Set Up A Coaching Business (And Start Taking Paid Clients)

Today I’m sharing how to set up a coaching business! Because if you aren’t at the point where you’re ready to start accepting paid clients, you need to get there quick.

Being a coach is incredibly fulfilling, and if it’s your dream to be one, you can make it happen with just a few preliminary steps. Those steps are what this video is all about.

I’m walking you through the 5 steps you need to take to set up a coaching business and start working with paid clients: business formation, contracts, offers, pricing, and accepting payments.

These are the only essential pieces of a coaching business required to make money. You heard that right! Everything else is icing on the cake.

Find out my recommendations for getting these steps ironed out quickly and seamlessly, so you can start making money as a coach today!

Watch the video!

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Set Up A Coaching Business (And Start Making Money)

Welcome to stage one, the biz basics. My goal for your business is to be successful, to get clients in the door, and to be able to work with them seamlessly and create a process that is easy for them to use, easy for you to use. One where nobody is confused about anything.

These are the absolute essential things that you need to run your business to take a paying client. These are the things that are required. And it’s essential and beautiful to have them all set up first. So that as we continue moving through the process, you don’t have to go back, you don’t have to make these decisions.

My goal is that you move through this so quickly. I don’t want you to spend a lot of time on this, I want you to just absorb the information that I’ve shared and implemented immediately. Make it your priority in your business to get these things set up and get them working so that you can move forward and not have to think about them again.

Step 1: Your Business Formation

Now the very first step that you need to take in setting up your business is to have your legal business formation in place.

If you’ve already done this great, you can move on to the next section.

If not, please know, this is a necessity.

It helps protect you if something goes wrong and you were to get sued. It can also help you in lowering tax amounts if you form in the right way.

It’s also a requirement if, in the future, you need to hire employees or contract workers.

I am not an authority on which business formation you should choose. However, below this video, I have some links to different options you’ll want to look at, because they have some information. And they also have some services they can offer you to get you set up correctly.

Now there are a couple ways you can do it:, you can hire a lawyer to handle it for you; you could go through a Legal Zoom kind of situation where you do it online with a business that does it for cheap; you can also file by yourself.

Now when I set up my business, I used an online formation process called Inc Corp. I will share that link below this video as well.

I set myself up as an LLC because I wanted to limit the ability for anyone who sued me to attack my personal assets. It’s up to you what you choose to do for yourself, but please, please, please do not skip this step.

Protect yourself and make sure that you are legally able to operate your business. Because if you aren’t, you could be in a lot of hot water down the road. All right, good luck, get the process going, and dive right in.

Insuring your coaching business with business insurance is not just a smart business decision; it’s a critical step in protecting your financial well-being, reputation, and the interests of your clients. It helps mitigate risks, ensures continuity in times of adversity, and demonstrates your commitment to professionalism and accountability. So, don’t overlook the importance of business insurance—safeguard your coaching business with StartSure and focus on what you do best: empowering others to achieve their goals and dreams.

Links:

Choosing your business structure: https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/launch-your-business/choose-business-structure

Inc For Free (Legal Formation): https://www.incforfree.com/

Get a business insurance quote here.

Step 2: ‘Do I need a contract?’

So there is a hot debate in the coaching and consulting industry on whether or not you need to have a contract for your clients.

I am going to give you a simple rule of thumb to follow if you work with clients on their personal lives. So if you are a life coach or if you are some kind of styling coach where you’re helping them edit their home, or if you are doing something that relates back to their home life, their personal life, their relationships, their weight, their money, things like that, on a personal level, so nothing to do with their business, then you don’t need a contract. The fact that they have opted into hiring you is proof enough that they were conscious of what they should have been getting.

If, however, you work with people on their business in search of reaching specific goals, whether that is making more money, or building out specific pieces, or increasing their marketing or getting them more followers or building their brand or their website or something to that effect, then yes, you should have a contract.

Here’s why: you do not want people to come back and say that you did not fulfill your responsibility, or your part of the agreement, because they didn’t make $100,000 in the two months that they worked with you. Or because they did not have 50 new people sign up to their email list, which is something that you said they could have, by the time they finished working with you.

You don’t want them to come back on you and say, ‘Hey, you were supposed to, you said, you promised, you blah, blah, blah, to get me this result, and it didn’t happen. So therefore I’m suing you.’

That would be bad. So you need a contract.

And in that contract, it needs to state that your services are a guide, that you offer support in reaching those things, and that if people do not put in the time and effort that it takes, and do not follow your process and your system, and do not do basically what you’ve told them to do, you cannot be held responsible. Okay?

This contract also protects against things like acts of God, if a tornado rips apart your house or a flood comes and destroys all of your work, or God forbid, whatever might happen, you cannot be held responsible, and the other person has to give you the chance to catch back up, or they have agreed to let you out of such a circumstance.

That is why contracts are important.

Below this, I have a resource for you on where to get a contract, and I have some tips and advice for you about what should be included in those contracts. And I hope that if you are in the ‘I need to contract’ party, you will do your best to get it set up quickly and efficiently and protect yourself.

Links:

The Contract Shop: https://thecontractshop.com?ref=cassandraewertl

What to Include in your Coaching Contract: https://clevermemo.com/blog/en/coaching-contract-agreement/

Step 3: Creating Your Offers

Let’s talk about your offers. This is a really fun topic. And I know that people go wild with thinking about all the different things that they could offer to people, and in all the different varieties and ways that they could do that. But I want you to bring it back to the basics.

Now, if you are starting out and you’ve made less than $100,000 in your business, then I want you to stick to one offer. One thing that you are selling.

Here’s why: when our brains are presented with multiple offers, when our brains are suggested that we could have this if we do it this way, or that if we do it that way, our brain spins in confusion and we say oh gosh, I don’t know which one is best, I don’t know. And a lot of times, that confusion is enough to send your clients running for the hills. You don’t want that to happen.

You want their brain to be very clear and say, ‘Okay, I could work with her for three months, once a week. And that’s it, take it or leave it. I really want to work with her. So I’m going to take it.’

That’s the kind of clarity and easy decision making you want people to have — not to have to make a choice between offer A and offer B or not choosing anything at all. You just want them to say okay, I can either choose offer A or get nothing. I’m gonna choose offer A.

So you’re going to choose the timeframe that you work with people. That could be six weeks to start out. It could be 12 weeks, it could be six months, it could be a year — whatever you feel is mandatory for what you offer for the type of coaching, the type of consulting whatever it might be that you do, and stick to it.

You’re only going to make that single offer on your sales calls. In order to avoid the confusion aspect, okay?

In the next video, we’re going to talk about pricing, and how to decide what you’re going to charge for that single offer. But I want you to start right now laying out exactly what people will get, and for how long? What’s included? How long does it last? One offer.

Step 4: Set Your Prices

Pricing is one of those topics where people tend to not have a clue what to charge. And here’s the funny thing, it’s completely up to you.

Now, you get to choose what you want to charge to start out, you get to choose how much you want to charge moving forward, and you get to choose whatever price you want to say out loud to your customers.

But here’s the thing… you have to say a price. When they ask how much it costs, you have to state a price that you’re confident in. If you go and say something is $10,000 for three months of coaching, and you haven’t yet proven to yourself that it’s worth $10,000 for three months of coaching, your brain is going to stumble in those sales calls.

You’re going to waffle, and you’re not going to sound confident, and you’re not going to be sure. And people are going to pick up on that. They can hear it in your voice, they can feel the energy, they can feel your nervousness, even over the phone. I know that may sound crazy, but it is so true.

So here’s what I generally recommend to people when they are first trying to set up their pricing. If you’ve never had a paid client before, I want you to choose a price that seems like a no brainer.

I want you to choose something that is like, ridiculously obvious. Like, let’s say your first paid client would be three months of life coaching for $1,000. That’s $333, right per month. That is obvious.

And here’s why I say this: you need to get that yes under your belt. You need to get that yes into your body. You need to feel it — you need to experience it — so that you can build up your confidence. So when you get that first Yes, I then say, okay, now double it, or add another 500 or whatever it might be. Jump from $333 a month to $500 a month. Now it’s $1,500 for three months of coaching, and then you get that next Yes.

And you keep raising it as you build your confidence in your own abilities. You don’t have to be some Rockstar coach right out of the gate. You don’t have to be making $5,000 a client immediately.

You have to make what you’re capable of making. And that might mean low balling your prices for the first couple of clients until you get that experience of the Yes into your conscious mind — where you can say okay, I am doing this. I am worthy of being paid for my services.

That’s what I recommend you do. Choose whatever number you want, and lowball that first paying client.

If you already have clients, and you’re still not sure about your pricing, stick where you are until you get those couple of yeses. Okay? Until you have enough under your belt to make you confident in raising them.

That is the best advice I can give to newer coaches. Don’t try to jump too far too fast, and get so many nos that you end up being discouraged or end up thinking that ‘no one’s ever gonna buy from me. I’m never gonna sell anything. No one will ever want to work with me. I’m too expensive. I’m not worthy enough. I’m not whatever.’

Get those yeses in at the lower prices. Prove your concept. Do the work, get the experience, and then raise them as you go.

Step 5: Accepting Payments

Okay, let’s talk about how to accept payments. This is so important. This is like, fundamentally one of the pieces of your business that you absolutely need to have in place in order to be a business: the ability to accept payments from your clients.

Now, the simplest and easiest way to do this is to set up a business paypal account. Let me be clear, do not use your personal paypal account that is linked to your Hotmail email address from 10 years ago. You need to set up a business paypal account that is linked to an email address that relates back to your business.

So for me, it would be cass@lovelyimpact.com. It’s not yogababe15@hotmail or something else that doesn’t make any sense.

Make sure it is relatable to your business so that people know exactly who they’re sending their money to.

Set up your business paypal account, and then you can start accepting payments and you can start sending invoices to people.

Invoices and recurring payments are both things that you can use. If you have someone who’s going to pay in full, you send them an invoice. If you have someone who is going to make installments on their payment plan, then you set up a recurring payment structure so it’s automatically deducted from their account. And then there is no question of whether or not they’re actually going to make their payment on time.

Now, as you’re setting up your business paypal account, keep in mind that your branding on invoices and your messaging on invoices should be updated when you figure those things out. You want to include your logo, once you have it, and you want to include snippets and thank you notes and different little pieces like that, that give it more of a personal touch.

But for now, you are okay with just setting up your basic account with your information and sending it as is because you are in the basic stages of your business. This is the biz basics, and we’re not going to get too complicated.

But in the future, you can set those things up and you can make it all be a seamless, beautiful experience for your clients.

Links:

PayPal Recurring Payments: https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/setting-up-recurring-payments-for-business