If you have experience in the business sector and do not want the hassle of the 9-5 work life, then becoming a Business Coach may be the next step for you. In this article, I have outlined what you need to do and how to use your skills to become a Business Coach in Australia.
Firstly, if you want to be a Business Coach, you need to upskill yourself and immerse yourself in some training. This means doing some courses or joining organisations that specialise in franchises who can help you.
One of the biggest challenges for people in this industry is learning how to coach, and coaching is not something that is easy to learn. However, there is a lot of training available for this. And it is a skill that can be taught.
Everybody can be trained how to coach as long as you’re willing to learn and you have the right attitude. If you love helping people, then you can be trained to coach people. You will need to learn coaching methodology, you will need to learn a little bit about mindset, psychology, what it is that holds people back, and what it is that motivates people.
You’ll need to learn a little bit about business as well. You need to understand some of the basic fundamentals, like financials in business, planning, marketing, sales, systems and more.
If you don’t have all the skills that you need, the first thing you need to do is upskill yourself, and you need to decide which path you are going to take to achieve this education. Whether you join an organisation or a franchise with training available or you enrol in some courses, either way, it’s imperative that before you start working one on one with business owners, you have done some training to upskill yourself.
You’re never going to be perfect from day one, you’re never going to know everything ever, but at least you’ll have enough knowledge to know how to run a coaching session, how to overcome some of the biggest hurdles or obstacles that business owners may face when coach them.
The second thing to consider when becoming a business coach is thinking about whether or not you’re going to be a general coach or you’re going to be working in a particular niche or field. For example, you could select an industry to work in and this may be because you have worked in that industry before or owned that type of business. You can then specialise in an area. Sometimes, it’s very lucrative to pick a niche. It makes it a little bit easier from a marketing point of view, and you get known as the authority in that industry.
Word of caution: there are a lot of niche coaches out there that haven’t upskilled themselves as much as they should have and have gone into that sector without any knowledge. Unfortunately, that may have affected the credibility in that area. If you do plan on entering a niche sector, approach with caution.
Your next step is to create the programme that you are going to deliver. Now, one of the beautiful things about this day and age is there’s many ways to deliver coaching programmes.
- You could deliver them one on one and in person
- You could use technology like Zoom or Skype to do coaching on the internet
- You could do groups all at once on webinars or in a room
- You could do very leveraged coaching by using automation, videos, e-learning courses
It is up to you to design your coaching programmes that best suits you. And before you sign up your first client, make sure programs are structured and ready to go.
Another very important thing to remember when becoming a Business Coach is to get one for yourself. It is vitally important that as a business coach, if you’re starting your own business coaching business, you need to get your own coach or mentor that is going to work with you to help you stay on track.
It does a couple of things.
- You will benefit by having somebody work with you one on one that has previous experience in building a business, and if they’ve already been involved in the business coaching industry, even better because then they can help you avoid the same pitfalls and traps that they probably fell into it.
- They probably have already worked out the best way to grow a coaching business.
The next step goes for any business, and that is to write your business plan. And before you start any business, especially a business that is going to involve you trading your time for money and reward, is that you need to make sure you’ve got a solid business plan.
In a professional services business, like business coaching, you can decide exactly how you’re going to go about growing your business, how many days per week are you going to work and how many clients you’re expecting and how much you’re going to charge. Also, understanding things like threats and opportunities and outlining how you can leverage off that is important. To become a business coach, it’s important that you do not overlook the very basic fundamental of creating a business plan that guides you step by step through exactly how you’re going to go about building your business coaching business.
Having a business plan is important, however having a Marketing Plan is equally important. If you talk to any business coach that is struggling to build their business, I can guarantee you it’s not because they’re not confident in their ability to coach. It’ll be because they have not mastered the art of marketing.
One of the challenges that we face in any professional services business is we’re selling something that is intangible. You need a really good marketing plan to make it clear to your prospective customers what it is they’re going to get into if they buy from you. And you’ve got to have a marketing plan that attracts leads based on what it is that they’re challenged with.
I see too many business coaches that do not have marketing plan and that is one of the main reasons why so many business coaches fail. You don’t want to be the coach that fails. Master marketing because I can tell you right now that if you can master marketing your business coaching business, it’ll make it much easier when you start coaching people in their own businesses.
Lastly, if you want to become a Business Coach in Australia, you need to know exactly how you are going to do it. There are plenty of which makes it quite confusing, but also makes it easy for you to choose which path is going to be best for you.
Now, what I’m talking about is your options when it comes to becoming a business coach in Australia. Nowadays, many places are recruiting business coaches so you could become an employee, but if you want to start your own business, but don’t have the confidence to go alone, then a great option is franchising.
If you feel the lack of confidence, and want to plug into somebody else’s experience, then find out more about MaxMyProfit’s Exceleration Franchisee Program.
We’re looking for some amazing people to join our team as a Business Exceleration® Accredited Franchisee.
If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a Business Excelerator®, click here for more information.
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
