5 Ways to Scale Up and Serve More Coaching Clients

Do you want to serve more coaching clients but don’t know how to scale up your business? You’re not alone. Many coaching businesses hit a plateau where they can’t seem to grow any further. This guide will discuss five strategies to help you serve more coaching clients and take your business to the next level!

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I receive a small commission at no cost to you when you make a purchase. This helps me pay to keep this site going and to bring all these free resources to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Is coaching scalable?

Whether you’re a business coach, relationship coach, life coach, or health coach, you’ll eventually hit your limit in terms of income or impact.

When you can’t seem to take on more coaching clients, it’s time to start thinking about how to scale up your coaching business.

But are coaching services scalable? The answer is yes! Many successful coaches have scaled their businesses and increased the number of satisfied clients.

Pros and cons of scaling a coaching business:

Like any business decision, there are pros and cons to scaling an online coaching business. On the plus side, scaling can help you reach more prospective clients online and have a greater impact. It can also lead to increased revenue and profits.

However, there are some potential downsides to consider as well. Scaling too quickly can be difficult to manage and may lead to coaching clients fast, coaching burnout, and unhappy clients. It’s important to carefully consider your options before making any decisions.

Now, let’s look at five ways to scale up your coaching business.

5 Ways to Scale as a Coach When Your Schedule Is Full

Here are five ways you can start scaling up your coaching business today.

1) Digitalize Your Products and Coaching Services as Much as Possible

While it’s difficult to entirely replace one-on-one coaching, there are ways to digitalize your products and services to serve more clients without having to coach them all individually.

A few ways to digitalize your 1 on 1 coaching services:

• Create an online course or mini-course

• Provide accountability asynchronously using pre-recorded videos

• Create a resource library online that you can refer clients to

• Publishing an e-book

• Host regular webinars or live streams for your private community

• Record private podcast episodes for clients

• Set up a membership site and provide instant access for clients to support each other

• Set up automated email campaigns for client follow-up and check-ins

Not only does this help you serve more clients, but it also allows you to automate parts of your business. This can free up time to focus on other areas of your coaching business.

If you’re unsure where to start, begin by surveying your audience. Find out what type of content they would be interested in and what format would work best for them. You could also ask current or past clients for testimonials about how digital coaching has helped them. This feedback can be helpful as you create new products and services.

Automate Your Process

Similarly, reviewing your marketing, sales, onboarding, and coaching delivery processes is a good idea to identify areas where you can automate or systemize tasks. This will help you free up time to focus on coaching and scaling your business.

There are several ways to automate your coaching business:

• Use an email marketing tool like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign to automate your email list sign-ups, segment your list, and send automated emails.

• Invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesflare, Keap, or HubSpot to manage your coaching leads and paying clients.

• Set up an online booking system like Acuity Scheduling or Book Like a Boss so clients can book their own appointments without having to email back-and-forth with you.

• Use a project management tool like Asana, Trello, or Clickup to keep track of your coaching deliverables and deadlines. Clickup, for example, has some cool time-saving automation features.

You can focus on coaching and scaling your business by automating some of these tasks.

Outsource Non-Coaching Tasks

To scale your coaching business, you’ll need to free up as much time as possible to focus on coaching and growing your business. One way to do this is by outsourcing non-coaching tasks.

There are many things you can outsource in your coaching business:

• Graphic Design work (e.g., creating ongoing graphics for your marketing campaigns)
• Web design (creating an engaging and user-friendly website – chat with our awesome designer Colleen Keith)
• Setting up sales funnels, landing pages, and automated email campaigns (we recommend the work of Automation Agency for this)

• Email marketing

• SEO audit and SEO services (we recommend and can vouch for the fantastic work of SEO Leverage)

• Copywriting and content writing

• Bookkeeping/accounting/virtual CFO

• Social media marketing, general admin, sales admin, and more. (We recommend chatting with The Growth Hub about how their awesome virtual assistants can help)

2) Change delivery method (your coaching model)

Delivering one-on-one coaching is a great way to start a coaching business, but it can be very difficult to scale, as you’ve most likely encountered. You can only coach a limited number of people at one time, which means your coaching business will plateau if you don’t make a change.

How to scale with group coaching

One way to start coaching more people is by switching to group coaching. You can still give individuals the attention they need while working with more people at once.

This type of coaching is great for those who want to focus on accountability and getting results in a shorter period of time.

As we’ll discuss later, once you’ve established a clear coaching methodology and are producing consistent results for several clients, you can then look to bring on more coaches to help you deliver your coaching program.

Steps to getting started with group coaching:

1. Determine the coaching program you want to offer and who would be the ideal client for it

2. Create a curriculum

3. Find a group of people in your target audience who would be interested in being your first coaching clients. Start with your existing network and existing clients.

4. Market your group coaching program

5. Deliver your program

How can you charge the same for group coaching as you do for one-on-one coaching?

This is a common question and one that has a few different answers.

Some coaches choose to charge a lower rate for group coaching as it’s a more affordable option for clients. Others choose to keep their pricing the same, as they feel they’re providing the same value in coaching and can help clients get results faster by leveraging the power and support of the group.

You may want to chat with existing one-on-one clients individually to see if they’d be interested in upgrading to group coaching at the same rate. You can also offer a discounted rate for clients willing to switch over.

There’s no right or wrong answer here, it just depends on your coaching business model and what you feel comfortable with.

If you’re not ready to switch to group coaching, another option is to add more coaching packages or tiers to your business. This will allow you to work with a wider range of clients and serve more people overall. We’ll discuss this further in the pricing levers section below.

How to scale an online coaching business with online courses

As mentioned earlier, online courses can also help you scale your coaching business. There are several benefits of offering online courses:

1. Help more people to get results – They’re a great way to share your coaching methodology with more clients and get people results without having to coach them one-on-one.

2. Not limited by your availability – This is a great option if you want to serve more people but don’t necessarily want the added responsibility of coaching them all individually.

3. Lead generation – Creating an online course is also a great lead generation tool. You can use it to attract new coaching clients by offering it as a freebie or low-cost entry point into working with you.

We have a great resource for getting started if you want to learn more about creating an online course.

3) Expand Your Team through Hiring or Franchising

Hire a team of coaches

One way to immediately start serving more coaching clients is by hiring a team of coaches. This will allow you to leverage your time and energy to focus on other business areas. As the saying goes, “time is money!” When you have a team of coaches working with you, you’ll be able to serve more clients and make more money.

So where do you find good coaches for your team, anyway?

There are a few different ways:

• Identify clients who have been through your coaching programs who show potential and desire to become great coaches, then invite them to join your team.

• Look for certified life coaches, business coaches, or personal development coaches who may be interested in coaching under your brand. You can find these people by searching online directories or job boards.

• Work with coaching schools to find recent graduates who are looking for an opportunity to get started in the coaching industry.

• Reach out to your existing network of contacts and see if anyone is interested in coaching.

Some tips for bringing on great coaches to represent your coaching practice:

• Understand what motivates them and whether their values align with your company’s.

• Make sure they have the coaching skills and experience required to be successful.

• Provide adequate training and ongoing feedback to ensure they can follow your coaching program or process.

• Give them a trial as a coach (and team member) to see how they mesh with your company culture.

• Check their references!

Offer a coaching franchise opportunity

Another way to expand your team and serve more clients is by offering a coaching franchise opportunity. This could be a great option if you’re looking to scale quickly and reach a wide audience with your coaching.

The pros and cons of franchising your coaching business

Pros:

• Can reach a wide audience quickly – Franchising can help you expand your coaching business rapidly and reach more people in a shorter period.

• Increased brand awareness – Having multiple coaching franchises will increase brand awareness for your coaching business as a whole.

• Improved coaching quality – With franchising, you can maintain control over the quality of coaching being delivered to clients.

• Additional revenue stream – Franchising can provide a passive income stream for you as the franchisor. This is due to franchisees’ royalties to use your coaching brand and business model.

Cons:

• Requires significant upfront investment – To franchise your coaching business, you’ll need to invest in things like marketing, training, and support.

• More paperwork and red tape – There’s also more paperwork and red tape involved in franchising, which can be time-consuming. We’d recommend hiring an experienced accountant and lawyer to help with this. (Maybe even an experienced business franchising mentor)

• Loss of control – When you franchise your coaching business, you’ll have less control over how it’s run and what happens on a day-to-day basis.

• It may be difficult to find good franchisees – It’s important to carefully screen and select individuals who will represent your coaching business well. Not everyone is cut out for franchising!

If you’re interested in learning more about franchising your coaching business, this video will help you answer “Franchising – Is It Right For Your Business?”

4) Shift your sales approach

If you signed less than seven of the last ten prospects you spoke to, you’ve got a conversion problem.

So there are a couple of things you can do to improve your coaching business’s sales and generate more revenue per client:

• Use pricing levers
• Improve the closing rate for you (and your sales team if you’re at that stage).

Use Pricing Levers

Pricing is a great way to scale your coaching business. By increasing your prices, you can serve fewer clients and still make the same amount of money (or more!).

Of course, it’s not always that simple. You’ll need to consider things like the value you’re providing, what your competitors are charging, and how much your target market is willing to pay.

The key is to find the right balance for your coaching business. If you increase prices too much, you could lose clients. But if you don’t increase them enough, you could be leaving money on the table.

Experiment and see what works best for your coaching business. And remember, you can always change your prices if they’re not working out.

Related: Coaching prices: How much to charge for your services

Utilise Package Pricing

Package pricing refers to offering coaching services in different bundles at multiple price points.

A simple example of package pricing can be seen in any fast food chain. You can get a small combo, medium combo, or large combo. And each size has a different price point.

Packaged pricing has proven effective because it simplifies the buying process for customers. It’s much easier to choose from a menu with only 3 packages in front of you instead of viewing all the individual items on the menu and trying to work out what would go together and how to tally up the cost, right?

It also allows you to increase your prices without losing customers, as they can simply choose a lower-priced package if they’re on a budget.

Package pricing is a great way to scale your coaching business because it:

• Makes your coaching more affordable for clients

• Allows you to sell coaching in bulk

• Helps you upsell clients on higher-priced coaching packages

• Allows you to make more money per client

• Can increase the perceived value of your service.

• Allows you to serve more clients – When you offer multiple coaching packages, you can serve a wider range of clients.

There are several ways to implement package pricing, but some common methods are:

• Offering premium coaching packages with additional features or benefits

• Creating high-ticket coaching programs or products

• Offering group coaching at a discounted rate

• Using tiered pricing to offer different levels of service

The key is finding the right balance for your coaching business. If you increase prices too much, you could lose clients. But if you don’t increase them enough, you could leave money on the table. Experiment and see what works best for

For example, if you currently offer one-on-one coaching, you could add a group coaching program, an online course, or a membership community. Or, if you have different levels of coaching (e.g., beginner, intermediate, and advanced), you could add an additional level or two.

This would allow clients to work with you in different ways and at different price points (based on what works for them at any point in time).

Improve the closing rate for you and your sales team

So how can you improve your closing rate when speaking with prospects?

1. Ensure you’re clear on your coaching offering, the pain points your ideal prospects are experiencing, and the results you can help your clients achieve. (Make sure you’ve got real case studies on hand of successful outcomes for past customers that you can share with prospects.)
2. Ensure that your marketing and sales system effectively brings in only qualified prospects so that you’re only chatting with ideal clients.
3. Implement a sales triage process where you (or your sales team) quickly qualify prospects on a 10-min call to ensure they’re a good match before spending too much time on the call. On the call itself, focus on understanding the problem your prospect is experiencing and whether or not you can help them resolve it. If you can, great! If not, that’s OK, too – there’s no point in trying to sell coaching to someone who doesn’t want or need it. (Taki Moore, whom I first learned about this technique, deserves a shout-out here.)

These are just a few of the ways you can improve your closing rate, but the key is to ensure that you’re only speaking with qualified prospects who are a good match for your coaching business. By doing this, you’ll close more deals and save yourself (and your sales team) a lot of time and energy.

If you’re still unsure how to close more sales, consider working with a sales coach or taking a sales training course.

5) Systemize Marketing to Reach Potential Clients

Now let’s talk about how to reach more potential clients, shall we?

The goal here is to develop a repeatable system for generating leads and filling your sales funnel.

In his Amazon bestselling book Systemology, author David Jenyns suggests that all businesses should focus on first systemizing their “critical client flow.” Here’s a video of David explaining this concept (fast forward to [17:18]):

Now that we’re clear about how important it is to systemize our marketing to scale, let’s look at a few good options (channels) for scaling your marketing efforts to attract potential clients.

Paid marketing and advertising

Paid ads are a great way to reach more people and promote your coaching business. You can use paid ads on social media, Google, podcasts, newsletters, online communities (e.g. Reddit), or even traditional platforms like TV or radio.

The key with advertising is to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. You don’t want to waste money on ads that no one will see (or that aren’t relevant to your coaching business).

You’ll also need to ensure that you’re using the right keywords, have well-written ad copy, and attention-grabbing visuals. The first objective of any ad is to get someone to click on it and get them to the next step in the process. That’s where it helps to provide a valuable offer (like free coaching) to encourage potential clients to move closer to paying for your services.

Paid ads can also work well if you run a local business, as you can target potential clients in your city or town.

Content marketing and increasing search engine traffic (SEO)

Another great way to reach potential coaching clients is through content marketing. Content marketing is all about creating and sharing valuable content (like blog posts, infographics, eBooks, etc.) that will help your target audience.

Not only does this help you attract more visitors to your website, but it also helps you build trust and credibility with potential clients. After all, if they see that you’re an expert on a certain topic, they’re more likely to want to work with you!

Combined with a strong SEO strategy, content marketing can be a great way to attract coaching clients who are already searching for the type of coaching you offer.

For example, if you were a fitness coach, you could write and publish an SEO-optimized “How to get fit when you only have 30 minutes per day” guide on your website. Then, when people search for “how to get fit,” they might come across your guide and decide to work with you!

Writing and publishing guest posts, posting videos online, and sharing well-researched and helpful posts in online groups are all forms of content marketing.

Note: Content marketing is a long game that requires a clear strategy and choosing to be prolific over perfect. The more consistent you are with organic marketing, the more business you’ll generate over time.

In this video, I share three steps to being more consistent with content marketing:

Social Media Marketing

Social media is another great option for reaching potential coaching clients. With over two billion active users on social media, there’s a good chance your target audience is hanging out on at least one platform.

The key to social media marketing is being strategic about your platforms. Not all social media platforms are created equal; some will work better for your coaching business than others. For example, LinkedIn would be a better choice for business coaching, while Instagram might be better for health and wellness coaching.

Once you’ve identified the best platform (or platforms) for your coaching business, you can start creating and sharing valuable content that will help attract potential clients.

You could also use social media to run paid ads or promote your content marketing pieces (like blog posts or infographics).

Affiliate Marketing

This might not be one of the first marketing tactics you’d think of for scaling a coaching business, but it can be helpful.

Affiliates are typically people (or businesses) who promote your coaching business in exchange for a commission on any sales they generate. This could be done through their blog, social media, or email list.

For example, let’s say you’re a health and wellness coach. You could partner with a local gym and have them promote your coaching services to their members. Or, you could work with a healthy food delivery service and have them recommend your coaching to their customers.

Affiliates can be a great way to reach potential coaching clients that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. And, since they only get paid when they make a sale, it’s low-risk for you!

If the idea of affiliates doesn’t jive with you, there are other types of partnerships that you can enter with complementary businesses that focus more on mutual values alignment and value exchange instead of commission.

In this video, Therese Tarlinton, author of SWAP! Marketing without Money, shares three different types of marketing partnerships you can use to grow your business.

Networking groups

Whilst our focus has been primarily on reaching new clients online, I thought it’d be worth mentioning offline methods too. One of which is networking groups.

Joining a few relevant networking groups in your local area can help you meet potential coaching clients face-to-face. Not only that, but it’s also a great way to build relationships with other small business owners who might be able to refer coaching clients your way.

Some popular networking groups include BNI, Rotary Club, and Toastmasters International.

To find networking groups in your area, simply do a Google search or check out Meetup.com.

Of course, there are also online networking groups, so it pays to explore all options!

Events

Another great way to meet potential coaching clients offline is by attending or hosting events.

If you’re looking to attract business coaching clients, then you might consider attending business expos or conferences. Sports events or trade shows could be a good option for health and wellness coaches.

When you host your own event, you have complete control over who you invite and how you market the event. This can be a great way to attract high-quality coaching clients that are a good fit for your business. You could even partner with an event manager in the same industry and let them take care of the logistics while you focus on coaching.

Hosting virtual events, like webinars, are also worth considering. They tend to be less expensive and time-consuming than traditional events but can still be very effective for attracting and converting coaching clients.

Never sold coaching through a webinar? We’ve got you. Here’s a video of Taki Moore giving a crash course on how to sell with webinars.

Now it’s your turn – ready to scale up your coaching business?

So, these are 5 strategies that will help you scale up your coaching business.

To recap, they are:

1) Digitalize your products and coaching services as much as possible

2) Change delivery method

3) Expand your team through hiring or franchising

4) Shift your sales approach

5) Systemize marketing to reach potential clients

Which of these strategies are you going to start with? Let us know in the comments below!

And, if you need help implementing any of these strategies, we offer various services.

(Featured image Photo by Belle Co)