So you’re bent on starting a coaching business? Well, you should definitely consider creating a coaching business plan.
Business plans are a very important element of every business.
Your business plan sets the pace for your coaching business and allows you to keep in view what should be done to take your business to the next level.
Creating a coaching business plan puts you one step ahead of most coaches who just jump right into building the Business of their dreams only to end up with roadblocks that could have been avoided if only they had a business plan.
So, in this guide, my goal is to save you the stress of having to create your coaching business plan from scratch.
This is perfect for coaches who are serious are turning their skills and expertise into a full-blown business rather than a mere hobby.
So before we dive right in, how about I highlight some benefits of creating a business plan to get you pumped about creating yours?
Importance of a Coaching Business Plan
1. It Outlines your specific roadmap for growth
Every business is unique and so is its journey to growth.
By crafting your specific business plan, you will be able to get an outline of what needs to be done to achieve the desired goals for your business.
Your business plan helps pace your growth, sets actionable goals, and ultimately tracks your success.
Without a business plan, you would simply be winging the growth of your business, which is a surefire way to fail in business.
You want to be able to know exactly what steps to take in your business to achieve the desired results you want and your business plan lets you do this.
2. It Helps you secure funding
While most coaching businesses can be started with $0, you might need funding for some specific aspect of your business.
A good business plan helps set a professional standard for your coaching business and makes your business admirable to potential investors and partners.
Using your business plan, you will be able to communicate the potential your business has in your industry and the actionable steps you plan on taking to make it a reality.
This in turn increases the perceived value of your business in the eyes of potential partners.
3. It allows you to identify potential challenges
As you will soon see, the SWOT analysis section of your business plan allows you to outline the challenges your business stands to face in your industry.
This will allow you to brainstorm effective solutions to tackle them ahead of time and fast-pace your journey to success.
How To Create a Simple Coaching Business Plan
Step 1: Start with your Executive summary:
This section of your business is what it sounds like. It is a proper description of your coaching business on a basic level.
You will need to write the section like it’s for a huge client or partner who needs enough information about your business to conclude whether to do business with you or not.
It should include the basic details of your business including:
- Business name
- A domain name or Social Media Username
It should also have a concise outline of the
- Services you offer
- The target market you serve
- Specific problem/ pain point you solve in your industry
- Unique strategies and tools you use to solve your client’s problems
- Main benefits of your services for a potential client
- Qualifications and experiences that certify you to provide services in your industry.
- Overall profit model of your business including how you plan on bringing in revenue for your business
- Short-term and long-term goals you have for your coaching business
In a nutshell, this section of your coaching business plan should be able to give an overview of what your business is all about.
Step 2: Carry out an Analysis of your dream client
The purpose of this section is to be able to nail exactly who you are trying to target with your services and give you proper knowledge of better ways to serve them.
It will also help you structure your marketing and sales efforts to align with their needs, and be compelling enough to get them to take action on your offers.
Here are some quick prompts to answer in order to craft this section of your coaching business plan.
1. Who are your dream clients?
Be extremely specific and think deeply about the common characteristics that exist amongst your past clients.
Also, take the time to give a brief description of what type of clients you would love to work with time and time again.
You might need to give information about their age bracket, gender, and other demographics that applies to the services you offer.
2. What are their needs?
Needs drive sales and the better you become at articulating your buyers’ needs with your offers, the more sales you will be able to make.
So what needs do your dream clients have right now?
My best advice here is to do real-life research on them rather than just making speculation about what you think they might need.
You could do this by joining the conversation on Facebook groups or other communities where they hang out.
Your goal is to find out the most repeated complaints in your target market so as to structure your services as the effective solution they need.
3. What is their buying power?
This section of your business plan is extremely important for helping you validate the profitability of your potential business idea.
Buyers in different niches have varying buying power.
For example, A financial coach for people in debt might not be able to charge as much as a real estate coach who helps people with cash flow invest their money.
On that note, you need to be able to ascertain the buying power of your target market so you can properly price your programs to maximize your sales.
4. How do they consume information?
You’re going to need to know exactly how your customers love to receive information.
Some people love reading blog posts, others might love videos.
The point is to get accustomed to your ideal clients’ preferred mode of information consumption.
This will in turn help you be better informed about the best marketing platforms for your niche.
5. What competitors already appeal to them?
If you are just starting a coaching business then most likely you would already have competitors to deal with.
During your client analysis, you want to be able to know what your competitors are already doing that’s working well for them.
The key to exceptional marketing success is to pinpoint what is already working and Double Down on It.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with marketing.
Just find what works, double down on it and add your own spin, that’s how true marketing success comes to be.
Do a quick research and find out what competitors already has a huge following of a target audience.
This will give you quality information about what type of content works best for your industry and how to best serve your potential clients.
Step 3: Do a Competitor Analysis
I need you to think about this deeply.
Why would anyone buy from a newly emerging coaching business when they could just stick with already trusted services in your industry?
Well, the goal of the section is to analyze the competition and brainstorm better ways to serve your industry in order to attract a market share.
Here are some helpful prompts to use here:
1. List out your main competitors
Find out who the top dogs in your industry are.
You could do this by searching for topics your potential client would normally search for on Google and social media
The key here is to get a list of competitors who are already enjoying the sweet traffic and lead flow from Google and social media
2. Outline how your services differ from theirs
If you have a list of these competitors, it’s time to list what services they might be offering.
This will help you see the gap in your market as well as get ideas for services to offer in your business.
3. What is the common pricing structure of competitors in your industry?
Another analysis anchor to focus on is the common pricing structure in your industry.
She want to be able to know what the common pricing range is in your market.
This will allow you to create products that match that pricing so you don’t scare away potential clients.
I’m not asking you to down price your services, instead, create a product that has a worth that matches the common pricing structure.
This will allow you to hook potential clients into your sales funnel.
Once you have them in your funnel, you can always upsell them your higher-priced programs to make more money.
4. What marketing channels do they use?
Another piece of information to map out in your competitive analysis is the common trend in marketing for your industry.
If everyone in your industry is marketing on LinkedIn this should give you a good idea of what and what might not be possible for your market.
Remember it’s not about reinventing the wheel.
If you are struggling to choose your marketing channels, your competitors should be your best brainstorming tool.
So like I said, list out all the marketing channels that are already working for your competitors and see how you could market better on them.
Other prompts you could have on your competitive analysis include:
- What strengths do your competitors have?
- What are their weaknesses?
- What does their client acquisition process look like?
The goal of your competitive Analysis is to help you pinpoint your unique selling proposition.
If you want to be truly successful in the coaching industry, you will need to be able to analyze what your competitors are doing and figure out better ways to sell your brand as the go-to solution.
This is because coaching is a high-ticket industry and people would rather buy from established experts than from a newly emerging business.
To beat this, you will need to have something unique about your program, offers or business as a whole to hook them in.
If you’re just like any other coach, you will really struggle to sign in consistent clients.
Step 5: Create Your Marketing Plan
The marketing plan section of your coaching business plan should give you a good idea of marketing strategies to implement in order to get the word out about your programs and offers.
Marketing is an essential aspect of every business so your marketing plan should help you outline the activities that you will need to execute to get started with getting the reach your business needs to grow.
Before I share prompts to use in the marketing plan section, I implore you to read this guide on digital marketing for coaches as it will give you a quick overview of what needs to be done to execute a successful digital marketing plan for your coaching business.
Here’s what should be on an effective marketing plan:
- An overview of how you plan on marketing your services in your industry
- An outline of how you plan to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts
- A Short List of all your marketing goals and an overview of the actionable steps you plan to take to achieve them.
Step 6: Cash Flow Plan
Once you have the income flowing in this aspect of your business plan will help you better manage your resources so as not to run on the loss.
You should be able to clearly distinguish what part of your income goes into your personal needs and what part is reinvested.
1. What is your dream or projected revenue?
This is basically what your dream income goal is.
This will give you an idea of how much effort you’re going to need to put in in order to achieve the desired income.
For example, if your goal is to make 10K per month with a program priced at 1k, you know that you need 10 clients every month to reach your desired income goal.
Having this income goal in mind would help you narrow down your marketing efforts to reach the end goal.
2. What are your projected business expenses?
Out of the income you intend to make, what percentage do you plan on allocating to your business expenses?
This outline should contain various tools you’ll be paying for and bills you will have to settle consistently.
Take a brief moment to think about the expenses of your business and write that out with the accorded prices prices
They should give you a good idea of how much of your income is going to be spent on your business necessities
3. What percentage of your income goes to your personal needs?
Just like you have portioned out what income goes to your business expenses, you will also need to plan out what part of your income goes to your personal account.
Many coaches make the mistake of mixing up their personal and business finances but this can really be a pain in the ass when it comes time to pay taxes.
So make sure you clearly outline what portion of your income is yours to keep.
4. What are the revenue opportunities in your business plan?
There are many ways to make money in a coaching business.
You could try workshop digital products one-on-one programs and so on.
The point here Is to list out all the possible revenue opportunities for your business, this will give you an idea of the possibilities that pose in your business industry.
Step 7: Create your Operations Plan
The key to every successful business is consistent action.
So in your business plan, the operation section is going to outline the different tasks you’d be executing on a daily basis to ensure the success of your business.
This could be as easy as your daily content creation tasks, sales calls, and client onboarding duties.
You want to be able to know what you have to do each and every day to keep your business up and running.
Below are some amazing prompts to use on this section of a business plan
- Outline the key tasks and processes you plan on executing daily to grow your business
- Describe briefly how you plan on onboarding new clients
- Describe how you plan on managing existing clients and sessions
- Discuss your policies for cancellations and session rescheduling
- Describe your client’s payment or billing methods
- Outline your strategies for client follow up
Conclusion
Your coaching business plan is literally the bedrock of your business.
It needs to be solid enough to lay a strong foundation for the future success and growth of your business.
By outlining your business plan following the above step you will have a strong outline to run your business on.
How about you simplify the whole process using our SIMPLE COACHING BUSINESS PLAN template?
If you need an editable template with amazing prompts to help you create a highly intuitive business plan, then check out this business plan template made with love for coaches like you.
If you are a business-savvy coach, you will definitely love this template.
