How To Write A Life Coaching Business Plan: 5 Templates

If you’re passionate about helping others fulfill their potential and reach new heights, life coaching could be a truly rewarding career for you.

This guide will show you how to create a coaching business plan that will help you turn your ideas into reality, so that you can start creating value and deliver real results to your life coaching clients.

5 Tips For Starting Your Life Coaching Business

Starting out as a life coach can seem like a big move, and there’s plenty to consider. For many experienced life coaches, it’s balancing the support, guidance, and coaching theory side of things business admin that can be a little tricky.

Maybe you see yourself more as a development professional than an entrepreneur, or perhaps you’ve helped others professionally but never quite had your own practice.

Regardless of where you are in the coaching game, here are some tips that can help you get started building a life coaching business of your own:[1]

1. Decide on a clear, unique value offer. Life coaching is incredibly popular, and that’s not changing anytime soon. To distinguish yourself as a coach, think about the unique value you’ll create for your clients – what’s original about the results you can help them achieve, or how you help them get from A to B?
2. Consider accreditation. The right life coaching certification can arm you with useful skills and knowledge in your field while boosting your credibility as a coach. There are plenty of qualifications available online for coaches, and you may find one that goes a long way to enhance your marketability.
3. Set your business up, practically. Various states, regions, and countries have different systems for registering and starting an online coaching business. Make sure you allow time to collect or create all the coaching forms you’ll need to enroll and manage your clients.
4. Develop or curate your coaching resources. To practice, you’ll need tools such as life coaching worksheets, lessons, exercises, videos (if you’re using them), and more. Create a database of all the coaching tools you’ll need so you know just where to find them when you land your first client!
5. Create an online presence. Think about how you’ll reach out to clients, and prepare the things that will help you be discovered online. Some examples include a coaching website, social media profile, or listings in online coaching directories. A strategic way to approach this is by developing a marketing strategy, which covers all the ins and outs of how you’ll grow your visibility.

How To Write A Coaching Business Plan: 2 Examples

A coaching business plan should help you clarify why and how you’ll start and run your coaching practice, as well as the tools you’ll need to help others.

Creating a life coaching business plan might sound terrifying, don’t be put off. You can go into more detail if you prefer a comprehensive organizational roadmap, but your business plan should quite simply help you:

1. Clarify your “Why” – What is the ultimate purpose of your business? What is your desired future vision for your practice and clients?
2. Solidify your “How” – What are your coaching objectives/your mission? What approaches will you use to achieve them?
3. Determine your “What” – Understand the interventions, tools, lessons, or solutions that will help you on your mission.

Depending on the depth of detail you’d like to go into, you can break your plan up into more or fewer sections.

The following two coaching business plan examples illustrate this.

Example 1: Lean Life Coaching Business Plan

A lean business plan is ideal for explaining your coaching practice succinctly, or if you’re planning a small coaching business.

Using this USA Small Business Administration sample as a guide, your lean coaching plan might include the following headings:[2]

• Business identity
• Target client
• Client pain points
• Your solution
• Your competition
• Revenue streams
• Marketing activities
• Expenses
• Team and their key roles, and
• Milestones

Lean coaching business plans can be particularly helpful if you’re keen to refine and enhance your business plan as you learn and gain experience.

Example 2: Life Coaching Business Plan Template

This life coaching business plan template from Profitable Venture is a more comprehensive example, starting with an executive summary and ending with a startup expenditure budget.[3]

SWOT and market analyses are used for an in-depth assessment of potential opportunities, threats, and rivals in the coaching industry.

3 Helpful Templates and Samples For Your Plan

Here are a few good examples of coaching business plans, including some extra sections you might want to include:

1. 9 Steps to a Lean Life Coaching Business Plan from Coaching Online – this covers a few more sections such as your competition, marketing, and finances[4]
2. Traditional Business Plan from the USA Small Business Administration – a traditional business plan that may work well for larger coaching practices[5]
3. Business Plan Template for a Startup from Score.org – a 9-step template for new business owners.[6]

Creating A Business Plan For Your Online Coaching Business

Once you’ve decided on the most relevant format for your business plan, you’ll want to formalize it by writing it all down.

You will most likely be referring to it regularly, as you structure, run, manage, and grow your coaching practice, so it’s critical to keep your plan along with the rest of your business documents.

A quick, straightforward solution for most coaches is to create a digital business plan, as we’ve started to do below using Quenza:

Using Quenza’s Activity Builder, you can create custom sections for each element in your plan, as well as text boxes for all the information that will go into your tool.

This helps you store your plan in your coaching portal alongside your Client profiles, activities, and other coaching tools, so your plan is always near at hand as you start to build your business.

To create your own coaching business plan using Quenza’s Activity Builder, simply:

1. Open and title a new Activity
2. Create sections for each header of your plan, and
3. Save your Activity to your Library when it’s done!

You can also print your plan as a PDF, or access and edit at any time on Quenza’s client app, as shown below:

There’s no right or wrong way to create a coaching business plan template, so don’t be afraid to add in headers or sections as your plan grows. As long as your plan takes you through each milestone of building and running your business, you’re on the right path to creating a successful, growing practice.

Best App and Software For Your Coaching Business

Quenza is a state-of-the-art solution for coaching professionals, regardless of where you are in the process of running your business.

Not only can you plan out your business as a first-time coach, but Quenza’s tools can help you deliver solutions, stay in touch with clients, and even market your business as you gain traction.

With Quenza’s features, for example, you can:

1. Design, build, and deliver personal and group life coaching solutions
2. Craft coaching programs, curricula, or entire e-courses from your existing tools
3. Drip feed your solutions to coaching clients automatically, on a schedule
4. Create and customize all your coaching contracts, coaching agreements, and feedback forms
5. Collect and securely store all your clients’ data with Quenza’s HIPAA-compliant app and coaching platform
6. Offer clients a centralized online coaching portal
7. Stay in touch with and engage your clients throughout the course of your programs, using notifications, reminders, and multimedia,
8. Track, monitor, and evaluate your clients’ progress in real-time, and
9. Document your sessions with Quenza’s Client notes.

5 Unique Features Included in Quenza

We’ve already seen how important it is to carve out your niche as a life coach – and of course, you’re most efficient when you decide on your own workflow, processes, and style.

With Quenza’s custom features, you have all the flexibility you need to get creative with solutions and market yourself in a way that suits you.

For instance, you can make use of Quenza’s:

1. Multilingual client app – to translate your own or your clients’ Quenza app into 16 different languages, and custom brand colors
2. Group or private chat – to share feedback, reminders, or encouragement
3. White label feature – to promote your brand by adding your logo to tools, forms, and programs
4. Wheel of Life feature – to design personalized life Wheel of Life assessments, and
5. Expansion Library – for customizing popular and evidence-based coaching exercises without starting from scratch!

Final Thoughts

These tips, templates, formats, and examples will help you craft a strategic business plan that can get your coaching practice up and running – even if you’ve never started a business in your life.

If you have a template of your own to share with your fellow coaches, do let us know in the comments below.

We hope this article was helpful. Don’t forget to start your 30-day, 1 dollar Quenza trial for all the tools you need to bring your business plan to life!

Quenza’s practitioner tools will help you craft and deliver powerful online coaching solutions from any connected device, and contains everything you need to run your life coaching practice digitally for brilliant client outcomes.

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