181 - Tips for Gaining Momentum for a Thriving Coaching Business

Let’s talk about building business momentum! Momentum is the essential driving force behind a thriving business. When you've got it, everything just clicks. Your confidence soars and you effortlessly step into growth mode. Your business shines, and so do you!

In this episode, let’s dive into the ways you can gain momentum in your coaching business. 

Gain insights on how marketing, setting clear goals, and building strong foundations can help you stay in the game and head into 2024 strong. Plus, I'll be talking about the habits you should ditch that are actually slowing you down. 

Tune in and start building the momentum you need to fuel the success of your coaching business!

👉 Check out my 8-part Business Marketing Series to know about how to market your life coaching business organically. (Organic market is FREE marketing.)

👉 Create a profitable business that looks good and sets you up to be respected through the Fast Track Business Building Boutique Program 

👉 Check out my FREE Canva Workshop and learn how to create stunning graphics for your coaching business! 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and forward this to a coach who is building and growing their coaching business. CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A REVIEW

Don’t forget to connect with me on social media: Instagram | Facebook| Pinterest

Transcript

Preview: That's another great move towards creating momentum, investing in personal development. Let me just tell you, when you fill yourself up, you can show up stronger in your business. When you get personal coaching, you can show up stronger in your business. When you do self-coaching, you can show up stronger in your business. All of that helps to create a better attitude for you, maybe some motivation, maybe some inspiration, which adds to you being able to build momentum in your business.

Intro: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Let's talk about momentum. In this podcast, I'm going to be sharing ways you can gain momentum in your coaching business. Gain momentum to build it, gain momentum to keep yourself out there and really work on building momentum to be able to go into 2024 strong. I'm also going to be talking about the things that you should quit doing that are actually slowing you down.

The first thing that I want to address before we get started is if you are lacking clients, marketing is the answer. And that's one of the things I'm going to talk about today. Now you have two solutions to that. Number one, you can go back and listen to a lot of the podcasts that I have about marketing.

In fact, I have an entire series that I'm going to link right here in the show notes. That is a whole set of podcasts, eight episodes in a row about marketing. All right. If you go back and look and you follow the show, I do marketing podcasts regularly. So marketing is always the way to increase momentum, right?

To increase your opportunity for clients. Today, we're going to talk about a lot of other ways. That you can increase your momentum. 

The first thing is to set clear goals. So you want to define a short term goal. You want to define a long term goal. Those goals give you something to shoot for, right? They could be financial goals.

They could be how many clients you want to have at the end of the year. How many consultations do you want to have? How many new connections do you want to have? For some of you, your personal goals should be about getting your business foundations built. In the Business Building Boutique, that's some of the work that we do, right?

It's just getting your branding done. It's getting your messaging done. It's getting your website done. All of those things. They actually create momentum for you when you have a website that you're proud of to send people to, when you have your email opt-in built, when you are doing weekly emails, all of those things create momentum. That's the marketing that I was talking about. 

You can also narrow or specialize to really be able to differentiate yourself. You can also narrow and specialize. Narrowing your niche is something that a lot of you guys don't want to do because you don't want to exclude anyone. But what I want to tell you is that when you narrow and you differentiate yourself from everybody else, it really does set you apart. As I tell people all the time, we want people to raise their hand and know, hey, that lady is talking to me. That's what happens when you specialize. 

In a particular thing, or when you narrow your niche to have more momentum, you also want to have a strong online presence. If you listen to those episodes about marketing, I talk about all the ways that you can market your business for free online. All right, all of those various ways will help you create momentum because you'll be found in so many more places.

Content marketing. I love for you to have a content plan in place. And a content plan that you follow when you follow something consistently and you have a theme, you become known for something again, increasing your momentum. How about networking? Oh my goodness. That is such a great way to become known.

If you go network, and you network with a group of people, you are meeting a whole bunch of people at one time instead of one person, that creates momentum, right? It's a way for you to have larger exposure. The workshops that I do create larger exposure, putting yourself on social media, even though you think it's not working, creates a larger audience that you get yourself in front of.

I mentioned email marketing, and one of the things that's really great about that is that once you get it set up one time, like we get your email opt in set up, we have your nurture series where you introduce yourself to your clients. Then you start building that know, like, and trust your weekly through your weekly emails.

One thing that's great is that every new person that comes into your world. Then gets to drop into those series of emails that are already written. That's another way to create momentum testimonials and reviews that does it to positive testimonials and reviews is another great way to encourage people to connect with you.

Positive feedback builds trust and credibility. Workshops. You guys know, I love those. Any of those free events that you can do where you educate people. That's another great move towards creating momentum, investing in personal development. Let me just tell you, when you fill yourself up, you can show up stronger in your business.

When you get personal coaching, you can show up stronger in your business. When you do self coaching, you can show up stronger in your business. All of that helps to create a better attitude for you, maybe some motivation, maybe some inspiration, which adds to you being able to build momentum in your business partnerships. Oh, my goodness. Partnerships and collaborations. All of those are great ways to get exposure to a much larger audience.

Remember the gaining momentum in your online coaching business is an ongoing process. You don't just do it now and have momentum, you have to keep fueling your business by doing all of the things by doing the steps over and over by staying consistently committed to your goals, applying strategies that you're currently doing and adding new strategies. Right. You're always evolving as you build your coaching business. 

Now let's talk about the things that I want you to stop doing that are actually slowing down your momentum. They're really taking away from you being able to have time to build your business. 

The first thing is peer coaching. I too did a lot of peer coaching when I became a life coach. Now I've done business coaching forever, so I didn't need to practice that, but I went to life coach certification. We peer coached because we needed to practice. But what happens is many of you guys are still with your peer groups. And I love friendship, but if you are coaching with peers several hours a week, that is time that you could be spending building your business.

I would much rather that you give those hours away to people that you don't know that could be potential clients someday. I would rather that you offer free coaching to them. Free coaching was a key to me building my business. I told people I will help you with your business for free. Some of you listening to this podcast had that free coaching and you became either long time clients or fans of what I do, because I use my time instead of peer coaching to do free coaching with people who could be potential clients or who could also be people who promoted the work that I was doing. 

Worry and doubt really slow your momentum, So if you have self doubt and you have excessive worry, of course, you know what happens? You slow down, right? You start to overthink things. You start to ask your peers. What do you think? Right? You start to ask people who know nothing about building a coaching business. What do you think? You start looking on YouTube for a different answer.

You start scrolling social media. Looking for some inspiration or an idea, if you will do what you know best, you don't have to look for ideas anywhere else. You guys. Yes, you have to learn the skill of doing some of the things that's required, the marketing skill, right? The Building your Business skill. I get it.

You have to learn how to be in business, but if you are coaching on something, you already know the answer lies within you. So the way that you eliminate doubt, if you become a good decision maker, you tap into your own tuition and you just make decisions. So often, you cannot know what is right or wrong until you just make a decision and take action and move forward. Oftentimes the correct answer reveals itself through you taking action to develop some self awareness about the doubts that are going to be most common for you about the things that you worry about. Sometimes some of those things are just worrying habits. Sometimes it's just a habit that you're not even really aware of why you're doing it.

So just notice. What are the things that you worry a lot about? What are those things that you're worried about do you actually even have any control over? And if you have control over that worry, then do something about it. You've heard it said, if you are worrying about something that already happened, you have no control over it.

So if you're obsessing about what you did on the social media post or about what you said in an email, it's too late, guys. The email's already been sent. The post is already out there. You cannot change it. So quit worrying about that. If you are worrying about the future, you actually have no control over what happens, right?

If you're worried about the social media that you're going to do. You have no idea what it's going to turn out like, you have no idea who's going to see it. The only thing you have control over is what you do today. All right, so isolate and begin to notice. The worry is, if you can do something about it, then do it. Otherwise start correcting that habit and start calling yourself out. If you have doubts, then make decisions. 

Something else I want you to stop doing that is slowing your momentum is that you offer too much. You have too many options. You're giving too much to your clients, right? Your packages are so full of so many things. Your clients are even confused. If you have too many options in too many ways for people to work with you, you have heard it before and it is so true.

If you’re confused, you lose. You need to have one option for coaching until you are fully booked and until you know exactly what you're doing. For some of you guys, that's going to be one group program that you sell out. For some of you, it's going to be private coaching that you sell until you fill it. I want you to be an expert at one thing.

I want you to be an expert at selling it, marketing it, delivering it, all of those things before you offer anything else. Also, if you are giving your client too much, again, assess what you offer in your coaching and decide to dial it back if it's too overwhelming for your client. They actually might not need as much as you think. 

Oftentimes we overgive because we're insecure. We're not giving what our client needs. We're giving so much more to make ourselves feel better. So check into yourself if you're giving too much, nail that one offer, make sure you learn how to do it. When you simplify your offers, you're going to also simplify the decision process with your clients. It's like you either want this or you don't, all right? They don't have to choose between A or B. There's no confusion. It's like, this is the way you work with me. All right, you want to work with me. This is how we do it.  Addressing these issues, right where you are offering too much, where you're offering confusing things.

When you are worrying too much, when you have too much doubt, all of the peer coaching that you have. Addressing those and eliminating some of those things will actually free up some space that you can then thoughtfully decide to use in your business on things like marketing, where you can increase the momentum that you have in your business. That's it guys. Go do it. Let's have an amazing week and I'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Outro: Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.