When you want to get started in the coaching business — it is normal to ask yourself many questions: “How to start as a coach?” , “How to launch a successful coaching firm?” Or “What to do before embarking on the coaching business?”. Whatever your age when you start coaching — you are a young coach.
It’s a bit like venturing into a jungle you know nothing about, without having any benchmarks other than those coaching training schools give you. The purpose of this article is to explain how to get started as a young coach and find your first customers in coaching.
Where and How to find your first customers once started as a young coach
To get started in coaching and having your first customers — you do not necessarily have to go looking for a niche market (even if it will quickly become essential — you do not need it to start coach).
To really get started and get started as a young coach, you need two essential things:
1). You have trained in coaching: ayes, it is the essential base. If you are not trained in coaching, do not make the mistake of thinking that being a coach is just giving advice and that you can become a life coach, deliver professional or career coaching without having acquired the coaching posture or simply because you read books and lived experiences. It’s a bad idea to assume coaching skills you do not know anything about.
2). A network to get you started as a young coach and find your first free or paid customers. Yes, you must know people around you, so start offering people around you the opportunity to experiment with coaching to help them gain clarity and understanding of the situation that is causing them problems. Do you have a friend who wants to lose weight? a friend who wants to reconvert? suggest them to accompany them.
You are started as a young person and have been able to find your first customers … but beware!
Here you have already found your first people to accompany and have received money for your coaching.
However, as an experienced coach, I must warn you! You will surely make some mistakes and that’s normal!
Get started as a young coach and find customers: the 3 mistakes to avoid!
Here are the common mistakes to avoid to get started and build your coaching skills and coaching posture.
Do not wait to have 10 years of experience to start charging you for your coaching
Make the exchange of skills, if necessary, but most importantly — never coach your clients 100% for free except for the first session. If you do not pay anything, your customers are not engaged and commitment is the foundation of your customers’ success. Without commitment, there is no success for him and no first positive reference experience for you! it’s the loser — loser!
Receiving money — even for symbolic sums — is important. If you see that you can not get paid at all, it is possible that you have a form of blockage in relation to money. We must, therefore, consider being accompanied and unblocked on this subject while continuing to coach clients.
Assume being a young coach and getting started to find your clients
You will meet people who are skeptical or who doubt your ability to coach — especially when they are close people. There is sometimes, if not often, a gap between what people think about who can and can not coach. In many cases, they may never have thought of you in this light. This is especially true with people closest to you.
Therefore — know how to take things with humor and assume to introduce yourself as a coach when asked what you do in life. It’s a new identity that you are integrating!
Take the time to lead your introspection and your research to find specificity and base yourself on it to position yourself and stand out as a coach
When you start and you start as a young coach — the common mistake is to look around what others are doing: what are the fees for their coaching, do they pay for the session OR not, who is it? do they address, how are they known … etc etc etc
It’s a common human trend — but more than ever, getting started as a young coach and lasting requires finding your uniqueness: what makes you different, what you are passionate about, what value you can bestow on anyone clients … in short do not fall into the trap of looking at what others are doing and tracing on them … what works for some people to get started and find customers as a coach, does not necessarily work for others … even if there are also good practices to implement!
Conclusion: Start as a young coach and find more customers
Only when you have the basics of coaching posture and take the time to practice with real clients will you be able to find more and more customers. On average, each person knows about 200 people — so you have what to start and go around your contacts to find your first customers as a coach.
Afterward — once you have carefully thought about your niche market in coaching and clearly identified the profile of your clients — you can start creating your communication materials and introduce yourself to this customer segment. Anyway, at that moment, congratulations: you started as a young coach and could find your first customers!