Once upon a time, starting a coaching business was HARD!
A coach would set up their coaching business and their clients would be those whom they could reach geographically. Face-to-face and in-person coaching was the norm because it’s all that was available. In addition, coaches were expected to have an office, with all of the expenses that are associated with that.
Coaching businesses could go down in flames leaving coaches owing a lot of money. It wasn’t unusual to hear of coaching businesses collapsing with massive debts.
Starting A Coaching Business In The Last Century
In the 80s and 90s, before the wonderful Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, coaches had few options on the marketing front and they were expensive. Taking out classified adverts, or an entry in the Yellow Pages were common and at the time, it did work to some extent.
Newspaper ads and Yellow Pages entries and all of the old methods of advertising were pricey. I remember placing an ad in a local newspaper for an employer I worked with and it cost £500, in 1989 – that’s around £1930 today. For a single ad, in a single local newspaper, that would end up wrapped around someone’s fish and chips the following day.
Enter The Internet
Now, we don’t have to worry about geographic locations. The world is our oyster. We can coach clients from literally anywhere, providing that they have an internet connection. Our audience that was once numbered in the tens or hundreds of thousands are now numbered in the billions.
Low Barrier To Entry
The technology we needed to access those who might want to work with us, from that pool of billions of people is freely available. Most of it costs nothing, the rest of it is very low-cost.
To start an international coaching business you need one good social media profile, a way of video conferencing (Zoom, Skype etc) and a way of taking payments online. That’s it.
Best of all, those three things are free.
How To Make This Work
The way to create this profitable coaching business, the secret sauce if you will, is just this.
- Define exactly who you want to work with
- Be crystal clear in your marketing message about why they should want to work with you.
- Find out where they are, in order for them to hear your message.
- Get consistent and you’ll generate inbound enquiries.
- Turn those enquiries into conversations
- Turn those conversations into paying clients.
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