This year I started working with a business coach online – and it transformed the way I see my business.
Running your own business can be incredibly rewarding. But as you gain more and more valuable experience, you’ll probably reach a stage where you need help from someone with more experience, more knowledge, and a unique perspective to help you grow.
Many business owners tend to make the same mistakes. And you might be just the person they need to help them avoid common pitfalls, set smart business goals, and streamline growth.
The business coaching niche is now an $11 billion industry and has been growing exponentially, as more and more startups, entrepreneurs, and business leaders look for expert guidance and advice on how to achieve their business goals.
Sounds interesting? If you’re wondering how to become a business coach and what you need to do to get your coaching business off the ground, we’ve put together this ultimate guide – including real business coaching examples, quotes from expert coaches, and templates to help you get started.
Follow along or skip ahead:
- What does a business coach do?
- Who can become a business coach?
- How to become a business coach in 9 steps
- Step 1: Identify your niche and your audience
- Step 2: Evaluate and work on your skills
- Step 3: Set up a framework for your work
- Step 4: Build your coaching offer
- Step 5: Invest in your personal brand
- Step 6: Create an online coaching program
- Step 7: Market your coaching business
- Step 8: Collect feedback
- Step 9: Analyze and improve
- Start an online business coaching practice today
What does a business coach do?
The primary goal of a business coach is to help entrepreneurs and business owners succeed. A business coach provides a space for clients to share the challenges they’re facing, their goals, and what they want to improve. Many business coaches also offer their feedback, guidance, and suggest specific tools and systems to help their clients.
Here are a some activities a business coach might do:
- Create accountability
- Assist in goal setting
- Formulate a strategy
- Adjust business plans
- Offer motivation and support
- Give feedback
- Detect and highlight blind spots
There are many different types of successful business coaches – and each has a slightly different role or set of responsibilities for their clients. Some might resemble motivational speakers, others consultants, and others coaches or accountability partners.
The consultant-coach does not have to be an all-star player. His job is to teach the client and see that his best ideas are carried out.
— William S. Royce, How To Be A Business Coach
Here are a few reasons why entrepreneurs and business owners decide to hire business coaches:
- To shift their perspective or change their mindset
- Solve specific business problems (e.g. operational bottlenecks)
- Avoid unexpected but critical business mistakes
- Help raise funding or go through the IPO process
- Generate new business ideas and directions
- Temporarily replace key personnel (e.g. CFO)
- Improve business owner’s performance
In other words, the role of a business coach is extremely varies. The type of work you choose to specialize in will shape how you work with your clients – and the type of client you work with.
For example, Shereen Hoban, an executive and business coach offers clients a unique 4-pillar formula for growing their business and achieving their goals, providing specific structure and frameworks.
Business coach Jason Cornes specifies on his website that his approach is tailored to every individual – and he supports clients to make their own decisions, offering his guidance and suggestions.
When you’re thinking about how to become a business coach – and who you’ll help – it’s up to you to decide what type of business coach you want to be.
Who can become a business coach?
Business coaching is not a regulated industry. This means you’re not legally required to have a degree, qualification, or go through coach training before becoming a business coach.
The only thing that matters is whether you can deliver value to your clients. If you have some practical business experience — you’re already half way there.
It’s up to you if you choose to get a business coaching certification or start coaching right away.
Let’s look at both options.
How to become a certified business coach
Getting a certification to become a business coach can help to build your confidence and equip you with the skills you need to be an effective business coach – including how to conduct sessions, how to address your biases, and how to find clients.
There are lots of coaching programs that can help you develop a vision for your own coaching journey and what you want your coaching business to look like.
You can become a certified business coach through an ICF-accredited (International Coaching Federation) institution or find an independent business coaching program.
Take a look at our list of top coaching certification programs for more inspiration.
How to become a business coach – without a certification
Alternatively, you can become a business coach without any formal qualification or certification. There’s an almost unlimited amount of educational content related to business coaching online – from courses to strategic frameworks to client check-in questions, and more.
You don’t need to pay for a course or certification program if it’s not right for you. Instead, you can work on developing your own business coaching style and framework from day one.
And remember, business coaching is not just for large corporations and their executives. Small business coaches are just as important. After all, there are over 30 million small businesses in the US, making up 99.9% of all enterprises.
Certified business coach vs no certification
Here are quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each type of business coach – and some key considerations when choosing the path that’s right for you.
Pros | Cons | Considerations | |
Becoming a business coach with a certification |
|
|
|
Becoming a business coach without a certification |
|
|
|
How to become a business coach in 9 steps
Excited to share your knowledge and expertise with others through coaching? Follow this 9-step process to kickstart your coaching practice, from choosing your coaching niche to setting your pricing strategy to analyzing feedback.
Step 1: Identify your niche and your audience
The first step to becoming a business coach is knowing what type of a business coach you want to be. There’s a huge range of business coaches out there – and it’s up to you to decide what you want to be known for.
While you can become a generalized business coach, without a specific niche, choosing a niche makes it easier for you to target a specific audience and tailor your marketing and messaging to one customer.
Identifying a niche can help you:
- Build a personal brand
- Write content for your business
- Craft an enticing offer
- Shape your pricing
- Deliver a clearer message
Your coaching niche will ultimately shape your business strategy, frameworks, pricing, and more. But don’t worry – when you’re just starting out, you can easily test out, change, and adjust your niche as you go. It isn’t set in stone.
10 questions to find your business coaching niche
To help you choose a niche for your business coaching services, try working through these questions:
- What experience, expertise and knowledge do I have?
- What problems can I solve?
- Who do I most want to help?
- Who most needs my expertise?
- What area can I deliver the most value to people?
- What type of business coaching services do I want to offer?
- What services aren’t currently being offered?
- What sets me apart from other business coaches?
- Would I prefer to focus on one-on-one or team coaching?
- What is my overall goal for my business?
Use your answers to help you shape your niche. By tapping into your individual expertise, skills, and overall goals, you can become a business coach that offers people something new and fresh – and stand out from the crowd.
“I’m an uncommon business coach because I don’t like to follow what everyone else does… I like to go against the grain because you have to find your marketing voice—that thing you’re going to be good at to drive traffic for your business.”
Diamond Lee, Thinkific Creator Educator
10 questions to find your target audience
After you pick your coaching niche, think about the person who would be an ideal match for your skills. This will help you find a target audience.
Try to answer these questions:
- When I think about my ideal customer, what characteristics do they have? E.g. age, location, education.
- What does their business look like? E.g. industry, revenue, number of employees.
- What stage of their career are they at? How experienced are they?
- What do they most care about?
- What’s the biggest challenge they’re facing?
- What problems do they currently have that they can’t solve themselves?
- How do these problems impact their business?
- What solutions have they already tried?
- What benefits might they gain by working with you?
- Why would they hire you?
By asking these questions, you can start to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP), which describes the demographic, psychographic, firmographic and behavioral qualities of your potential ideal clients.
Use your ideal customer profile to help you understand the best place to find your first clients and how to make your coaching offer enticing.
Top tip: At this stage, you’re looking for a basic outline of your target audience. Use surveys, customer interviews, and research to help you tweak and refine your target audience over time as you start to understand more about your customers – and who you can help.
Step 2: Evaluate and work on your skills
To help you feel more confident and capable when you’re working with clients, it’s helpful to evaluate your existing skills and competencies.
Even world-class coaches are constantly learning new skills, techniques, and industry best practices to help them stay on top. In fact, that’s the only way they can remain world-class.
Based on the problems you’re solving for your clients, evaluate your existing skills. Go through all your coaching skills and classify them as primary, secondary or tertiary. Rate your competence in each of them.
Then create an improvement plan. If you feel you’re anything less than excellent in your primary skills, start working on improvements right away. Read around the topic, sign up for business coach training, get a specific business coaching certificate, or even hire a coach for yourself.
Your secondary skills should be regularly improving as well. You might choose to:
- Subscribe to leading industry publications
- Buy online courses
- Read books
- Watch videos
Your tertiary skills are also important for industry awareness and staying up-to-date with new trends or methods – work on these skills with podcasts, YouTube, attending business coaching meetups, and more.
Step 3: Set up a framework for your work
To help you build an organized, efficient coaching business, it’s a good idea to set up a framework for your work – including defining your own business goals.
Not all successful business coaches work with clients full-time. For example, many coaches continue to run their own businesses and coach clients part-time – whether to give back to the community, better understand their own work, or generate additional income.
The way you engage with your clients can also vary. Here are 5 examples of how business coaches operate:
- Regular face-to-face sessions: Some coaches business coaches prefer to set regular weekly or monthly one-to-one appointments or group coaching with clients – for example on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.
- On-demand coaching services: Other business coaches prefer to provide services on demand – for example, offering coaching for one-off events or emergencies like investor pitches.
- Asynchronous coaching: Many coaches work with clients on an asynchronous basis – providing coaching, feedback, and advice via online content like self-led video courses or personalized one-to-one videos, such as Loom recordings.
- Coaching communities: Coaches looking to serve a wider audience might choose to start a coaching community – either as a standalone product or alongside their other coaching services. Clients who join a business coaching community usually pay a subscription to access a range of content, ranging from community discussions to coaching Q&As, live sessions, and more.
- Fractional services: Other business coaches may join a client’s team for a short period of time to provide hands-on project or long-term support to make a significant impact on a business.
There are a wide range of coaching strategies you can choose from too. Here are just a handful of examples:
- Coaching specific teams (e.g. sales) to improve results
- Working with executives to uncover their vision
- Helping small business CEOs to grow their businesses
- Collaborating with the leadership team to elevate their company’s brand
- Focusing on key team members to optimize their performance
Many coaches offer several different services or cater to different audiences. For example, Starla Sireno, an NYC-based Executive Coach works with organizations, individuals, and teams.
Her work with clients is also varied, as she explains on her website:
“My conversations with clients weave seemingly disparate worlds together – we might focus on business strategy, organizational dynamics or, just as easily, swerve into behavioral science or wisdom traditions.”
Starla Sireno, Executive Coach and Creator Educator
To help you structure effective business coaching programs and productive coaching sessions, we’ve got a whole range of free templates you can use.
Top Tip: If you’re not sure how to teach and present new information to help your clients internalize and remember it, our guide to instructional design models will help too.
Step 4: Build your coaching offer
When you’ve got an idea of the structure you’ll use to deliver your business coaching services, you can work on building an irresistible offer.
Your offer will ideally include:
- Your service structure
- Communication channels
- Timing
- Pricing
For example, if you’re offering business coaching as one-to-one sessions with individual clients, your offer might be something like this:
- 1x free discovery call
- Monthly 60-minute 1:1 coaching sessions
- Email support
- 6 months package
- Price range: $1,500 – $3000
Business coach Laura Jean has a range of one-to-one coaching packages on her website, like this one pictured below. For each package, Laura Jean outlines exactly what each package includes – and what outcomes entrepreneurs can expect.
To level up your business coaching offer, create 3 tiers that allow your ideal customers to choose the option that works for them.
Play around with creating an entry level, mid-level, and high-tier offer that packages your coaching services in a way that’s clear, easy-to-understand, and a no-brainer for your clients.
For example, higher tier offers might include:
- More contact hours
- Additional resources e.g. a workbook or templates
- Session recordings and notes
- Access to a coaching community
Make sure you’re pricing your services accordingly – if you’re offering more access, hours, or resources, you need to be charging higher prices.
How to know what to charge as a business coach
Figuring out how much to charge clients can be a sensitive topic for new business coaches. Here are a few tips to help.
- Price out your time: Try to understand the cost of your time at a high level. If you have a full-time job or a business, what’s your hourly rate? To do the calculation, divide your salary plus dividends or bonuses by the number of hours worked. This is the lowest hourly rate you should be charging (unless you’re working with nonprofits or charities, etc.).
- Charge for your expertise: As a coach, you’re charging based on value. Your knowledge and expertise took you years to build – and you’re the best at what you do. Does $500 an hour sound high? What if four sessions with you helped a startup founder raise a $4 million financing round? Suddenly, $500 an hour sounds like an amazing deal.
- Do your research: Talk to other coaches in your niche to understand what they charge. You can also research online to see what other business coaches are offering for their services – many coaches have their pricing on their websites. This can give you an idea of what your potential clients are ready to pay to help you start.
Don’t let the question of pricing slow you down. Pick a number and work on finding your first client. You can always repackage your services, rework your pricing, and increase your rates later on.
You can also experiment with different pricing models, such as:
- One-time payments
- Subscriptions
- Retainers
- Project-based pricing
- Equity
- Performance bonuses
Your offers and pricing are likely to change as your business grows and you start working with more clients – you don’t have to have all the answers right now.
To find out more about how to price your coaching services, download our Complete Guide to Pricing.
Step 5: Invest in your personal brand
When you become a business coach, you also become a brand.
You are the face of your coaching services – and your expertise, skills, and experience are ultimately what will convince your customers to work with you.
To build a personal brand, work on defining your vision, mission and value propositions. Here are a few questions to ask to help you get started:
- Why did you decide to become a coach?
- What motivates you?
- What do you want to be known for?
- Where are you going and how are you going to help others get there too?
A personal brand can not only position you as a successful coach – but also help you develop trust with your target clients, build your network, attract more prospective clients, and charge premium rates for your work.
All your content, communication, and marketing should tie back to your brand. Your target audience should be able to instantly recognize who you are, what you stand for, and how you can help them.
“We don’t need to make it harder on ourselves by creating this image that we’re so professional and rigid; no one can connect with that… We need to be personable and connect with our target audience because they’ll probably never meet you in person.”
Diamond Lee, Thinkific Creator Educator
By having a clear message and mission, you can establish a powerful personal brand over time. It doesn’t happen overnight – but the benefits are truly long-lasting.
To get started, take a look at our detailed How to Build a Personal Brand guide for entrepreneurs, coaches, and Creator Educators – and download the free personal branding template.
Step 6: Create an online coaching program
One of the best ways to convert your coaching leads into actual clients is to help them solve a small, simple problem while demonstrating your business coaching technique.
In the world of online business coaching services, the best way to do this is to create an online course or a digital download like a guide, workbook, or template. This is an asset you can share with anyone – and it acts as a lead magnet to get your prospective customers’ email or contact details.
When you’re thinking about creating a lead magnet, try to choose something that covers these criteria:
- A resource that best shows off your expertise
- Something that will be genuinely helpful to your clients
- Something actionable to deliver a quick win to your clients
As well as using coaching products to generate leads, you can also use them as products to open up additional revenue streams for your coaching business.
While one-to-one coaching is hugely impactful, it’s not very scalable. Your earnings are limited to how many hours you have in a day. This is where digital products like online courses, online communities, and online memberships come in.
We have tons of resources to help you create your first digital product for your coaching business, here are a few to get you started.
- What is a Digital Product: Understanding the Basics for 2024
- How to Create Digital Products
- The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Selling Digital Products
- Best Digital Products to Sell Online
If you’re learning how to become a business coach and figuring out which digital products you want to create and sell, choose a platform that makes creating your course, community, or membership easy.
Thinkific is the perfect beginner-friendly tool for creating and selling any type of digital coaching product you can think of – with handy features like AI-driven content creation tools and a simple drag-and-drop editor to help you build out an engaging learning experience your audience will love and publish it right away.
You can even use Thinkific to create custom landing pages and a website for your digital coaching products too. No coding skills required Watch how easy it is to create a Thinkific course here.
Step 7: Market your coaching business
Now you’ve got everything set up – from strategy to your personal brand to digital products, it’s time to get more coaching clients.
There are a wide range of marketing channels you can use to help you connect with your ideal customers, including:
- Industry conferences
- Local business networks
- Email and newsletters
- Paid ads
The trick to marketing your coaching services is to start small and scale up. Pick 1-3 marketing channels to start with and test them out to see what works for you – when you start seeing results on one channel and a particular type of content, double down on it.
Don’t do something because you see it working for others… Examine where you are and where you want to go. Then, get honest and willing to be your most authentic self.”
Diamond Lee, Thinkific Creator Educator
Word-of-mouth and referrals
One of the best ways to get new clients is through word-of-mouth and referrals from your existing network and clients. Make it easy for people to refer you by sharing referral links and even templates they can send to their network – you could also offer referral incentives too like a discount code or freebie.
Networking and Industry events
Attending industry and networking events gives you a chance to test (and tweak) your pitch to see if your initial assumptions were correct. It’s a great way to quickly see if there’s a market for your business coaching services – and collect feedback from potential clients too. You could also join local meetups – either in-person or virtual – for relevant industries too.
Social media
Utilize social media to help grow your business, nurture leads, and build trust with your target audience. For many business coaches LinkedIn will be the best channel for finding clients and building a personal brand. Many coaches also find TikTok a great resource for generating attention. Or to get exposure to large businesses and their executives, you might consider using X (Twitter).
Pick the social media channel where your target audience most like to hang out online – and create content that speaks directly to their needs, challenges, and pain points to help set your services up as the ideal solution for their needs.
Email and blog content
As a business coach, you have valuable expertise to share with the world. To help you build a personal brand, consider starting a newsletter and blog. A newsletter can be a powerful way to turn your website visitors and social media followers into contacts, helping you to build an email list and opening up opportunities to market to them in the future. If someone subscribes to your email, they’re more likely to purchase your digital products or hire you as a business coach.
And if you’re creating content for your newsletter, why not repurpose it into blog posts? Creating a blog can help you test and clarify your coaching ideas, as well as attracting organic traffic from search engines.
For more ideas, check out our complete guide on top ways to market and increase sales for your online course.
Step 8: Collect feedback
The only way to ensure your business coaching practice is on the right track is to gather as much feedback from your customers and audience as possible, especially in the early stages of starting your business.
To make sure you’re collecting feedback regularly, set up a system:
- After every pitch (especially unsuccessful ones), ask what sounded interesting in your offer and what didn’t
- Request written testimonials from your past or current clients
- Nudge people to leave reviews
- Send out surveys to your audience, your contacts and your customers to ensure you’re on the right track
- Ask for feedback in your newsletter or social media posts
Use feedback to help you continually refine your offer and your messaging to help you better speak to your ideal customers – and win more clients.
Step 9: Analyze and improve
Your coaching practice is not for everyone. So inevitably, you’ll receive some negative feedback at some point. Everyone does and it’s ok.
Make sure to sort constructive criticism from emotional reactions and use the former to create a process that consistently integrates changes to your practice. Track how your feedback changes over time. The more you can learn from feedback – good or bad – the easier it will be for you to create an effective and impactful coaching business.
Start an online business coaching practice today
It’s easier than ever to become a business coach thanks to the wide range of resources, certifications, and tools on offer today. Use this guide to help you get started as a business coach – and build the coaching practice of your dreams.
If you’re looking to start creating digital products, Thinkific has everything you need to get set up and launch your first scalable coaching product today. The easy-to-use platform is already helping tens of thousands of coaches, creators, and educators build deeply impactful and engaging learning experiences online.
Try Thinkific’s coaching and webinar features for free here.
This blog was originally published in November 2022, it’s since been updated in December 2024 to include the newest information.