Every life coach – from a newcomer to the industry to an experienced coaching professional – needs a good coaching business plan to succeed and thrive. After all, life coaching is a freelance business like any other. You need to know how to attract your clientele, how to manage your finances, and more.

But building a business plan from scratch can be tricky if you don’t know where to start. Today, let us show you how to create a business plan specifically for life coaches like you.

Make an Executive Summary

There are two reasons to create any business plan as a life coach:

• To give yourself an outline you can follow so you can achieve your business goals
• To acquire funding (if needed), which can be useful if you plan to start a larger life coaching agency. Business investors will only invest in your enterprise if they are confident you have a business plan to follow to success

You need an executive summary in both cases. In a nutshell, an executive summary is a short summary or overview of the rest of the business plan document. It should cover your overall business goals, your target audience, and the broad means by which you’ll accomplish your business objectives.

In most cases, your executive summary will be less than a page long. It might be useful to draw up your executive summary after you do the rest of your business plan so you know what to summarize.

Perform a Market Analysis

Next, you’ll need to make a market analysis. A market analysis looks at your target audience members – such as working professionals, those in need of relationship advice, or someone else – and examines:

• What they need most from a life coach like you
• How you can provide a solution to their needs

You can do a market analysis by combining your personal experience and collecting data from third-party data firms. Doing a market analysis is important so you know who to target your services to and how to market most effectively.

That all said, remember that market conditions can change at any point. In fact, you can bet that the life coaching market will look significantly different a few years from now than it does right this moment. So it’s a good idea to keep your market analysis adaptable and flexible.

Don’t assume, for instance, that your target audience will stay exactly the same. If you want to coach working professionals in the IT sector, remember that the demographics of that sector will change over the next few years. So will those professionals’ goals, responsibilities, and market pressures.

Bottom line: do a market analysis, but don’t keep it ironclad. Leave some wiggle room so you can adjust it, and remember that you’ll need to do more market analyses later down the road to keep your life coaching business relevant.

Decide on the Services You’ll Offer

Every life coach offers a different spread of services. For example, you might be a specialized life coach focusing on parenting skills. Or you may be a more generalized life coach that offers a variety of business and relationship guidance and exercises.

Regardless, you need to settle on which services you’ll offer so you can market them and come up with plans, exercises, and materials for your future clients. Don’t plan on doing everything – even the best life coaches have to narrow their services somewhat. You can’t stretch yourself too thinly, or you won’t provide the best services for your clients now or in the future.

Settle on a Marketing and Sales Strategy

Even if you are an amazing life coach, you won’t get enough clients to pay the bills unless you get the word out about your services. To that end, you need to settle on an effective marketing and sales strategy. Make advertisements highlighting your services.

Our advice? Make heavy use of testimonials. Testimonials are positive reviews of your life coaching results so far. Get them from friends, coworkers, and your first clients. The more services you provide, the more positive testimonials you’ll collect and can use for future marketing materials.

As a side note, you might consider incorporating elements of sustainability and social responsibility into your life coaching business plan. These days, lots of people only want to spend money at businesses or with professionals who are committed to goals like eco-friendliness, sustainability, and more.

For example, when you market your business life coaching services (as a hypothetical), you can highlight how you’ll help businesses:

• Use green materials and processes
• Attract customers through their eco-friendly marketing
• Minimize carbon emissions
• And more

Not only will you be doing your part for the planet, but you’ll also attract more clients that much faster. It’s a win-win!

Develop Financial Projections

The last key element of your life coaching business plan is the financial projections section. You’ll have some idea of the money you can make as a life coach from your market analysis, but you should also include a breakdown of the costs and expenses your business will have to face to keep running.

For example, you need to spend X dollars on marketing each month – that eats into your overall bottom line and changes how much revenue you need to make to turn a profit. You’ll also need to pay for software subscription services, buy clothes for your professional meetings, and maybe even rent office space depending on where you meet most of your clients.

Develop your financial projections carefully and highlight the bottom line numbers. That way, investors in your business will know what to expect financially and when they can expect a return on their investments.

Conclusion

As you can see, creating a life coaching business plan isn’t too difficult, so long as you go through the process step-by-step. Armed with your business plan, you’ll be well-equipped and ready to pursue your clientele and provide stellar life coaching services right from the get-go.