A Simple Life Coach Business Plan to Get Your Practice Started
Setting up your own life coaching practice can be incredibly rewarding. But like any entrepreneurial journey, it requires a solid plan. A life coach business plan acts as the roadmap for your coaching journey, ensuring that you're equipped to deal with the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
In this article, we'll delve into a simple life coaching business plan template that'll help you set your practice off on the right foot.
What Is a Life Coach Business Plan?
A life coach business plan is the strategic foundation upon which a coaching practice is built and developed. Just as a sturdy house requires a detailed blueprint, a life coach may seek to create a comprehensive plan to navigate the entrepreneurial landscape of coaching.
Typically, a life coaching business plan outlines key areas of focus including your unique value propositions, intended target audience, pricing & services, and marketing & sales strategies. When done correctly, a strong coaching business plan ensures a clear direction as you embark on your professional journey.
Whether you’re just starting out on your coaching journey or trying to take an existing life coaching side hustle to new heights, the following plan should help.
Key Components of a Simple Coaching Business Plan
There’s a reason this article stresses the idea of a “simple” business plan. For most coaches just starting out or wanting to refine their business, there really is no need to over-engineer a plan.
It may be tempting to keep refining and tweaking your strategies before starting your business. In reality, half the battle is actually getting into the field and getting started. Nothing will prepare you to build a successful coaching business quite like hands-on experience. And through that experience, you’ll find that the first draft of your coaching business plan will never be perfect.
To draft your own simple life coaching business plan, we recommend the following key sections:
Mission & Vision
Target Market & Audience
Services & Pricing
Marketing & Sales
Financial Goals & Planning
Once again, no need to over engineer it. Copy the above sections into your own document and start typing away. For some help through the process, read on to learn how to flesh out each of the above sections like a coaching pro.
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The Simple 5-Part Coaching Business Plan
Each of these business plan sections are just as important as they next. If you’ve already given your coaching business some thought, you may find that you’re strong in one area, while weak in another. Our goal is to provide you with a plan template that covers the key bases while remaining easy to navigate.
1. Mission & Vision
The heart of every successful business is its clarity of purpose. Even just for yourself, defining the vision and mission for your practice will give you a North Star to rally behind. Let’s cover the key differences between vision and mission using the example of a coaching practice intending to support C-Suite executives to have better work-life-balance.
Mission Statement
Purpose: Your mission statement articulates your coaching work in the here-and-now, answering the question, "What does my coaching practice do today?"
Focus: Mission is present-oriented and concentrates on immediate goals.
Components: It typically includes your practice’s purpose, target audience, and how you serve that audience.
Our example: “To give high-ranking business professionals an accessible space to work on achieving healthier work-life balance.”
Vision Statement
Purpose: Your vision statement articulates your practice’s long-term aspirations, answering the question, "What do I want to represent for the future?"
Focus: Vision is future-oriented and speaks to your long-term goals and ultimate impact.
Components: It typically embodies your values, aspirations, and the broader impact you seek to create in the world.
Our Example: "To reject traditional expectations around corporate culture in favor of a better, more sustainable way.”
Both vision and mission offer a critical foundation for your business, which is helpful for yourself and the individuals you seek to serve. These are bedrock statements that will have a compounding impact on your ability to build a coaching business of structure and substance.
2. Target Market & Audience
Identifying your target audience is crucial. For coaches, landing on a target audience often goes hand-in-hand with picking a coaching niche. In a market that’s only becoming more saturated (active coaches are projected to double from 2019 to 2024), standing out as a specialist serving a specific audience is more important than ever. Here are some key considerations for your target market:
Demographics
Who is the individual you see benefiting the most from your services? Consider their typical age, gender, profession, and socioeconomic status.
Psychographics
Diving a little deeper, what are their aspirations, fears, challenges, and motivations? Maybe you're targeting millennials struggling with career decisions, or retirees finding a purpose post-retirement.
Again, the clearer you are about your audience, the more personalized and effective your strategies become—particularly sales and marketing.
3. Services and Pricing
When it comes to the actual coaching work, your services are a backbone element of your life coaching business plan. Well considered services, coaching packages, and pricing will make it possible for you to hold productive conversations with prospects around the “how it works” side of the operation. These details also add credibility to your practice, suggesting to your target audience that you run a legitimate and professional business.
Services
The spectrum of coaching offerings is vast. While one-on-one sessions are the most common, there's a growing demand for group sessions, workshops, webinars, and even retreats. What is the suite of services you’re willing and able to promote to the world?
Pricing
As with any product or service, pricing is a delicate balance between perceived value and actual cost. While researching competitor rates provides a baseline, your pricing should also reflect your expertise, operational costs, and the unique value proposition you offer.
If you’re just starting out, you may need to work your way up to competitive rates and pricing. But for a growing number of coaches, the payoff is worth it. Coaching revenue generated continues to rise year-over-year, making coaching an increasingly viable full-time occupation, even for newcomers. Check out this post for more on how much life coaches make.
4. Marketing and Sales
Next up in your coaching business plan: Letting the world know you exist and convincing folks to take the next step. While you may not have any experience in marketing or sales, embracing a DIY-mindset can get you far in the coaching industry. Here are some best practices on each.
Marketing
If you’re looking for ideas on marketing your coaching business, you came to the right place with CoachRanks. Our blog is a premier resource for coaches trying to scale, market, and sell their coaching services. Here are a few key pillars worth working into the marketing section of your life coach business plan:
Website: For most of your prospects, your digital presence will be your first impression. If you haven’t already, consider investing in a well-designed, mobile-optimized website. Here is where you can organize key information about your practice, including services, testimonials, and contact forms.
Content & SEO: To build brand awareness, thought leadership, and web traffic, consider a simple content and SEO strategy for your coaching practice. The earlier you get a jump on content creation, the better.
Networking: For many coaches just starting out, your first leads may come directly from your network. In your coaching business plan, you may want to document any individuals or segments of your network that seem likely to convert to business.
Sales
Just like marketing, sales is a critical part of running your own coaching business. If you’ve done a great job with your marketing, you’ll land in front of highly qualified leads and your coaching services will sell themselves. That said, don’t ignore the basics here.
Consider the requisite elements of a smooth “sales process” for when you have an interested coaching prospect leaning in. Will you need a Calendly account for easy scheduling? Forms on your website for easy contacting? A simple contract for easy contracting? Half the battle with sales is simply setting up a system that makes it an easy experience for both yourself and your future clients. It’s well worth the work, and your future self will thank you for setting a foundation for healthy coaching client retention and satisfaction.
5. Financial Goals & Planning
Finally, don't forget the financial side of your coaching business. While you might not yet have a solidified understanding of your book of business, pricing tiers, and timeline, it’s still worth documenting some numbers on paper.
Costs
Startup costs for your coaching business may include coaching certifications and initial marketing efforts, like investing in a professional website. Meanwhile, operational costs recur monthly or annually and may include content production, website maintenance, advertising, and business tools (i.e. Calendly). It’s important to document your full list of costs and expenses to get an initial understanding of how much you’re putting into the business and how much it will cost to run it.
Projections
Based on your pricing and anticipated number of clients, what's your projected income? Set both conservative and optimistic estimates, and make sure your projections align with the rest of your plan. For example, if part of your go-to-market strategy is to offer free coaching for a couple months, then you might want to project little to no income over those months.
Goals
With financial goals, it helps to work backwards from an end figure. If you want to earn $75,000/year through coaching, what would that require? Key metrics that make up this calculation might include Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), average sales cycle length, average contract length, and average contract amount. You likely won’t know many of these metrics when you are just starting out, but it can help conceptualize the required growth of your business.
For example: To earn $75,000 annually, I will need to earn $6,250 per month. This will require averaging 12.5 clients at $500/month, or 6.25 clients at $1,000/month.
Moving from Planning to Building
A monumental step in creating your coaching business plan is to actually move on from it. Once you’ve built your business plan—your North Star document—it’s time to start breaking down the actionable ideas within it.
Don’t underestimate the power of moving from planning to building. It often takes courage to begin, but expect to be the beneficiary of a positive snowball effect. Once you’re actually in the field, you’ll learn more about your coaching practice than you ever could have from your initial business plan.
To add some structure to your small business, make it easy on yourself with modern tools designed for coaches. An all-in-one software like HoneyBook offers everything you need to manage your coaching practice with ease.
To stay up on the latest trends, ideas, and advice on building your coaching practice, make sure to subscribe to the CoachRanks newsletter below. And for more on this topic, continue exploring by reading our latest checklist for how to start a life coaching business.
