EP 373 - How To Use Google Voice In Your Coaching Business | Free Phone Number for Coaches 2026

MarketingCoaching LifestyleTechnology
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

As a coach, you need a simple and professional way to communicate with coaching clients - and it's not your personal phone number. Having a separate business number is essential to maintain professionalism and keep your personal life private.

In this video, you'll learn how to create a free business phone number and make the most of Google Voice for your coaching business. We will walk you through a step-by-step Google Voice tutorial on how to set up your account and use it to text clients privately. By the end of this video, you will know how to use Google Voice to get a free business phone number and improve your communication with clients.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love. This one simple tech tip is honestly one of the things people ask me about the most.

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TRANSCRIPT

Do not give out your personal cell phone number. Just don't. I know that sounds dramatic, but if you're building a coaching business, your personal cell phone is one of the last things you want floating around on your website, on your business card, or even at the bottom of your email. And yet I gave my number to everyone. It is out there for anyone to find. You could text me right now, night or day. How do I do both? How do I stay completely private and be that available at the same time? Well, my friend, it is a free tool called Google Voice it is a real phone number. It costs you nothing, and it keeps every single client in one place separate from your personal life. In the next few minutes, I'm gonna show you exactly what it is, walk you through the steps to set it up step by step, and show you how I use it every day, and I'm gonna go slow because I want every one of you to be able to do this If we haven't met yet, I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women build boutique-style coaching businesses without paid ads and without tech overwhelm. I've been at this for over two decades, and I can tell you this one tech tip about Google Voice is probably one of the things that people ask me about the most. let's talk about why this matters, why I don't want you giving out your personal cell phone number. Well, for obvious reasons, I don't want people to know how to hunt you down. I know that sounds crazy, but let's leave that part of your life private. If you think about your personal cell phone number, you want to just be able to give it to your friends and your family, and my goodness, So once clients have that phone number, you can't take it back. So you know what happens? If you have some crazy person that is just abusing their privileges over there, well, that means now if you're ever gonna change it, your family and the doctor and all those people we talked about also can't have that phone number. So I wanna tell you there is something so positive about giving out your phone number because for me, and I know firsthand 'cause I've done it for years, people that I talk to, when I say, "Let me give you my cell," they are like, "Wow."Oh my gosh, Debbie goes above and beyond any other coach." And I do, by the way. But also it really builds trust faster than almost anything. Again, you're giving out personal contact information. You don't have to just email me. Here, text me. this is so phenomenal, and this actually starts from the time that we have our consultation call because a lot of times if somebody doesn't join the consultation call on time, or I need to check with them about something, or have some pre-conversation to be prepared, I text them, And they are so surprised that I am texting from what looks like a personal cell phone number. So I want you to know that you can do that as well. One of the beautiful benefits of this is that everything for your clients can be in one place. The only people that have ever used my free Google Voice number are clients. it's only client conversations in there. Like it's like a big tracking record of every conversation. I can go pull up a text message and see everything that's ever been talked about, and it's only client communication. They can still add a video. They can still attach something. They can text, they can call, they can leave a voicemail. It works all exactly the same. like I said, I give Zoom links. I, send people things. I do personal texts to check in with them. Let me tell you one other really big thing you should know about. If you are emailing clients right now, many people are having challenges with email deliverability because the emails go to a promo folder. If you are using a Google Voice number, you have a chance to be able to communicate with somebody via text message, and that is gold to just check and see, "Hey, have you gotten my email?" It is such an incredible thing. Now, how do I get people's phone numbers? Well, first of all, if they schedule a consultation with me, I text them the reminder. there you go, I have their cell phone number. We also have ways of capturing phone numbers if people want reminders for our workshops, which is another great way to do it. But the real thing is I benefit from giving out my number because it helps people understand that the level of commitment that I have to them is very high So how does this work? The notifications, they come right to my phone. This is my regular phone. I have downloaded the app, and so right there I can look and see how many text messages and how many calls. And I will tell you, I'm very specific about text message. On every place where I've given out my phone number, it is in brackets and it says, "Please text." Because if you're like anyone else, I keep my phone off all day long, but text messages come through. it's a great way to be able to have people text message you. And of course, if somebody calls, they can leave a message, and as you well know, the messages are all typed out now, so you can read the message. But yeah, it comes right to my phone. if I have the notifications silenced in my Apple settings or whatever kind of phone you have, that means I don't have to get the phone call if somebody texts me at midnight or calls me at midnight. I don't have to have that. all around the world, people can have this phone number and they can be texting me or calling me 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and I am not bothered by it. I can decide what time I'm going to reply to those messages. provided you have good boundaries around your own schedule and you answer people back during business hours, then you set the tone for that type of communication. Let me just say one more incredible benefit. If you do not have a Facebook group or something along that line, some kind of community, your text messaging can be that. You could even do group texts there It is such an incredible way, and it is a piece of technology that everybody knows. There's nobody who doesn't know how to text message. there is no barrier for those of you who are over 50 or over 60 or over 70 who are like, "Okay, all the tech is hard." This is the easiest thing that honestly you'll do. I wanna invite you to get yourself a Google free number. Now, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to set that up because I want you to know how to do it. I want you to have the phone number that you can give to everyone in the world, and you can still sleep. Now, you might be thinking, I don't need to get some paid Google business line, do I? And no, you don't. As I've mentioned several times, you can get a free phone number. If you had the paid version of the Google Voice number, it would show up in search. But let's be honest, who is gonna be searching for your phone number? Nobody even expects you to have a phone number, why would they go searching for it? People are not looking for that at this day and time. you can have it on your website, in your bio, in your email signature, on every document that you share, with your scheduling calendar. Any place you communicate with people, you can add your phone number there. they will get your phone number from whatever they see from you. to be very clear, the version that I want you to get is free, not a trial, genuinely free. Please make sure that when you go set this up according to my directions, you make sure that you do it the way that I am telling you. I don't want there to be any confusion, okay? So first of all, I'm gonna walk through the steps of what you need to do, about setting up your phone number. Now, we all have a Gmail email, and if you don't, you need one, okay? So step one, get your Gmail account. And if your Gmail is just like debbieshadid@gmail.com, it's just free, okay? That only takes a minute to set that up. Once that is set up, you'll see that there's a little checkerboard in the top right corner when you go to Google, like your search bar, Google. There's a little checkerboard, and when you click on that checkerboard, and when you're logged in via your email, then that checkerboard will show you Google Voice. You might need to scroll down and find it. So once you open that up, you will be able to see that you're gonna choose personal use only. which is the free version, or it's gonna have the business. And again, you don't need the business version. the next step is this. You are going to pick a phone number. You can search by your city, and I'm just gonna be honest with you, I've had my phone number so long that I was able to actually search a city right close to my house. And at this point I bet you're not gonna be able to. I bet you will have, like, suburbs and things that are not exactly in your town. It doesn't matter because the truth is, none of us have a phone number for where we live anymore because everybody has taken their cell phones wherever they move. it's not like the olden days where we would say, "Oh, she's from this area code," and we would know where they lived. Just pick a number. You can search by your city or by area code, whatever feels good to you. Look through them and pick one. Once you pick your number, you need to do is verify that you are a human. They're gonna send you a six-digit code to your current cell phone number. You're gonna type in that code, and that is it. Your personal number will stay private. Nobody you give that new number to will ever see your real number. Then the phone piece. You're gonna take your phone and you're gonna go to the App Store, either Android or Apple. You're gonna go to the App Store and you're gonna look for Google Voice app, you are going to sign in with the same Gmail, okay? Like debbieshadid@gmail.com. Now, this will download the app on your phone, and it will ring on your phone, and it will notify you whatever it is, if you've got a text message. One thing that I would recommend is that you go and set the notifications just like you do for anything else for what you want. Again, I have mine silenced, I can go look at them anytime. There's a little red number that comes up I know it's there, a couple of things I want you to know. First of all, the free version is for the US only, And it is built for you if you are just talking to your clients and prospects, not for blasting hundreds of marketing text messages a day. That is not the way that you do that. If you want to do something like that, that's gonna require a completely different text message tool. this is just like somebody who has, you know, 20 clients, and you're communicating with them, So it's pretty cool. I have all the messages I've had since I've had my Google number, and it is thousands of messages. for coaches, this is really ideal. So some people might be asking the question what about WhatsApp? Maybe you're saying like, "I've already got that. I thought that's what everybody used." And while that is true, I also have WhatsApp, and I've used that also for communicating with my team. They were around the world, and we would talk through a WhatsApp channel. But truthfully, that has become a mess of spam and junk of all kinds. It is not a professional place for me anymore to even go and look. Sometimes I have to look because I'll get a notification that somebody sent me something there, but really, it's just a place for people to spam me about wanting to work for me. I recommend that you don't use WhatsApp and that you do use a Google free personal phone number. Now, if you're someplace else in the world outside the United States, then WhatsApp is the go-to one for you to use. Your Google Voice number is your actual phone number. Anybody can call you and text you just as they would normally. There is no special way that they have to reach out to you. They just literally pick up the phone and text. They don't have to go to any kind of app. The other incredible thing is it is on your desktop. You can go and I can text message people. Like when I'm sending a Zoom link to somebody for a consultation call, I can literally go to Google Voice and then I can send them a text message. It is so awesome. I can send, you know, a PDF or whatever I need to send. It is that great way to keep organized. It really is simple. Every conversation lives in its own thread with the person's name just like regular text messaging. You can scroll back through and see what your entire history is. What is so fun is sometimes I'll see like, "Who is this person? Oh, I had a consultation call with them like 18 months ago, and they're back." It is also really great for you to save all your client contact information right there in one place. You can add their email address, their phone number, and any other details that you want to know, like their birthday, that would be good for you to be able to keep track of for your clients. And then there's the do not disturb setting, which is the icing on the cake. That one I mentioned earlier, but honestly, it is phenomenal to turn that off. I want you to be away from work. I want you to have a break from work. We don't work seven days a week. Remember, we're creating a business with freedom. if this is making you feel like your business and your life is so much simpler, Then do me a favor, subscribe. I would love to have you continue to follow along. I love to help women figure out simple tech, and honestly, affordable tech, and this is the most affordable thing of all. It's free, okay? make sure you subscribe and follow along. If you have any doubts about this, like, I don't know, this isn't professional. Should I text people or should people text me? Give it a try. There's no harm. Look, if you start texting with people or you give out your phone number, you can close the phone number down. It's not the end of the world, Nobody's gonna blow up your phone. Everybody respects it. I tell people what the limitations are. That's not for my coaching. It is only used for messages. My coaching happens on Zoom, just like this, So you turn off your phone for holidays. You answer on your own schedule. The only way you're gonna get in trouble on this is if you answer this at midnight

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 372 - How To Finally Choose A Niche For Your Coaching Business