Are You Building The Health Coaching Business You Want?
In this week’s article, I am going to take a little detour from what I normally write about, which is usually the nuts and bolts of online marketing for your health coaching business.
I recently spent the weekend with a room full of 200 people who wanted to build their health coaching business online. What I discovered is that everyone has different reasons for doing this and different goals for their business.
I’ll tell you my big reason for first deciding to work from home and build a business online. When I got laid off from my corporate job several years ago I made a commitment to myself to be home and available for my 2 boys when they got home from school and I would be available nights and weekends for them.
I have my own specific reasons for my why just like you will. When my kids were very young I was an executive chef at a restaurant and ending up working many nights and weekends. This wasn’t such a big deal when they were pre-school since they were still home whenever I was. When my oldest entered school though, I knew things would need to change if I wanted to be there for him.
So I moved back to the corporate world, you know, a “real” job. I was home every night, weekend and holiday. Everything seemed perfect, but the job was sucking the life out of me. Once again, I knew it was time for a change but that is easier said than done when you have a full life and a steady paycheck.
Fortunately, the universe intervened and I got laid off a few years back. This was one of the happiest days of my life (and scariest). I knew if I just took another “real” job, I would wake up 10 years later and wonder how I got there. So I made another commitment that I would build a business that supported my lifestyle, not the other way around.
This has made making some hard choices, from turning down opportunities to changing direction several times over the past 6 years, but it has really given me a good perspective on what it is that I want.
I also talk to people that want to play on a much larger stage. This too, can take many forms. From building a million dollar business to becoming a celebrity author or speaker. The great thing is that none of these choices are the right or wrong one, you just need to figure out which is the right one for you.
Sure, they will all take hard work. I’ve yet to meet any entrepreneur that said starting a business was easy. The actions you take today, however, will be vastly different depending on if you want to be a nationally recognized speaker or just want to make a few thousand dollars a month so you can stay home with your kids.
I think that we all tend to get enamored with (at least I know I have in the past) all of the “gurus” out there saying how easy it is to build a million dollar coaching practice. First off, I don’t think any of it is easy. Doable, definitely, easy, NO WAY! What if your ultimate goal is to make $5,000 a month from your practice. Should you spend all your time and energy focused on trying to emulate the 7 figure coaches? Probably not, the problem is, most of the 7 figure coaches out there are the ones that we hear the most from.
By the same token, if your goal is to build a coaching empire, by all means find someone who has done it and do what they did. Having a mentor is invaluable. I know I have been guilty of trying to do it all on my own many times and while this is an admirable quality and sometimes necessary in the early stages, it also slows the process down considerably.
If I could do it all over again, back in 2005 when I built my first website (a story for another day, but it cost me well over $5 K), I would have taken that money and invested it in learning from someone who had already done what I wanted to do. And not just learning the skills (I also wasted a lot of time and money on courses) but how to implement them. If I had implemented every thing I learned in every online course I have ever taken (which would take exactly 99 lifetimes), I would probably be writing this to you from an island somewhere. No, actually, my commitment was to be home when the kids got off the bus, remember?
The one thing I have done well in the past 6 years is to consistently send out Health Coach Weekly and try to provide you with valuable content to help you grow your health coaching business. Whether you are still in school and haven’t gotten your first client yet or have an overscheduled practice and are trying to figure out how to scale and get some hours back in your day, I hope you find value here.
I’d love to hear from you and what your goals are for your business. Just leave a comment below, and yes, it will be me that personally reads and responds. I don’t have a team of outsourcers doing this stuff, although I need to get some of that soon. They will never be my voice, respond to comments or create any of my content.
