Coaching Business Plan

Career coaching business plans are essential. Anyone who starts a career coaching practice needs to write a business plan. It acts as a valuable starting point and serves as a handy reference guide for future decisions and actions.

Be Clear and Concise on Business Plans

Business plans don’t need to be tens of pages. Think of how complicated our federal tax system is – it is nearly 75,000 pages, but it would probably be more effective if it were about 20 pages. Think of this when you are creating a business plan. Sure, it should be more than a few paragraphs, but it doesn’t need to go on endlessly and be excessively complex and wordy.

Clear and concise is the rule. Whether that means two pages or six pages – it probably depends on the size and scope of the business. Keep it readable and understandable. You should be able to reference it with ease, and adapt it without too much trouble as a need arises.

Career Coaching Business Plans and Defining a Target Market

One of the most important sections in a business plan is the identification, definition, and clarification of the target market. This is where you need to be especially clear and concise. This is also where you should definitely not confuse the world “concise” with “brief.”

You want to make certain you give a comprehensive definition of your target market, but you want to make sure it is clear and well-defined. Knowing who you are seeking to coach is important for many factors in your practice – how to market, how to apply skills, and what other products can be created for additional income.

Being comprehensive means including the following:

• Income levels
• Geography
• Education
• Job status
• Career field

There are many other demographics you can include. Remember to be comprehensive, but clear and concise.

Do You Have Outcomes for Your Target Market?

An often ignored component of career coaching business plans is the identification of the outcomes you can offer your target market. You can’t be a successful coach if you don’t identify the outcomes you can provide.

A career coaching business plan should list and details these outcomes. The larger and more diverse your target market is, the more outcomes you should include in your business plan. If you choose a highly specialized and narrow niche, you won’t need as many different potential outcomes because the demographics and the needs of your target market are narrower and more homogeneous.

Every Section of a Business Plan Should be Clear and Concise

Though this article has focused on the target market section, all career coaching business plans should be drawn up with care and should end up being highly readable – clear and concise.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a workable and dynamic business plan will take more than an hour or so to complete. Start with an outline and then slowly fill in each section. Once each section is filled in, more detail should be added. Once that detail is added, you may need to go the other way and pare it down.

There’s plenty of give and take when writing a business plan.

Career coaching business plans will take a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months to get right. But, when completed, they should be readable, workable, useable. The clearer and more concise they are, the more your career coaching practice will reap the benefits.

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Fred Philips
Business Coach
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