People frequently lump coaching into the same category as training, education and tutoring, but coaching is much more than imparting information. If you are thinking of starting a coaching business from home, you need to think about how to set up your business and structure how to help your clients.
What is a Coach?
Coaching is a calling to give support, guidance and encouragement throughout the client’s development process. Coaches want to see their clients succeed and achieve their goals, and they have a strong desire to make people and life better. That is precisely why coaches can command a higher rate than tutors.
It doesn’t matter if you are an athletic coach or coaching for spirituality, lifestyle changes, nutrition, fitness, wellness, or even parenting. The point of a coach in all of these disparate areas is to lend support when perhaps no one else can or will.
Do you have what it takes to be an effective coach? Be there in your clients lowest moments when they feel they can’t achieve their goals, and bring inspiration, motivation, and encouragement?
Yes? That’s great! Let’s get started.
A Coaching Business from…Home?
Okay, the title of this blog describes starting a coaching business from home, but you might not work from home at all.
It depends entirely on what you are coaching. If you’re coaching athletics, you might be working from a stadium or track. Lifestyle and other sectors might mean you work in your clients’ homes. If you’re coaching in spirituality, you might work from anywhere with a spiritual connection. It might even be the local woods.
That fact is that starting a coaching business home means there are no initial set-up costs. You can effectively work from anywhere. You can even do your coaching and support over a video call if that’s what will work for you and your clients.
Alternatively, you could always offer coaching from your home if you have a dedicated workspace to keep things professional.
What Kind of Coaching?
The chances are that you already know which type of coaching you’re aiming for because you will already have the skills and knowledge to back you up. But what if you want to specialise in a specific sub-category or diversify into other niches with your particular set of skills?
Most, if not all coaching will fall into one if not more of these niches:
- Life – and it’s such a broad category.
- Spirituality – and it’s not all about religion.
- Mental Health – mental health is a huge thing now.
- Relationships – no relations is all sunshine and roses
- Personal Development – Life is not just about living. It’s learning too
- Health & Wellness – people can need coaching through taking time for self-care
- Wealth – Do you know how many people don’t know how to make the most of their money?
- Career – So many people get lost when trying to progress or change careers
- Business & Work –
- Skills –
And each niche has at least ten different sub-niches.
However, if your niche tends towards Personal Development, that could include particular Skills that are also useful in Career and Business.
On the other hand, you could choose to focus your energy on an in-demand but underrepresented area of coaching, such as relationship coaching for a specific type or period of the relationship. For example, non-binary or polyamorous relationships. Perhaps post-children marriage coaching for getting back to each other after the baby stage – it’s a real struggle for so many.
A broad reach or a narrow one, you need to decide how to focus your talents to make a coaching business work for you.
Where Does Your coaching Business Fit In The Market?
If you’re looking at coaching as your next step, you need to find where your particular brand fits, what you’re offering to clients of your coaching business and how you can support them in improving their lives. What coaching need will your business fulfil?
An interesting point to understand is that how you frame your coaching skills will also impact your clients. For example, perhaps “Life Coaching” isn’t particularly popular or in-demand. So many people still consider it a frivolous thing, as if everyone should work everything out perfectly for themselves. However, if you drill down into the subdivisions, there could be a demand for child and teen coaching, with parents trying to help their kids through the trials of school and life.
Dedication to Coaching Clients
Your coaching business will affect your time. Unless you are coaching people through a particularly turbulent life event or a struggling relationship, you can usually set reasonable boundaries for when they can contact you and when you are available for consultations and coaching sessions. Being dedicated to helping your clients achieve their goals doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your life and responsibilities to succeed in your coaching business.
However, you will have to allocate regular and significant hours to your clients to ensure you can support them. What is the point of someone paying a coaching fee when you are only available to help them in a strictly scheduled session? Coaching is more than training or tutoring. It provides mental and emotional support through a person’s growth journey. So you had better have the time to deliver on it.
Set your availability and stick to it, you won’t make any more profit by deviating, and your dedication to other areas of your home life will be reflected in your time for clients.
Starting a Coaching Business
There is so much more to starting a coaching business than I’ve mentioned here. However, the key to creating a coaching business from home is starting small with minimal set-up costs. A booking system with your availability, a place or digital location to coach clients, and a little bit of marketing. It won’t break the bank and could steer you towards a thriving coaching business.
But be cautious. Even if you have a proven track record of coaching people, not everyone can build a thriving business from it. So start small and target your niche market.
Building your coaching business from home allows you the freedom to fail without fearing financial losses. And everyone knows one of the barriers to beginning a business is economic instability or the loss of capital. Another barrier is fear of failure.
When you have everything to gain from trying and maybe failing or succeeding, having the ability to recover, both mentally and financially, feels less like a failure and more of a learning experience.
Figuratively, everything starts at home. Why shouldn’t your new coaching business?