15 Business Building Strategies for Coaches

During The Coaches’ Edge Extravaganza I had the pleasure of spending the day with 100 successful coaches and 18 industry leaders. Part of the day was devoted to small group networking in which we were grouped into 8-10 coaches per group.   Viki Winterton, co-founder of the Extravaganza and founder of The Coach Exchange, assigned each group to share the best business building strategies that had brought them the most success in their coaching business.

I share a few strategies for business building in this video.

Here is the collection of the Top 15 Best Business Building Strategies that were reported by each of the small groups during the Extravaganza.

1. Treat coaching like a business, not just a hobby.
2. Go with what life brings you rather than what you think it is “suppose” to look like.
3. Leverage your time and energy through creating strategic relationships.
4. Know your target market as well as your niche, they are two different things.
5. Integrate social media strategies, especially a Fan Page on Facebook.
6. Create value add products and tools that create additional revenue streams to compliment your primary services.
7. Always remember that you are not alone; you don’t have to do it all. Leverage the tools, people and resources around you to leverage your way to success.
8. Be true to yourself.
9. Create your “A-team” and use the technologies to help you do so; technologies such as e-lance.com; o-desk.com.
10. Networking. networking. networking. – get out of the house and get face-to-face with people every week.
11. Follow your passion, do what you love.
12. Create powerful conversations with prospect groups – workshops, seminars, retreats in which you can speak to many people in your target market at once.
13. Always do values driven work: values-based marketing, values-based promotions, etc.
14. Go for it!
15. Have fun!

Being one of the panel experts that was presenting later in the day on the topic of “Leveraging the Business Success Formula for Massive Success,” I was thrilled with this topic and actually a bit surprised by the results.  I had anticipated that the groups would share specific marketing strategies, specific types of networking groups, various promotions that were successful for them, or even listing the types of marketing that worked for them (print vs. word of mouth vs. public speaking, etc).  I was so thrilled to see that not only did some of the groups report on these types of tangible strategies, but the list included what I would consider to be part of the attitude or mindset of a business owner.  Creating a thriving business is not always about the strategy, the promotion or the event.  While those are vital and crucial, the mindset and attitude of the business owner is what is the fuel behind the success.

The common theme that permeated throughout the coaches and industry experts participating in The Coaches’ Edge Extravaganza was that in order to be successful doing coaching, you must treat it like a business.  This top 15 list gives a coach a hint at what that statement means.

So what have been your best business building ideas?  We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and let us know what has created success in your coaching business.