You need a plan in order to make your business idea a reality. Your coaching business blueprint will guide your business from the beginning to ensure your success.
First Steps of Business Model
Name your business – using your real name or a name that identifies your services. Choose a name that can grow with you and define your focus accordingly as to local, international, or international attention.
How expansive do you envision this? Can your business name withstand international scrutiny? Finding a corresponding URL name, even a misspelled one, is a necessary presence today. Also, buy your name as a domain name.
Tiers of Business Formats
Hang out your shingle and take personal checks as a solo entrepreneur
Legally set up a sole proprietorship as doing business in your state in your business name, The advantages of this business model are the setup •Is more professional •Allows payments are made to business name •Could be eligible for PayPal business account. •The accounting separates the personal expenses from the business expenses.
Incorporation Levels
Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) – the benefit is that you receive the liability protection of a corporation, but the tax benefits of a sole proprietorship. Cost could be between $500 to $1000 for setup and paperwork fees.
Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) – Two or more coaches working together. Each partner is responsible for mistakes, and tax liability doesn’t cross over to partner.
If unsure, start as a sole proprietorship and carefully investigate the pros and cons.
I went against the advice of my mentors. As a family coach or parenting consultant, you build your brand by deciding who you want to be as a business person. Can you envision the person you will be in the future and make that your goal, while following your own heart?
In the process of developing a personal brand, most entrepreneurs set goals around time, or earnings, or marketing methods. Their profile or persona is the first step.
Step One
Decide who you want to be. When I founded the Academy for Coaching Parents International, both of my mentors told me up front to hire an assistant to handle email, answer queries, and keep up with the enrolled students. They explained the purpose for this was to give me a lot of free time. Wow! The advice was not what I expected.
In deciding who I wanted to be, I chose this description: A professional mentor with heart, who supports ACPI students through compassionate guidance and coaching to succeed in their business goals in becoming a certified parenting coach. Not only am I personally involved in my business, but I also answer phone calls, emails, and make personal queries to each student and support them through weekly phone calls.
When you build your brand, the best choice is to be yourself. There is only one, unique you, and the vision of who you are in business refers to who you want to be in the future.
Where do you want to live?
How do you see yourself?
What do you see yourself doing?
What are your goals?
Step Two
Dream about different futures to choose from the possibilities. Try on potentialities to see which ones fit best. It’s a necessary process. Decide through the dreaming to build your brand that’s right for you and take affirmative steps to turn that dream into reality. The process involves a certain amount of decisionmaking, some mental toughness and the ability to look at your goals realistically.
You see, there is a difference between a dream and a goal.
The dream is tentative. The goal is firm.
The dream is a possibility. The goal should be a probability.
The dream is subject to change. The goal is not.
These are important differences. They are also differences that many people don’t recognize or, even worse, choose to ignore. Take a cold, hard look at the dream that you’ve selected to be your goal. Look at the ins and outs. Don’t avoid looking at the bad. If you don’t weigh the good points against the bad, you’re going to be in for either a rude awakening when you reach your goal or disappointment when you don’t.
Step Three
When you set firm goals as the final step, you have accomplished the first three steps to build your brand.
Envision possibilities or your role or who you will be as a business owner.
Choose your persona and write it out for reference when you lose focus.
Accept that you are the brand and build your brand products and services on that foundation.
The confidence of knowing where you’re going translates into personal stability. Your personal security, in turn, translates into higher acceptance of your brand over time. When your customers trust you, they also believe in your brand. After all, you are your brand.
When coaching whole parent, child or family member, the best coaching model is the wholistic viewpoint: involving the physical, mental, emotional, intuitive, spiritual, and social intelligences affecting each person.
It can be of no benefit to simply examine one or two of these intelligences. This would not give you a holistically complete and thorough view of the child and parent. Coaching whole parents and whole children is more beneficial when you look beyond the surface level of behavior and symptoms. What is truly influencing or causing the reaction or behavior?
Temperaments?
Emotional frustration?
Lack of Understanding?
Need or more information?
Need for more experience?
For example, if a child gets an ear ache or undefined tummy ache, do you check in with the doctor? Are medications enough? Not likely. It would be in everyone’s best interest to look at what is going on with that child from a whole perspective. Determine what is going emotionally, mentally and/or socially. A child may also be having trouble with a peer at daycare or in school or maybe even with the teacher. Emotional and social problems can show up as physical symptoms.
ACPI Coach and parent Kristy Dixon explains why:
“In coaching whole parent and whole-child, the parent is guided to self-discovery of their internal and external influences. They envision their parenting goal and feeling baby steps of success along the way. When looking at the whole child, the parent is better able to help rather than punish that child. For example ,if a child is having a fit. the parents would allow that child time to release their anger, frustration, disappointment, whatever it may be that needs to be released rather than labeling that child as ADHD, Oppositional Defiant, challenging, or out of control. If looking at the whole child one may find that the true culprit of this fit may be the result of the child “using up all of his good” (self-control and restraint) at school, or again of too much sugar in the diet or reaction to a food allergy, or of not feeling heard by his or her parents. Children struggle to learn how to express their feelings and needs appropriately. It is our job to investigate the mystery of what is causing this type of behavior. Then help the child express in a more effective and safer way. However, we cannot do that if we do not thoroughly look at all influencing factors in the child’s life.”
As a certified coach for parents or families, you can better envision your sales funnel components by taking one step at a time.
The Effective Sales Funnel Components
For a sales funnel to work, there are two key components. The first is the offer you make to people, and the second is how you keep in touch with them.
Optin registration
Step One – Opt-in Giveaways: Opt-in giveaways are freebies that you offer website visitors in exchange for their name and email address. You provide a digital ebook, or a checklist or worksheet in the topic of interest to your clients or audiences.
Step Two – Front-end Offers: Front-end offers are small ticket offers you make to your list to qualify them. In a sense, you offer an ebook, a podcast audio, or a teaching video to be part of the sales funnel components.This step in the funnel includes a price tag of $7 to $10 and your audience would consider this digital product, group coaching, or an Ebook to be high quality and would be interested.
Step Three – Start and Stick With the Connection – People who are interested in your topic have given you their email and now trust you to treat it with respect. Also, you know that the topic could be evergreen and you want to offer it again in a later sales cycle. The new emails that you gathered are entered into your email program and you’ll communicate regularly with them. Much of this Email process can be automated, and you will learn the business of automation in later blogs entries under the Category Business Automation.
Step Four – Subscription Products Instead of making a one-time sale, subscription products keep your prospects paying on a regular basis in exchange for your valuable content. Or, membership sites also could require monthly fees for membership in exchange for a variety of premium content. In fact, a membership site is considered one business model.
The best subscription model is a membership site where your offers can be purchased singly, as in buying a course or a book, or a package of both. By now, your sales funnel components are attracting interested persons. And, at this level for products, the pricing is extended upward to $20, $27 or $37. A large package of valuable information could be $100 plus and well into thousands of dollars for top content in your niche.
Step Five – One-Time Offers are are those that are time-limited, adding scarcity to the sales equation, which helps a client make a choice to purchase, This becomes one consistent marketing strategy. After a website visitor has shared their email or opted into a subscription to your newsletter or content site, then they receive one-tine offers periodically based on your marketing model. Their subscription shows you their interest and willingness to purchase a product. Marketing to your email list includes making them offers and giving them valuable, exclusive content.
Conclusion – Since your landing page is the entry point of your sales funnel, it needs to be properly search engine optimized.
For parenting and family coaches, building a sales funnel offers a method for planning your monthly income, especially if your income bounces from high to low. The erratic approach can drive you nuts. Welcome to the series on funnels – sales, product, or client.
What Is A Funnel?
For an online business owner, sales occur after a series of steps, which is the funnel. A sales funnel is a fundamental marketing tool. However, many new and experienced entrepreneurs have no clear understanding of what a funnel is or how it works. Read on…you’ll see how necessary a sales funnel is for a stable income and business growth.Imagine: You want a client to purchase a parenting book – that is the end goal. You start by inviting the site visitor to read any content on the blog, or a landing page on your web site associated with the book topic. The funnel refers to the how you lead a customer through the buying process.
A Simple Sales Funnel
The basic sales funnel starts with free content. This typically begins with blog posts, videos, or social media content from Facebook or Instagram, and other information readers can access at no cost. This is the “top” of your funnel.
Next, you’ll have an attractive offer that requires a very small exchange: trust me with your email, and you receive this offer. You’ve seen this type of offer all over the internet, and likely signed up for some. The offer might the free ebook or guide, video series, checklist, class, workbook, or other valuable content.
Once on your mailing list, you’ll then present your readers with a series of low-cost offers. Perhaps you have a low-priced ebook or a trial membership.
Customers who purchase your low-priced product move further down the funnel, and are presented with more, higher priced products. As they continue to buy, they move closer and closer to your top-end offers, which make up the bottom of your funnel.
How Your Funnel Works
If you imagine a funnel, you can see that free content—at the top—is consumed by the largest number of readers. Below that, your extreme low-cost item (available only for the cost of an email address) attracts a smaller subset of the true freebie seekers. Next, your low-priced products bring in yet a smaller group.
Finally, as you near the tip of the funnel, only the loyalest of fans and customers will purchase your highest priced offers.
Your job, as the business owner, is to ensure that your funnel leads buyers naturally from the top, free offers all the way to the bottom. The more buyers you can keep in your funnel, the more money you will make.
Most new—and even established—business owners can easily envision the top of the funnel, but if you truly want your business to grow, you must master the entire process, and that starts with understanding what a funnel really is and how it works.
