Do you run your coaching business like a business, a hobby or a non-profit?

I have always enjoyed teaching, coaching and mentoring. I started teaching when I was 10 – I was explaining math homework to my elementary school classmates. By high school I was a math tutor, and in college I was hired to teach technology and math. In my corporate job I taught software tools, web design and many other technology-related things to clients and colleagues.

I enjoyed teaching, was good at it, and that is all I did – I taught. I either volunteered or was paid by an employer to teach, so I wasn’t working on the business side of teaching/coaching. However, as soon as I started coaching on my own, I saw the need to not only be the best coach I can be, but also be the best business person I can be.

There are many coaches out there who are great at what they do, but they don’t treat their coaching business as a business. They feel that clients should come to them, because they are so good at what they do. These coaches don’t market, they don’t promote themselves. As a result, they have almost no clients.

Here are the steps that got me and my clients on track with running a coaching business:

– Understand that you are running a business.

– Create your business and marketing plans. Now that you have a business, you need to have a plan. What is your business mission? What are your services? What are your products? What is the optimal mix for your products/services?

How will you market your business? How will you generate leads for your business? How will you close sales for your business? What is in your marketing funnel? What do you still need to create for your funnel?

– Start working on implementing your business and marketing plans. You might need some help – get yourself books and ebooks, check out different classes, attend a few teleseminars, create yourself a masterminding group.

Now is a great time to start implementing the above points – commit to making 2006 the year when your coaching business takes off and start working on it NOW!

P.S. Do you want to Market Your Coaching Business, Free? Here is a FREE Tutorial, How To Market Your Coaching Business

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.