How to Scale Up Your Coaching at Every Stage of Business

In this exclusive guest post for Coach Factory, Milana Leshinsky addresses the nuts and bolts of how to scale your coaching business with practical tips for coaches who are just starting out, coaches are growing a blossoming business, and coaches who have a well established practice.

---

Social media is full of people talking about scaling your coaching business. These days it seems like everyone wants to scale up and grow, which makes sense because coaching someone through a challenge to a better future and guiding them through a transformation feels amazing.

If you’re like most of the coaches I work with, or the coaches who use my software Coaching Genie to manage their 1:1 coaching services and group coaching programs, you know coaching changes lives — and the more people you help, the more people you want to help.

Thinking about growth and how to help more people is natural. But all of the advice and information on scaling up and growing a coaching business might not apply to you. It might not be relevant to the stage of business you’re in. And if you try to apply advice or strategies and tactics from a more advanced stage of business before you’re ready, it will likely lead to hardship, frustration, and poor results.

I focus on three core stages of business growth for coaches:

1. The Emerge Stage: In the Emerge stage, your focus is on getting your first 10 coaching clients, gaining experience, building confidence, and clarifying your path forward.
2. The Build Stage: In the Build stage, your focus is on creating visibility and leverage by developing systems and processes, creating tailored offers, and expanding your audience.
3. The Scale Stage: In the Scale stage, your focus is investing in solutions that create flexibility and freedom, like team expansion, group offers, and premium experiences.

Only after you understand your current stage of business, will you know what advice you should listen to or follow about growing your business. Let’s look at what a typical coaching business looks like in each stage of growth.

1. The Emerge Stage

If you are an emerging coach, this stage of business growth is all about recognizing your value, differentiating yourself, and gaining clarity. 

The goal is to get your first 10 clients as quickly as possible. Typically, your first 1-5 clients come from free sessions and short-term beta client engagements (maybe eight weeks or 90 days). Then, your next 6-10 clients come from paid offers that might have introductory pricing. 

While working with these initial clients, observe how you feel about your coaching clients, process, and business flow, and how they feel about working with you. Pay attention to:

• Who you like to coach.
• What topics and transformations you like to coach on.
• When someone is ready to coach with you.
• How you like to engage with clients.
• Where you ran into challenges.
• Why clients hire you.
• What results clients experience.
• What type of feedback you receive about your coaching.

This clarity is how you narrow your focus and define your coaching niche so you can stand apart from the crowded sea of other coaches and attract great clients you love working with. It’s how you gather the information you need to refine your messaging, website copy, and marketing content so every word is tailored to prospective clients and it’s clear you understand them better than any other coach. It’s also the best way to build your confidence and own the value and impact of your coaching.

Also, pay attention to what’s working and not working for you, or what’s easy and difficult for you in terms of your tools, software, and technology. Ask yourself:

• Where am I getting frustrated or running into problems?
• What is holding me back or affecting my ability to grow my revenue?
• What do I want to be able to do but can’t right now?
• What is working well and feels easy?
• What other options are available that I may want to consider?

It can be tempting to invest in fancy software and tools right away because that’s what the successful coaches you aspire to be like use. But if you don’t yet need all of the features and bells and whistles included, stick with what works for you right now and keep it simple. 

With that said, as you ask the questions listed above and discover things that aren’t working, consider how bad the pain is. 

• Is it bad enough to do something differently, change your tools, or invest in new software?
• Is it only a mild irritation and it’s good enough for now but should be revisited later if it gets any worse?

2. The Build Stage

If you are an established coach who is ready to grow, this stage of business is all about building your systems and processes and expanding your reach.

As you work with more clients, you’ll start to see your business slow down or things that used to be easy will feel harder because you’ve been flying by the seat of your pants, keeping everything in your head, and relying on memory. But eventually, you’ll start to feel the effects of not having systems and infrastructure in place to support you and your clients — and it’s not fun.

Streamline

Your first goal is to figure out how to streamline your coaching services and leverage your expertise and knowledge so you’re not reinventing the wheel with every new client.

1. Start looking for repeating patterns. What do you say to every client? What are you teaching over and over? Where are the similarities across your coaching clients, what experience, and how they achieve results?
2. Document what you find to begin shaping your proprietary framework or signature system.
3. Identify and develop resources you can create once and reuse with every client. These could be things like ebooks, checklists, workbooks, or courses.
4. Start using your resources and testing your coaching system with 1:1 clients, gather feedback, and refine as needed to work out any kinks.
5. Once your coaching framework or system is tested, proven, and validated, try offering a small beta group program and see how you like group coaching.

Standardize

Your second goal is to figure out where you can standardize business operations and create systems to save time, simplify workflows, and prevent overwhelm, stress, and exhaustion. Once you have systems, you can source additional support like expanding your team, hiring contractors, or investing in better technology.

1. Document everything you do to run your business, manage clients, and market your services.
2. Identify repetitive tasks, document the steps needed to complete the tasks, and define the systems needed.
3. Use your systems to delegate tasks to a virtual assistant (VA), automate tasks with software, and set up your coaching frameworks, systems, and courses in a platform like Coaching Genie.

With defined systems and the right technology in place, managing your coaching clients and running your coaching programs becomes simple, easy, and fast.

Market Yourself

Your third goal is to stay top of mind for people who are already connected to you and gain visibility and become more widely known so you can reach more people and get more clients. This is where marketing and strategic partnerships make a huge difference.

• Start an email newsletter and actively work to build your email list. Consider creating free giveaways and downloadable tools and resources, and hosting free webinars or training.
• Start speaking to groups. Reach out to local networking events and meet up groups, get books for podcast interviews, and build relationships with online event and virtual summit hosts.
• Get consistent with your marketing. Create a plan and execute that plan regardless of how busy you are. If you can’t be consistent on your own, hire marketing support.

What’s great about taking action during this stage of business growth is that each action you take creates momentum. You don’t have to wait until everything is perfect or everything you want to create is done. You can start small and start using everything you create as you use it — and this will build momentum, propel your business forward, and help you start attracting better clients faster. It will also ensure that you can handle the growth of your business without also experiencing anxiety, stress, overwhelm, and working 24/7.

3. The Scale Stage

If you are a coach whose business is powered by documented systems and reliable technology, this stage of business is all about expanding your offers, capabilities, and reach.

This is where your business starts to become more complex, with lots of moving parts and pieces. You’re experimenting with new offers like group coaching programs, mastermind groups, accountability groups, and leveraged courses and memberships. You’re transitioning your 1:1 coaching engagements to be your highest-level, premium tier offer. And you’re bringing more support.

Your primary goal in the Scale stage is to know the exact answer to the question, “What would happen if you got 100 new clients tomorrow?” Your secondary goal is to ensure everything that needs to happen to onboard and serve those 100 clients can happen without you (or with very little of your time). 

For example, when new coaches come into one of courses or programs, I have complete confidence that they will be taken care, get everything they need, and have a great experience because all of the content, delivery systems, and client experience systems have been defined and set up within Coaching Genie — software I created specifically to manage and run coaching programs.

If getting 100 new clients tomorrow freaks you out, you’re likely still in the build phase and need to further develop your coaching and business systems and find the right technology platform to support your business goals. And that’s okay! 

I remember when I realized that I needed more support than a virtual assistant could provide and hired my first Online Business Manager. It was a disaster. I wasn’t ready for her and my business wasn’t ready for her. I didn’t have the systems she needed to be successful in place and I ended up having to let her go. 

It was so embarrassing and I felt so silly! But the experience reinforced how vital systems are and made it clear that without them, I wouldn’t be able to scale up and grow my team successfully. 

In the Scale stage, your focus becomes putting all of your systems to work for you so you can stay in your brilliance and do your highest-level, most strategic and impactful work. It requires you to scale up your team beyond a virtual assistant and specialized contractors. 

Consider adding team members to:

• Manage business operations.
• Drive your marketing and sales.
• Provide client support.
• Manage your technology.
• Coach clients on your framework.

This saves a massive amount of time and gives you the space you need to work on your business so I can scale up, manage my team and provide the resources they need to be successful, and step into the role of CEO and business visionary.

And no, you don’t need all of this support at once. Start with one person. Ideally, someone like an Online Business Manager who can take the day-to-day tasks of running your business off your plate. Then, as needed and as your revenue grows to support it, you can continue to grow your team.

But you may find that with the right platforms and tools in place, you don’t actually need a big team to scale up your coaching business. Because every service, course, and program I offer is managed through Coaching Genie, I’m able to run a seven-figure business with a team of three (including me) and one development partner. 

Scale Your Coaching Business On Your Terms

Becoming a coach and starting a coaching practice means stepping into the role of business owner, boss, and leader. Lots of people will have opinions about what you should be doing and what your business, offers, and marketing should look like. But their opinions don’t matter because you’re in charge and you get to make all of the decisions. 

You can build your coaching business to fit your lifestyle, your preferred business model and coaching models, your working style, the amount you want to work, and your revenue goals.

Luckily, through Coach Factory, you have a wealth of tools, resources, insights, and information available to you for free. And Coaching Genie provides a platform made for coaches by a coach. It simplifies every aspect of managing coaching clients and delivering coaching programs and courses — and it’s easy to use! Most coaches say they can get up and running in just 20 minutes.

Check it out and watch the free demo. And, if you’d like help figuring out your superskills so you can scale smart, get a copy of my Marketing Superskills Toolkit!