#lifecoachschool

Hello everyone, David Fernandez here. I'm the founder of The Coach Your Way School and the author of The #1 Factor that Determines Your Success in Business, which by the way you can get for free once you join our Facebook group. I’ll add a link to the description so you can do so a little later.

Welcome to Part One of How to Start a Successful Coaching Business

These are three part video series where I'll be breaking down the business of coaching for you. In part one, today's video, I'm going to be talking about the structure of the business.

1. How to figure out the problems that you and only you can solve for people.

2. How to define your ideal clients based on the problems that you can solve for them.

3. How to structure your packages, your pricing and your offer.

I’m even going to be sharing what some of the standard rates are for beginner coaches, so you have a ballpark idea of how much you want to charge at the beginning. In part number two of the series, I'm going to be talking about the sales process and the two things that must happen consistently in order for you to have a thriving practice.  In part three I'm going to be talking about the marketing process, and how to consistently get qualified prospects that are ready to buy and eager to work with you. So if you are ready to learn more about how to start a successful coaching business, stick around because this video is for you.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, this video is going to be all about how to structure your business. In order to do that, the first thing that we need to do is figure out what are the problems that we can help people solve. What are those things that we have expertise on or that are natural in us, that we can turn around and teach others so they can have success in those areas too?

The first step is to list your assets.

The best way to do this is by doing a simple exercise that I like to do with my clients, which is called: Listing Out Your Assets. So what are your assets?  I want you to think about your assets as pretty much everything that you know or have expertise on. Or things that you have done in the past and you don't necessarily have to be an expert on, but you have been through a certain process and acquired a certain amount of knowledge about the topic, whatever that is. I want you to list that out on a piece of paper. Also some personal traits such as; I'm great at organizing, I'm great at planning, I'm great at eating healthy, exercising, saving money, sticking to a budget. Just do a personal inventory and list everything so you have a list of these things and something to work with.

The second step would be to figure out who your ideal client is.

This would be as simple as just listing out a few traits that a person would need in order to be an ideal client for you.  

Ask yourself the following questions elaborating a bit and using your logic:

They have to be looking for a solution, right?

So is it a person that needs help getting organized?

What is this person going through and why would they be searching for this type of service?

What's going on in their lives? What type of life do they have?

Are they married? Are they not married? Do they have pets? Do they have kids?.

Maybe they don't have a lot of time. Your ideal client has to be looking for what you are offering. In this case, your organizational skills. Just to stick with that same example. What other traits would be ideal for your ideal client to have? Well, first of all, they have to have money. If they don't have money to pay for your services, then they're not an ideal client, right? So that's key. You may want someone who has a positive attitude, you may want someone who is somewhat of an action taker, even if it's in a different area.

Keep listing out all the things that come to mind that you would like your ideal client to have. We already listed out the top two things regardless of the service that you offer an ideal client would have to have. They have the problem that you can solve, right? And they're looking for a solution for it. They have money to hire somebody to solve that problem for them. Now that you have figured out the problem or number of problems that you can help people solve in step number one and in step number two, you have created an ideal client profile with the people that you want and can help. It is always your choice, never forget that  You choose who you want to work with.

Now it's time to create an offer or a number of offers for your prospects to choose from when the time is right.

So let's start with a call structure. This is just pretty much you figuring out how many times you are going to want to talk to your clients once they buy in. Is it going to be once a week? Once every other week? Once a month?  What type of structure would actually fit your lifestyle and the way you want to structure your business.  So I'll tell you right from the get go, a standard practice is once a week. You meet for 60 minutes once a week. That is four calls a month or four hours a month. That is actually a great place to start and pretty much all coaches offer that as a standard package. Then what they do is offer variations of that package based on different pricing, different timings for the calls or different frequency for the calls depending on the client's needs.

All these variations to the standard package are what is usually called or referred to as The Coaching Menu.

Just think of it as going to a restaurant and being handed a menu. You have all these different meal options with different prices, right? So there is something for everyone. Based on that your standard package would be one 60 minute call a week. So that is four calls a month. That would be your standard package. And then you can package number one in three months of that. So it would be 12 calls altogether for each month. 12 calls of that is this price. Then you have variation number one, which would still be three months of coaching, but instead of once a week, it will be once every other week.

So that's half the number of calls. That would be six calls and that is a different price. You can have a 45 minute call or you can have a 90 minute call. You can have six months, you can have a whole year, but standard is your three month package.  You have your six months package and depending on what you're doing, you'll have a whole year. And by the way, if you're confused about any of this stuff, I created a free handout that you can download. Again it is free. I have a link in the description. Just go ahead and get it downloaded so you can see all the notes for this training. I attached a sample coaching manual for you to use freely. There's no copyrights or anything on that handout. You can use whatever is in that handout in your practice. So that way you have a visual of what the coaching manual would look like. You can just recreate that and attach it to an email when the time is right.

The next step of structuring your coaching menu is the pricing.

A lot of people ask online  how much a coach makes and how much a coaching session is. So I am going to spill the beans here and I'm sure a lot of people are going to be mad at me for divulging all of this information. The standard rate for a coach is about $250 a session. That would be $1,000 a month for four sessions. So if you start with that, a thousand dollars a month for four sessions, then you can create different variations depending on your offers.  Not everybody is going to be able to afford something like that. So then you have to create variations. For example, instead of four calls, you do the two calls, once every other week for half the price. So for $500, somebody can get monthly training from you or coaching only less time.

Another thing that I like to do instead of doing 60 minute calls is to do a 90 minute call for those other packages that are shorter.  Because 60 minutes sometimes is not enough. It just allows you a little bit of leeway and freedom on the timing. You don't have to be looking at your watch every 60 minutes.  So that is something that you can do for the variations of your standard package. You just play with time, frequency and money. So there is something for everyone, just like a restaurant menu. You don't want to be the coach that charges $10,000 a month but has no clients. I learned that the hard way, believe me.

When I first started doing this, I was charging way too much for most people and I wasn't flexible enough.Then I learned that I needed to be creative. I invite you to be creative with your manual. Once you see the handout menu that I'm providing for free, again, the link is down in the description, just download it, look at it, and then you'll see what I mean. You can get creative

with that. You can do whatever you want, it's your practice. Use the stuff in the handout as a guideline. Nothing is set in stone. Be flexible, you know, adapt. A lot of people are going to want to work with you. Believe it or not. People that are looking for solutions actively will want to work with you. If they feel like you are the right person for them. A lot of people will have the barrier of money. So you don’t want to work with them. If they really want to work with you, then you'll have to give them options.

Something to keep in mind, I think is a tip that I wish somebody had given me at the beginning: Just be flexible.

If you are completely new to coaching, I suggest you watch another video I made called, What is a Life Coach, What Does a Life Coach Do and What is Coaching All About? I have a link up here for you after you finish watching this video.

In my next video, which is part two of this three part video series, I'm going to be talking about the sales process  and the two things that must happen consistently in order for you to first have a business and second to be able to grow it. So if you haven't yet, Please Subscribe and hit the notification bell, so you're notified when that video is available. And please don't forget to check out the video that I mentioned to you earlier, and also this one, which I know you'll love, on How to Become a Life Coach.

Hello everyone, Dave Fernandez here. I'm the founder of The Coach Your Way School and the author of The #1 Factor That Determines Your Success In Business, which you can get for free once you join our Facebook group - I'll add a link to the description so you can do so a little later.

Welcome, and in today's video I'm going to talk about how to become a life coach. This a question I see a lot of people asking despite the fact that this is a very fast-growing industry - growing for the past few years. It's a question which coaches seem to take for granted - in spite of the growth of this industry, we assume people know what coaching is about, what a coach can do for you, and how to become a coach, if that's a career path one wants to pursue. Hopefully in this video I'll be able to help you address the question: how to become a life coach?

I would like to first address the concept of desire. How badly do you really want to become a coach? This is a question that a lot of us should ask ourselves before starting a new journey, or a new project, or setting a new goal. How badly do we actually want this for ourselves? No matter what you're trying to do, there's going to be a certain number of challenges that will come up. And that's just life, right? With coaching, there are always a number of skills that need to be learned – along with a number of challenges. As this is a new skill to learn, mistakes will be made - that’s just the nature of things. Having said that, that brings me to the second part of this concept of the desire - knowing if you have what it takes in order to become a coach. We conduct our lives by learning new skills. But, in the case of higher education, going to college may seem pointless. People may leave college and begin a new job, just to learn they have no passion for it and that they cannot stand the thought of doing that for the rest of their lives. This is why I'm sharing this with you as your coach.

So,

How badly do you want it?

Do you have what it takes?

Are you passionate about it?

Training: To Be, Or Not To Be?

Let's talk about training, which I'm sure a lot of you are concerned with. Should I get certified or not? This is not a regulated industry, so you do not have to get certified. You don't need a license to become a coach. If you’re an expert in a field or achieved a certain level of success, you can become a mentor to someone seeking out info pertaining to your skills. Transactions can begin this way.

On the other hand, some people wish to go through a formal certification program in order to learn the skills necessary to coach and to learn business skills - marketing, sales, etc. For those of you looking to getting into some type of certification program or formal training, let me explain how this works. I think this is the best way to become a coach because going through formal training will give you a very global overview of the whole business.

A good coaching program will have four things:

Coaching Training

Business Training

Marketing Training

Sales Training

1. Coaching Training

Through coaching training, you’ll learn a number of techniques, systems, methodologies, and psychological principles which will ultimately help your client to learn how to help themselves. You're teaching them how to fish, if you will. You're not just fishing for them. You learn how to coach the person to get from point A to point B. You learn how to define goals, create plans, schedule tasks for them to complete, keep them on track, and be an accountability partner for them, etc. If you want to learn a bit more about what a coach is, what a coach does, and what coaching is all about, you can watch this video right here (linked in video). I go a little deeper into all of these topics. Another thing that you learn in coaching training is how to organize your knowledge and structure it in such a way that you can package it/create workshops/webinars/programs for others to learn from.

2. Business Training

Business training is where you take the time to define two things: the audience that you can help and what it is you can help them with. This helps with the message and marketing later on. Once you have those two things - you want to learn how to structure your practice. That’s going to be dependent on you and your lifestyle - what you want your life to be like and your practice to be like. You go to work on what's called the coaching menu, which consists of your offers, packaging, and pricing. An example – you can offer a number of calls per month. They can be 60 minutes, 45 minutes, 90 minutes - up to you. Once you figure that out, you want to create packages around your coaching structure. If you're going to have one call a week per person, you may offer a three-month package; 12 sessions for a certain price. Once you know the pricing and structure, you can look at your schedule and know/plan how many clients you'll be able to realistically work with. We all have our limits; there are only so many hours in a day that one can be coaching.

3. Marketing Training

With marketing training, you’ll learn how to attain clients, whether it's going to be organic or via paid ads - through referrals or word of mouth. It could be just one way or a combination of all of them - that's what you learn in the marketing side. A key to marketing will be knowing the audience you want to target and exactly what it is that you can offer to them. The business step helps target an audience, making it easier to craft a message tailored to them.

4. Sales Training

In sales training, you’ll learn the art of reeling customers in. You will learn how to make strategy calls. A strategy call is when you invite somebody to have a free conversation with you to see if the two of you are a match and if you have what it takes to solve their problem, should they become your client. Let's say you're talking with a friend/acquaintance and they mention that they are going through a hardship or they have a problem that you have expertise on. Once you're done talking, you mention that you help people overcome those type of problems. You can explain that you are a coach and invite them to have a conversation with you. This would be an invitation for a strategy call. At the end of the strategy call comes a sales pitch. The sales pitch may consist of a tentative plan. You can invite the client to consider the possibility of continuing to work with you. Once you help them strategize around a certain problem, you offer to help them implement this plan. Would you like to continue talking until you achieve this goal?

Summary and “The Internship”

These are the main takeaways from training; training will teach you how to effectively make an offer, present your coaching/structure/pricing in an effective way while overcoming certain objections that the person may have, and how to enroll the person. Something I like to do in my program is called "the internship.” Before training is finished, I ask the trainee to find two to four people and work with them for free in order to start honing their skills. These people must be strangers which they help for free. This creates a less stressful environment as there’s no pressure of making a mistake under a money exchange. An internship during training is very beneficial. The results are amazing. As a matter of fact, that's how I started. I started with four people and I coached them for free in exchange for testimonials. I offered a month worth of sessions and we worked on a particular problem, and at the end of those four sessions, they gave me testimonials in exchange for the sessions - it was phenomenal. It built up my confidence like nothing else. Internships are required because they are a key to development.

The only difference between "the internship" and working with a client after becoming certified is the fact that you charge for sessions. Usually during the sales training, you get a sales script which guides you through the process of selling - the process of conducting a strategy call. The script helps you gather all the information you need from the client in order to assess if you can truly help them. If it’s feasible and you guys are a good match, it guides you on how to present your offer, especially if there are any objections or questions that the person may have.

Suggested Readings for Life Coaches

The first book I read about personal development is Jack Canfield's The Success Principle. This book blew my mind and motivated me to become a coach. There's an exercise in the beginning that helps you figure out what it is that you are good at and how to use that knowledge to find what you want to do with your life. I highly recommend that you read this book. The book touches on psychology, business, marketing, money issues, etc. Truly a wonderful book about personal development.

The Prosperous Coach is a very good book. It's focuses more on the business side of coaching and the structure of how to enroll clients - not the art of coaching. It's mostly about the business itself - highly recommend if you want to understand how coaching can be structured.

Another book is The Coaching Habit, Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever. It discusses a seven-question coaching process; mostly for corporate executives. The process is key, regardless. Even if you take away a few questions, it’s still worth the read.

Mind Over Money; this book is phenomenal in helping you understand money issues, or, money traumas as they call it. I highly recommend it. It changed my life and it changed my beliefs about money - how I deal with money and issues that I had, charging my clients, etc.

Sales Letter; I believe this book encompasses everything you need to know about marketing in order to succeed as a coach. If you read this book, you'll become a better marketer than 90% of people. I highly recommend it, and I'll add links to all of these books in the description for your convenience.

Hello everyone, Dave Fernandez here. I'm the founder of The Coach Your Way School and the author of The #1 Factor That Determines Your Success In Business, which you can get for free once you join our Facebook group - I'll add a link to the description so you can do so a little later. Welcome, and in today's video I'm going to talk about a question that I see being asked a lot online, which is, what is a Life Coach? What does a Life Coach do and what is coaching all about? In order to do that, we're going to have to start by defining what a coach is.

A coach is a combination of a mentor, a psychologist, and an accountability partner.

A mentor because usually, the coach has experienced success in the area that the coachee is trying to get into, and has taken the time to break down the success into steps that they can teach others, so that they can also achieve the same success. Or the coach has a set of skills that can turn any goal into a defined plan that can be broken into tasks and things that can be scheduled, and take anyone through that path and get them to achieve that goal. That's why the coach is kind of a mentor to the coachee.

A psychologist because: once they start working together and have defined a plan for them to work towards, there's a number of things that the coachee is going to have to start doing, that are completely new to them and force them to start expanding their comfort zone. And usually, those leaps into the unknown, is something that will require a lot of inner, deep, psychological work.

An accountability partner because: once the plan is done and all the tasks are scheduled, the job of the coach is to get the person to start taking action on the plan and the tasks that they committed to doing in the timeframe specified. It's a matter of keeping them on track and measuring their progress, helping them along the way by providing resources or solutions to some of the problems that they'll encounter.

Now that we have defined what a coach is, let's talk about what a coach does. It can be summarized in the following four steps:

Define Goals

Create Plans to Achieve Goals

Execution Phase

Accountability

Define Goals

The first step is helping clients define their goals. This is pretty standard, usually happening on the first or second session with a new client. A very simple way of doing this is simply asking your client where they see themselves in six months to a year, and then starting the conversation from there. Usually, that's going to lead to a lot of different things, but specifically, if the client is not very clear as to what their goals are (and that's why they're hiring the coach). If that's the case, the coach utilizes some techniques in order to start gathering more information about what the client is looking to achieve, or they create some type of system.

In my case, I have a five-step system that is made up of a number of templates that I give my clients to fill out, and we start the conversation there. Usually, what happens is that at the end of the five steps they'll have a very clear plan as to how to accomplish this goal within a year. Another way about it, especially if the client is a bit more clear about the goals that they want to achieve (they may have a number of goals that they're looking to achieve in the next six months to a year), is to ask what would be the one goal of all these goals, that, if achieved, would be a game changer? It would change your life - it would transform the life of your family and it would make all other goals super achievable. Because you achieved this one goal, which one of those goals would actually have that effect in your life? That is a pretty powerful question.

Create Plans to Achieve Goals

Number two; helping the client create a plan to achieve this goal. Once you have taken the time to define the goals, having either picked the one that is going to be the life-changer goal, or the number of goals that they want to achieve, you help create a plan around this goal. You start with the end in mind. What is the end goal, what does it look like? Let’s make it as specific as possible, so we know when we're there and can avoid guessing, so as not to back track. It could be a simple brainstorming session. So, this is the goal, we made it very specific, now what would I have to do in order to achieve this goal? You ask that question, and then you both get to work on brainstorming all the tasks that will have to be done or completed in order to get there. Once you have completed the list, you can go ahead and start scheduling this task. Prioritizing every single one of these tasks; you start asking the question, which one task could I complete this week that will move my business forward the most? And usually, that does the trick. Things start jumping out of this list and you can see where their priorities are. You can then chronologically plan. A lot of things are going to come up along the way that need to be added, and things will become irrelevant after a while. Once you start getting the ball rolling, a lot of these tasks will become unnecessary.

Execution Phase

Step number three is helping the client through the execution phase. Once you have the goal defined in step number one, then you have the plan laid out with a list of tasks and everything's been scheduled in your calendar. Hopefully you're sharing a calendar with your client so you both can keep track of things together. Now, it's a matter of helping the client perform the task in a timely manner. Some of these tasks are going to be new to the client and a bit outside their comfort zone, so they're going to need some moral support. It's more like psychological support where you're going to have to stop and talk about it, and see what feelings are coming up to start seeing where the resistance is coming from. It can be a matter of skills that they lack or psychological issues they have resulting in this resistance to completing tasks. Throughout the execution process, a lot of things will come up. That's where the coach will help, instead of the client working by themselves and procrastinating tasks. Now they are being held accountable; they have somebody that is watching over them and helping them through this task - expecting them to succeed. This execution phase can be a little challenging - we're talking about things that the client has never done. The planning and other steps are vital, but primarily, it's the execution - the lack of ability to execute, stay on track, and achieve your goals in a timely manner - that needs to be addressed.

Accountability

Number four - one of the most important roles that the coach has - is being an accountability partner for the clients. During the execution phase, there's a lot of back and forth, as the client is getting used to having a new schedule and starting a number of activities that they may not be too comfortable doing. That's where the accountability role comes in, where you're checking with your coach and communicating if you're experiencing hurdles. Occasionally, clients can be sensitive to feedback as things are not happening and expectations are not being met. Sometimes hard conversations have to happen, and that's what an accountability partner has to do. Another thing to keep in mind is that 80% of a coach’s job involves removing internal blocks that the client may experience as they start executing their plan. The funny thing is that a lot of times, there's no way to really see any of this until clients start taking action and hitting roadblocks. You start doing deeper work, the psychology part of the job, in order to uncover what's going on and what's getting in their way of performing. Once you start removing some of these things, the growth becomes exponential; a lot of these blocks are no longer there or at the very least, the client has learned ways to deal with them effectively, so they can help themselves as they're going through the process. It's very important to keep that in mind.

Conclusion

To recap, the job of the coach can be summarized in four steps. Number one; they help define goals at the beginning of the journey. Number two, they help you create a plan by breaking down all the tasks that need to be accomplished in order to reach the goal, schedule things, and attain a clear view as to what has to happen in order to achieve the goal. Number three is the execution phase, where you help the client through the whole process- help them overcome hurdles, help them develop skills necessary for them to perform. And number four is the accountability part, where every week there's a check-in session where progress is measured, and we see where everything stands and what needs to be done, or changed, or talked about, in order to keep moving forward towards the goal.

If you're looking to become a coach yourself, or you're in the process of becoming one currently, and have an inner voice causing you to doubt whether you have what it takes to pull this off, that is called imposter syndrome. I have made a video on how to overcome imposter syndrome with a four-step formula. Make sure you watch it once you're done here. 

I hope you enjoyed this video and that it helped you better understand what seems to be some of the most asked questions about this topic; what is a coach, what does a coach do, and what is coaching all about. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to my channel, and hit the notification bell so you're the first one to know next time there's a new video available.