How to start a coaching business in 2023

In this video. I’m gonna show you the fastest way to start a coaching business online in 2023. Whether you’re a business life or relationship coach, or any other form of coaching, the key steps are similar.

The DIY Trap

The problem is that starting a coaching business, gaining your first clients and getting to sustainable growth is, difficult. There’s a lot of technology and tools required. There are new skills like marketing and sales required. Developing your own unique coaching methods and systems are also required.

All of those and more need to be done. But each can lead into what I call the DIY trap quicksand that bogs you down and slows your progress to a halt. Here’s an example of how many coaches get stuck in the DIY trap. You discover a critical element in your business needs. Let’s say a sales funnel. In the beginning, you probably don’t know anything about sales funnels, but you know you need one. So you start reading and buying courses to learn all about sales.

The Shifts

As soon as you do that, you get bombarded with ads all about the must have tools for sales funnels, or the gurus selling their $2,000 courses about how to build sales funnels. They seem like they have all the answers and secrets. So you buy some tools and courses and dive in. Then you start to see that for each thing you learn, there’s a dozen others, one layer deeper that seem important.

Take the simplest example, a button on your funnel page. How big should it be? What color is the best to grab attention? Should the button have motion? Where should it lead when clicked? How do you track when it’s clicked to see if it’s working? How do you track it in Facebook or Google or other places to see if your ads are working?

Maybe it’s time to buy some specific courses on conversions and tracking, because that sounds important. Do you feel yourself sinking into the quicksand of the DIY trap. Over your first funnel in a simple button? As I paint that picture, I feel the pain myself. For my first several years trying to build my online business, I was stuck in the DIY trap too.

Imagine that button example repeated across dozens and dozens of areas, months and years of time. Invested tens of thousands of dollars spent and no real revenue to show for. Inspired by one of the all-time classic episodes of Seinfeld where Jerry tells George, if every instinct you have is wrong. Then the opposite would have to be right.

I completely changed my approach and that’s when my business finally started to grow. Three key changes made all the difference for building and scaling a coaching business. But sure to stay until the end. The last tip will show you the fastest way to get your coaching business launched. Not in years or months, but within days.

First Shift: Launch Before You Build

The first shift is to launch before you build anything. It seems counterintuitive. We all want everything to be done and perfect before we start marketing our business, but that’s the biggest mistake new coaches can make. It’s the mistake I made over the course of several years. When you make that mistake, you spend months or years working, building, preparing, but never getting feedback or revenue.

The longer you wait to launch, the more likely it becomes that you’re building something your audience doesn’t want. Instead, you wanna define your offer or solution at a high level and launch your business as soon as possible by pre-selling your solutions while you build the rest of your business. In fact, one of our offers is how to launch your coaching business in 24 hours for $12.

Yes, it’s possible to launch a coaching business in 24 hours for only 12 bucks. In the corporate world, this is called a minimum viable product. It keeps you out of the DIY trap by giving yourself a deadline that helps you put things in context, like forget about spending eight hours on the design of a button gets you in the market so you can test, learn, and improve.

You have to launch and learn, and the more you. The more you earn. You don’t wanna wait to launch until everything is perfect. You need to launch now, so you learn from your market what would make it perfect.

Second Shift: Rapid Iteration

The next shift is also related to speed, and that’s rapid iteration, assuming you launched. As you begin to think about version one of your business that comes after your minimum viable product, it’s imperative that you not fall back into the perfection trap and start spending once or years on version one.

I worked at Microsoft for 17 years and was well known and joked about the version one or two of everything we ever built sucked. And it wasn’t until version three that it was good. The problem was each version took three or four years to build the first version of Windows shipped in 1985. It wasn’t until 1995 and Windows 95, 10 years later, that one was commercially successful.

The pattern continued for another 10 years until the company finally shifted to a more agile development process with more frequent releases. These days, instead of releasing things once every few years, releases occur weekly and a month. There’s continuous improvement and rapid releases. One of the key markers of success today in business is how quickly you can learn and improve your products and marketing.

In our program, we target getting version one of your coaching business built within 90 days of your MVP. As you’re talking about in pre-selling or even selling your coaching services from your MVP business. You’ll be getting feedback that you can plug into version one. Things like which headlines and messaging attract your ideal customer, which types of content.

As you chat with them, you’ll learn about their specific challenges that your coaching needs to. You would be building the first version of your sales funnels pillar, content and ads. Instead of guessing what might work, you’ll have real data to leverage.

Third Shift: Delegate to Accelerate

At this point, you’ve launched your MVP and now launched version one of your coaching business. The final shift to getting your coaching business launched in 2023 is also related to speed.

As mentioned, your MVP business can be launched in 24 hours. The version one takes some time and a wider range of skills. Then as you move to version two and version three, even more are required. The mistake most coaches make is they believe they need or have to do everything themselves.

The problem is we all only have 168 hours in any week. I don’t know about you, but I like to sleep and I also like to spend time with my family. Maybe have 80 hours a week if you really push it, which I don’t recommend. Maybe you also have a day job, so you’re down to 20 or 30 hours a week for your coaching business. To build, learn, and improve quick enough.

You’re gonna need help. You can’t iterate quickly if you have to spend time learning how to do everything yourself, and then only hitting the quality level of a beginner. I see this all the time, like people taking a $2,000 Facebook ads course and for some reason, assuming their ads will be good. That would be like me taking a course on heart surgery and doing surgery on a patient and expecting good outcomes.

When you do that, you lose time learning and you lose quality since you’re a novice and you also lose money because your ads don’t perform. Then imagine repeating this in other areas like tech funnels, email and marketing. So the final shift to build a coaching business in 2023 is to delegate, so you can accelerate.

You’ve probably heard about or maybe even hired virtual assistants. But there is another option most people don’t know exists, and that’s a fractional team. A fractional team is better in every way instead of trying to find a unicorn VA that knows everything and putting all your eggs in one basket. A fractional team is a set of people each with specific areas of expertise working for you.

Part-time team is managed by an integrator or online business manager who’s your second in command. Imagine having access to a team of experts in tech design and editing copywriting ads. Since the team is managed by an integrator, you don’t get bogged down in managing tasks and projects. You set objectives and outcomes, and the team does the rest.

In our flagship done for you program, this is exactly what we provide and people are usually shocked to see how much we do. And the fact that it can cost less than a single, full-time virtual assistant. The fractional team enables you to delegate so you can accelerate the growth of your coaching business.

Conclusion

As an example, one of our clients, Rashida, we worked with her to help launch her MVP and version one of her coaching business. Within just a few weeks. If you follow these steps, launch, iterate, and delegate. With a focus on speed. You can launch your coaching business in a day and get on the path to scale to six or even seven figures of revenue within a year.

With another one of our clients today. We were able to help her hit six figures in revenue in the first 12 months. The first step is launching to help. We’ve put together a super fast step-by-step program called Launch in 24 Hours, which we’re offering for a ridiculously low price, basically our cost to deliver.