How to Know When It’s Time to Hire Your First Assistant

To run a successful business with clients and income flowing in consistently, you need to set aside hours to work with clients, for Breakthrough Sessions with potential clients, for marketing efforts and for administrative tasks.

What I often see instead is health coaches spending time on marketing, getting a few clients, and then spending all of their time on those clients and nothing on marketing. The inevitable result is when your clients complete their programs, there aren’t any new ones to take their place and suddenly you’re back to square one starting over from scratch. This can be so disheartening and leaves you feeling like your business is never going to “take off” and be consistently successful.

Let’s be honest. You didn’t become a health coach with marketing and administrative busywork in mind. You want to work with clients, guiding them through health transformations and showing them how to improve their lives through good whole foods and loving self care.

The need for good marketing is unavoidable though. Some businesses do well with minimal marketing and most need a solid effort on a regular basis. But even a minimal marketing approach requires some focused time on your part. What doesn’t require your time, however, is all the backend tech stuff that gets your marketing efforts out into the world.

In the limited hours you have to spend on your health coaching business each week, most of those hours are hopefully filled with clients and potential client consultations. So your marketing hours should be used wisely. Spend them doing the things best done by you alone: reaching out to referral partners, following up with speaking opportunities, and writing blog posts, ezines and social media content to reach and stay in touch with your tribe.

Creating content is up to you and it can be in the form of articles, audio recordings, video or all three. (I know some coaches purchase articles to use, but I personally recommend finding your voice and developing good writing habits over time.) The good news is: sharing that content and spreading it far and wide doesn’t have to be your job!

With a VA (virtual assistant) or a team behind you, you don’t have to take care of all the pieces that make up a successful marketing plan. Your VA or team can take your article and post it to your blog with a photo (sourced for you), prepare an email to send out to your list, pull short quotes to schedule on your social media platforms and publish it on article sharing sites. And a whole lot more.

If you’re just getting started, hiring a VA or a team for ongoing monthly support may not be a fit for you just yet. The best investment you can make, in that case, is in a business and marketing coach to show you how to get your business moving in the right direction, and a tech expert to get your website, ezine and social media presence started for you.

If you’re already having some success in your health coaching business, hiring a VA or a team could be just the thing that propels you forward to the next level of success.

6 Clues That It’s Time to Get Support for Your Health Coaching Business:

• you have limited hours per week to focus on your business because you have another job, a home and family to care for, or other hobbies, interests or volunteer projects taking up your time
• you spend too many of your business hours updating your website, putting together an ezine, posting on social media or trying to teach yourself about how to market
• you’re not great at the tech stuff, or you can do it but you really don’t like it
• you’re doing your own marketing, trying every new idea you read about, but know it could be done a lot better with a clear and effective strategy in place
• you can think of dozens of other things you’d like to be doing in your business (or in your life) if only you had the free time to do it
• you feel overwhelmed by the number of clients you’re working with every week and have little time for any marketing

If any of these are true for you, it might be time to get support. The easiest and cheapest way to get some help is to hire an inexpensive overseas VA through elance.com or one of those types of sites. The problem with this is most of the low end VAs can do the basics, like adding a blog post to your site, but don’t have any specific experience related to the health coaching industry and cannot guide you towards effective marketing and business mindset. The only coaches who should use these VAs are those who are working with a business or marketing coach so that you use your VA only to implement those ideas.

If you’re ready for support and love the idea of having a business and marketing coach, plus a VA and design team, all in one then we should talk!

I created the unique Monthly Success Plan which offers private, highly personalized coaching plus the VA and design expertise you need to get the marketing tech stuff done for you consistently every month. Space is very limited and we can accept only two health coaches into the MSP at this time.

Get started with an Awesome Business Breakthrough Session now at the deeply discounted rate of only $10! Use coupon code ONLY10 now. Good through 10/10/15.