The Benefits, Risks & Challenges of Online Coaching
In this post, we’ll look at 4 key benefits that come with working as an online coach, 4 the most common risks and challenges, and specific steps you can take to overcome these stumbling blocks.
If you’re an expert in your field and you’re looking for new ways to capitalize on your knowledge and experience, then there’s never been a better time to establish yourself as an online business coach.
With a huge proportion of white-collar professionals working from home, and an explosion in new entrepreneurial ventures that have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is plenty of opportunity to set yourself up as an online coach. Additionally, the development of a slew of online coaching tools make becoming an online coach more accessible, and potentially profitable, than ever.
Though the modern commercial arena certainly favors online coaching more than it has in the past, starting an online coaching business, like any business, isn’t without its risks and obstacles.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the key benefits that come with working as an online coach, the most common risks and challenges, and the steps you can take to mitigate and circumvent these stumbling blocks.
The Benefits of Online Coaching
If you know you’ve got a great deal of expertise you can share with the world, then you may be stuck wondering whether to focus your efforts on developing a remote online business, or go for a more traditional and hands-on route. We’ll start on the positives, with four key reasons to launch an online coaching business.
Successful coaching depends on successful two-way relationships, and as a coach, that means appealing to the kind of clients whose personalities mesh well with your standards and methods.
In a more traditional face-to-face coaching model, you’d have to accommodate for certain geographical limitations and work with clients who can feasibly access the place where you host your sessions. Though many coaches have turned a good profit this way in the past, setting out as an online coach allows you to disregard these limitations and connect with the right people for a productive and mutually-beneficial relationship.
With simple tools like LinkedIn available to all, it’s easier than ever to attract clients whose goals, professional field, and philosophies align with the coaching programs you offer.
By running your coaching business 100% remotely, you’ll be eliminating a long list of responsibilities that come with traditional 1-to-1 coaching, while empowering yourself to spend more time scaling and developing your business in-line with your long-term goals.
When you can save an hour or two per session that would usually be spent on traveling and other logistics, you’ll save yourself precious capacity which can be invested into delivering higher-quality sessions, delighting your clients, and fleshing out the next steps needed for your coaching business to fulfill its potential.
Another way in which online coaching helps reduce the need for admin is that it makes scheduling a lot easier when compared to more traditional, hands-on business models.
In a traditional coaching business, coaches have to sift through infinite emails and text messages, then collate these into an accurate calendar to ensure a well-oiled coaching service. This is usually at the whim of the coach’s clients, with some people preferring to book their sessions over the phone, others by email, others by text, or any other communication channel you can think of.
In an online setting, coaches can standardize a scheduling system through tools like Calendly, making admin infinitely easier in a way that’s not only helpful to clients, but expected from all modern business coaches.
When people opt for online coaching, whether for business or anything else, they want to know they’re making progress towards their personal goals.
When you deliver your training sessions in a strictly online setting, you’ll find it significantly easier to establish a system for tracking your clients’ progress and adjusting your sessions according to the unique needs of each client.
Many coaches build their own tracking methods using universal tools like the Microsoft Office suite, but there’s many more options on the modern market that make progress tracking infinitely easier. Nudge app, for instance, has a set of features specifically tailored to the task of keeping clients accountable and organizing data that shows where they are in relation to their training goals.
When your coaching is delivered in a digital-first context, and you’re able to leverage data sets for objective progress tracking, you and your clients will be able to get significantly more value from each session.
The Challenges and Risks of Online Coaching
Now that we’ve seen the great things online coaching can offer entrepreneurial people like you, here’s some of the challenges and risks that can come with a career as an online coach. Though none of these are insurmountable, it’s important for any aspiring coach to understand these before launching their business plan in earnest.
The most pervasive challenge that online coaches have to face, particularly in the early days of their business, is finding enough clients to keep their business ticking over.
Though you may have tons of knowledge and experience in your particular field, marketing yourself as a coach may seem like a mystery in that all-important first year of business. Furthermore, with online coaching being so accessible to so many professionals, it’s likely that you might find yourself in an oversaturated market where it’s hard to get a foothold.
To overcome this challenge, coaches need to work at showcasing their experience and social proof as much as possible in the early days of their business. Obviously, this is easier said than done when you don’t really have much experience or satisfied clients singing your praises, but with a little creativity and hard work, you’ll soon be able to develop a base of experience and social proof that will propel your business forward.
Taking on clients pro bono in exchange for testimonials and press, offering generous discounts for first-time clients, and publishing content that exhibits a high degree of knowledge in your field, are all great ways to close the experience gap and attract that initial windfall of clients.
Though our shift towards a digital-first business landscape has opened up a range of new possibilities with highly accessible tools and systems, it’s also introduced new standards of tech which have made life difficult for new entrepreneurs.
For your coaching business to remain competitive, you’ll need to have a fully developed tech stack that plays nice with your clients’ preferred devices and software, and enables you to deliver a service that holds up in a competitive arena.
File sharing, performance tracking, scheduling and anything else can sap the value from your service if it’s glitchy and unreliable, and send your clients running to a competitor, so make sure your tech is in good working order as you start to develop your business.
If you’re not a particularly tech-savvy person, it may be worth networking with outsourced IT support companies that provide a non-disruptive approach to tech stacks which will take work off your plate and help your clients have a smooth, hassle-free experience. Counterpoint explains when clients “can’t effectively access software, shared files or are using slow hardware, productivity drops” which can be detrimental to their progress and journey so far.
When they first get started, many coaches have a common misconception that by selling a certain specialty or set of coaching services, they’ll be limiting the scope of their business and their potential to scale.
Though focusing your initial marketing efforts on a specific audience segment can feel like you’re capping your potential, it’s a much better course of action than being a jack of all trades, which often only serves to confuse your audience.
Make sure you’re being clear and up-front about the coaching service you’re offering by narrowing your content, networking, and marketing down to a specific niche that you’re an expert on. Think about what your background says about you, and how it can enable you to offer your clients something that the competition simply can’t. It’s also important to consider your ideal coaching client so both you and your audience get the most from your interactions.
Crafting a service offering that distinguishes your niche and brings in the right kind of clients is tough, but it’s also one of the key things that separates successful coaches from failures. For more support with carving out your niche in the market, My Client Strategy has a great guide to help you “create a signature service offering that attracts consistent clients to your service business”.
Unless you’re setting up as a sales coach, the concept of contacting people directly to sell your coaching services can be nerve-wracking to say the least.
Though it’s perfectly natural to be afraid of coming off as too pushy or aggressive, newer online coaches who can’t get over their fear of sales will have a very hard time getting their business off the ground.
In the early phase of your coaching career, it’s important to give yourself a little self-coaching by trying to reframe the way you feel about sales. Rather than thinking of your pitches as some “sleazy salesman” trope, think of it as an effort to bring value into people’s lives, and help them reach the career goals that keep them coming into work every day.
By reframing your thoughts on sales in this way, you’ll not only find it easier to build more compelling pitches, but be able to showcase some genuinely good intentions that will help you attract your ideal type of client.
Final Thoughts
Online coaching can be a hugely fulfilling way to harness your entrepreneurial spirit and help people in your industry reach their loftiest career goals.
As you develop your personal coaching brand, we hope this guide has helped you prepare for the challenges ahead. Use it as a springboard to form a forward-thinking business plan you can trust that thoughtfully considers the benefits of online coaching tools and the challenges of going out on your own as an online coach.