opportunity to hold sessions in the convenience of your own home, workplace, or office.

What Are the Tips for Creating Online Programs?

Here are 5 tips for creating online programs.

Below we’re explaining each tip for creating online programs in detail and show you how to go about it so that you have a clear plan to start your first online coaching program.

Focusing on meeting the demands of a specific target market in a single niche is key to creating a successful online coaching program. Start by identifying a lucrative niche that appeals to a high-end clientele or, if you are already recognized as an authority in a particular field, stick with the same niche and try to identify a new, lucrative target market segment. 

You have many options when selecting the type of online coaching program, such as private one-on-one coaching, group coaching, live sessions, or offering recorded content. Which option you choose depends on your availability as well as the client’s expectations. 

Pre-recorded courses and on-demand live coaching calls are the best option if you are coaching multiple people who were dealing with a similar problem. One-on-one coaching sessions, on the other hand, are preferable if you are assisting different people with different issues. Personalized one-on-one coaching sessions are beneficial for novice coaches as they give them a chance to learn about their target audience more closely.

You must first prepare the course material if you decide to give pre-recorded course lectures. Make high-quality recordings of your program content and then combine them with other materials to form a complete coaching program. Templates, workbooks, checklists, tracking sheets, exercises, a personal resource library, success stories and examples, supplementary reading material, bonuses, and workbooks are a few items to include in your offer.

The last step is to choose a platform for hosting coaching courses that enables you to cater to your clients’ needs. A coaching platform is a software program that allows you and your clients to effortlessly access your coaching content and materials while at the same time facilitating the coaching relationship.

Some coaching platforms are more specialized in character and cater to specific sorts of coaches, such as health coaches or business coaches, while others are more generic and offer functionalities any online coach requires. Additionally, some platforms are made with the user experience in mind, whereas others are designed specifically with the coach in mind, providing resources for promoting and selling coaching services. Consider the functionality you gain from the platform and the platform’s ability to interface with your company’s tech stack as you examine your options.

Online coaching programs are typically more expensive because you are selling your knowledge and time as the primary products. However, you still need to ensure the price is fair and within the means of your intended audience. For instance, it is feasible to charge a premium price if CEOs of large corporations are your target market. However, make sure to keep the price affordable if your target market is startup CEOs. Provide special discounts or payment plans if certain customers are still unable to afford your coaching course. 

How to Get Clients for Your Coaching Business?

There are two different ways to get clients for your coaching business: 

Getting clients for your coaching business is not an easy task, especially if you’re just getting started. We recommend the following online strategies to get clients for your coaching business.

  1. Promote your coaching business online

The following are a few ways to create clear, effective messaging online:

  1. Use offline marketing strategies to get clients for your coaching business

There are several options to promote your coaching business offline and attract clients, including

Is It Easy to Setup a Home-Base Coaching Business?

No, setting up a home-based coaching business is not easy. Setting up a home-based coaching business is not something that happens overnight. You need to put a lot of time, thought, research, and effort into it. However, setting up a home-based coaching business and developing your online coaching program is possible with the right strategy, tools, and basic knowledge. 

Does a Coaching Business Make Lots of Money?

Yes, a coaching business makes lots of money. So, how much does a business coach earn? Coaches make an average of $235 per hour, according to the International Coach Federation (ICF). Many coaches work only 20 hours per week but make over $100,000 annually. These high earnings result from the opportunities for coaches to start adding new income streams as their business expands, like speaking engagements, online courses, and group coaching, all of which have the potential to bring extra money. 

Is Coaching Online a Real Profession?

Yes, coaching online is a real profession. Many people work as coaches on a part-time or full-time basis all over the world. The $2.85 billion worldwide coaching market is expanding quickly. Online coaching platforms had a nearly $2 billion market value in 2020 and the market size is expected to grow to $4.5 billion by 2028.

Alexis Fedor

 Founder & CEO

Alexis Fedor

 Founder & CEO

Alexis Fedor is an award winning performance artist and writer from New York City. She is the founder of Artists In Business, a company focused on helping artists create online businesses with their art through online courses and group coaching. Alexis is the creator of the renowned Profit Canvas Mentorship, which has helped hundreds of artists create profitable businesses with their art, and the AIB Jumpstart, a membership experience designed to help artists get their businesses prepped for profitability. Alexis lives in New York City among many friends, family, and two cats.