How to Start Your Online Coaching Business TODAY (4 Simple Steps)

I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling coaching and have helped other coaches in all kinds of niches get their first clients, finally pass $10K months, and even quit their jobs to go full-time into entrepreneurship. So in this video, I'm going to show you how you can start your online coaching business today in just 4 simple steps. Now, the first question that's probably on your mind is, do you actually need a coaching certification before someone will pay you? When I started my coaching business in 2018, I was a spiritual life coach. I got certified through Mary Mann and Morrissey's Brave Thinking Institute, and leading up to when I officially left my job in 2018, I was getting certified because I thought that the more certifications I had, the more legit I would be, the more that people would want to hire me. So I spent years climbing the ranks in her various certifications that she had offered. I became a Dream Builder Coach, which was the first phase, and then worked at becoming a Life Mastery Consultant. But I figured I can't really start making my business work or getting clients until I become an LMC or a Life Mastery Consultant. But the crazy thing is that when I got all the certifications and I officially bit the bullet, quit my construction job to go all in to building this business and I actually started signing clients, nobody actually cared. When I told them about my certifications, they said, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Can you actually help me? And that's when I realized that most coaches will get trapped in certifications. Now, I'm not here to badmouth certifications and say that you should not get certified. I think that you should at some point. But what I want you to understand is that certifications are great for sharpening your coaching skills, learning how to communicate, with clients, ask them great questions, help them guide themselves. And you also get to meet some really amazing people. But this is a big but— what is actually going to grow your business is being really good at what you do and just working with people. I mean, would you rather work with a coach who has all the best certifications and has worked with a couple of people a little bit, or someone who has no formal certifications but has 30-plus years of experience and has helped other people get these amazing transformations? Obviously, I'm going to go with the second one. So whether or not you decide to get a formal certification, I think it's a good idea at some point to have some kind of certification, less for the title you get and more for the experience, the knowledge, the skills that you learn. So now that that's out of the way, let's talk about how to find your niche and your coaching idea. There's a great saying that says if you help everybody, you end up helping no one. When I started out, I was a 22-year-old spiritual life coach. That is very broad. I didn't specialize in business or in relationships or in fitness or any one of these things. And I was kind of helping everybody with everything. I would have clients who had career challenges, who had relationship challenges, challenges with an estranged child, also some health challenges. They were kind of all over the place. But once I niched down and started working with entrepreneurs, business owners on streamlining their productivity, that's when my business really started to take off. So if you're going to be coaching people, we need to pick a lane for you. And here's something I call the income intersection. that's gonna help you do just that. So let's imagine a Venn diagram with 3 overlapping circles, and the goal is to get all 3 of these things overlapping, and when you do, that's when you're gonna have a profitable niche. So I want you to think about the topic that you would love to coach people in, and if you're kind of like general life coaching, just pick some kind of topic in health, wealth, or relationships. And the first thing I want you to think about is, do you have Proof. Have you done the thing that you want to help people with? People are going to invest in you for your skills. They either want to leverage your skills and have you do something for them, like video editing, for example, or they want you to teach them those skills so that they can have the skill, like you teaching them video editing. But if you want to be a successful coach, think about something that you've actually done in your life. Maybe you built a multimillion-dollar company And now you want to get into consulting. Well, you built this multimillion-dollar company and that's your proof. Maybe you went through a divorce with a narcissistic partner and now you have found a great partner and it was just really difficult for you navigating that territory. Whatever it is, just make sure that you have a story to tell and proof of results for your own life. Now, the other thing that we want to think about is profit. When it comes to this topic that you want to coach people in, are people actually spending money to do or learn this thing? I had somebody email me Pretty recently and they wanted to start their coaching business all around teaching people how to simply connect with nature. And they were thinking of charging $3,000 for their coaching. I love nature and I totally see the benefits in connecting with nature, but I don't know if I'm gonna pay you $3,000 to teach me that. Like, what are you gonna teach me? Come to find out by talking with them, they had 35 years of knowledge and experience in survival skills. And I was like, well, teach people survival skills because that's a skill and there's actually money being spent in that with gear. Equipment, people going on crazy hikes like to Mount Everest and all this kind of stuff. That's something that people would pay for. So make sure that money is being spent in this area and you're golden. And the last circle we want to think about, you could have all the proof in the world that you're good at this thing. There could be a ton of money being made or being spent in this area and you're fully qualified to do it. But if you have zero passion for it, it's not going to be a fun business. So whatever idea you want to pursue with your coaching, put it through this test. Make sure that you have proof You've actually done the thing that you're teaching so you can speak from experience. There's profit in this area. People are spending money. You've invested a ton of money to get through this thing, to learn this skill, whatever it is, and you have a ton of passion about this. If you're not going to want to keep learning and growing in this area yourself for the next 10 years and you don't like talking to people about it, it's not worth your time. Your job then is just to coach the people who aren't as far as you are on your journey. You don't need to be at the top of the mountain. You just have to be a few steps ahead of the person that you can help. Now, once you know who you help, what are you actually going to sell them? When I first started my coaching business, I thought that my offer was how long my program was, how many sessions they were going to get, the worksheets that I was going to give them, any course material, lessons, all that kind of stuff. And it took me a couple of years to realize that all of those things are the pieces of your offer, but it's not what's going to make people want to pay you $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more. What an offer really is, is an outcome. So here's how you can build yours. Let's imagine that this is your client. They are not happy in their current situation. They are trying to learn how to grow in their career, or they want to find a great relationship or whatever it is. Basically, think about the 1.0 version of you back in the day. The offer and what people are going to pay you for is the outcome. How is their life going to change once they've paid you? You could be a career coach and tell people, yeah, we're going to meet for 3 months. I'm going to be with you every single week. I'm going to do resume reviews. Blah blah blah. My eyes are already glazing over. But instead, a great career coaching offer would be that I'm going to take you from being jobless right now or getting kicked out of a job to landing a job with a $10,000 pay raise in the next 90 days, or I'm going to work with you until you do. That is an offer. People are not paying you for how much time they're spending with you or all your cool resources and courses and books and all the things that you've written. They're paying. For a job with a $10,000 pay raise in 90 days. So if we're thinking timeline for your offer, I would think in 90 days. So I want you to think about what is something that you've done yourself that you could help people get in 90 days, a result that is juicy enough to be $500 to $1,000 per month, let's say for 90 days. And when you think about your offer, break it up into 3, no more than 5 steps. These could also be thought about as phases to get people from point A to point B. So first we're gonna do this, then we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do this. And a pro tip is in the first third of the program, so the first month, get them some kind of quick win. So I have a 12-month program and it is designed to help coaches or experts turn their expertise into a $100K business in 12 months. The goal, add $100K of revenue in the next 12 months. I break it up into 3 phases. The first one is to get you clients. Most people have enough resources where they can start landing some business in the first 90 days or less. So that's all we focus on. The second phase is where we build your audience. The third phase is where we start to scale, introduce digital products, group coaching, that kind of stuff. So the win is in the first 90 days of my program because it's a 12-month program. They will make back their investment at least. And the last thing to add to your offer is a guarantee. Think about the career coach. I'm going to help you land a job with a $10,000 pay raise in the next 90 days, or the guarantee, I will keep working with you until you do. You can refund them the money if they don't get the result. I personally like to continue to work with them until they get the result, as long as they're consistently showing up, using the resources and putting in the work. But the biggest thing that makes your offer work is the transformation. It's not all the deliverables. It's not how much time they spend with you. It doesn't matter. What matters is that can you get them a juicy transformation in the time that you said you would get them? Make that promise and then deliver on it. That's how you're going to be able to sell your coaching for $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more. So once you know who you help, you have an offer. How do you find your first coaching clients even if you barely have an audience? So I have a client named Jason. He runs a business called the Futures Trading Revolution and he's crushing it right now. When Jason signed up with me, he had 6 years of futures trading experience and he was making some really good money just from his trading. But now he wanted to coach people and he had no clue about how to do that. He didn't know anything about online business, let alone a coaching business, content creation, offer creation, none of it. So I helped him create his offer and I asked him, who can you present this to? And what we came up with was talking with people that he already worked with. Jason is a full-time orchestral musician. So I suggested, what if you just talk to the people that you work with because you've been making money on the side of this orchestra gig? Maybe there'd be some people in there who'd be interested in making some side income as well. In just 2 weeks of doing this, Jason had already made over $8,000. He didn't need to build some giant audience, run paid ads, or anything like that. He just had experience with the thing, created an offer, and then got in touch with the people he already knew. And that's how he started his business. So here's the process that I walked him through. The first thing to do is to connect with people that you think would benefit from the thing that you have to offer. In Jason's case, it was the people that he worked with in his orchestra gig. So you can go to networking events, you can You can direct message people, you can host an event, you can have a podcast, you can go onto people's podcasts, you can create content, you can run ads. There's an unlimited of things that you can do. The key is finding which way makes the most sense for you and feels the most natural for you at first to just connect with people. It's like dating. If you wanted to go meet these people, you have to actually go where the people are at. Once you've connected with your target audience, then we move on to the second step, which is to inspire. So the other week I was at a friend's wedding from my gym and we're all sitting down at this table and a friend of mine named Russ, who's the gymnastics coach at my gym, he was chatting with me about my business and I was telling him about YouTube and just his overall business because he mentioned that he was interested in getting into coaching on the internet. Russ is a phenomenal gymnast, so I got super excited and I was just telling Russ the amazing things that he can do and keep it simple, be like, no, don't focus on this. I would recommend focusing on this. Here's what your YouTube channel could look like. And just kind of painting a picture of the system for Russ. The whole time Russ is just slowly having this giant grin show up on his face. And he said, we should talk. What I did was I inspired him at the wedding. When people can see themselves in the result, they feel a connection to the dream and it gets them excited. The next thing I want to do is take action. That's where we go on to the 3rd step, which is to invite. The more you can connect with and get into conversations with the people that you want to help, the more you guys are going to talk about life, about business, about what you're doing, et cetera. And then you can start talking about what it is that you do. That is where you can try and show them what's possible for them and inspire them. Share social proof, share your own proof, testimonials of people you've worked with, stories, but more importantly, get them to experience the vision. And when they're on that high and they think, man, like I want to go work out right now, or I want to start building a business or film a YouTube video or something, that's when you invite them. To the next step, which is usually a call with you. The beauty of connect, inspire, invite is that you can do this anywhere. You can do this in DMs. You could do this in an advertisement. You could do it at the airport when you're talking with someone. I've literally gotten clients being at the airport. So practice this framework, implement it into your own business. If you have questions, leave a comment below this video. But look, if you want to build a coaching business, you need to learn how to sell and get over your fear of selling. So watch this video next and I will destroy your fear of selling. In just 58 seconds. If this video was helpful, please like it, share it with someone that you think would benefit from it. And if you're not subscribed, make sure you hit the subscribe button. As always, take what you learned here, get out there and make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.