How To Become An Entrepreneur Coach
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
I’ve been building my business, H, for as long as I can remember. In fact, when you’re crafting, rethinking and executing a startup strategy, the days can often start to blend together - making it seem as though I’ve been at this for 50 plus years. In truth, I’ve been grinding away for several years. And, although my entrepreneurial pursuits don’t quite stack up to seasoned veterans - I’m talking men and women who churn out new businesses on the yearly - I still believe that I have an immense amount of knowledge and insight to share.
Once I began to realize how incredibly challenging it was to build my own business, I often thought of the eager entrepreneurs begging for the chance to get to where I currently am. Hey, I get it. I was in their shoes once too. Bright eyed, excited for the chance to start something of my own. Now, with blood, sweat and tears engraved into my startup - I think about what I wish I would’ve known when I was starting out. That’s when I decided to start guiding and mentoring founders and become an entrepreneur coach.
What Is An Entrepreneur Coach?
An entrepreneur coach is someone who works with individuals who are interested in starting their own business by offering knowledge, insight and guidance to building their startup. An entrepreneur coach is essentially a professional mentor that focuses solely on the process of starting a business.
An entrepreneur coach can be someone who has been in the field for years or someone like me, who has built one company so far and has a bank of knowledge that is worth sharing to entrepreneurs like myself.
So, now that you know what an entrepreneur coach does - let’s talk about how you can become an entrepreneur coach and start working with passionate, dedicated startup founders.
How To Become An Entrepreneur Coach
Compile Everything You’ve Learned About Building A Business
The first step to becoming a successful entrepreneur coach is to have all of your knowledge and experience put together, so that it's easy to share from start to finish. When you’re working with an entrepreneur, you want to make sure that you cover all of your bases. You want to think back to the absolute beginning of your startup career and recall any and every decision you made about your business.
Do this by creating a timeline. Start at the conception of your idea, move to the construction of your website, posting content on social media, marketing, finding customers, landing your first customer and everything else that comes from starting from scratch.
Once you have all the information on hand, you can start to sift through what steps were important milestones to your success and what actions you could have done without. Focus on the aspects that made your company grow and use these as the starting point for your conversation with your entrepreneur.
Remember, an entrepreneur is looking for a streamlined way to take their company to the next level. They’ve done the dance of failure and are ready for a new perspective to switch gears. Make sure that you are making your coaching sessions valuable by only discussing what works best.
Assess The Mistakes You Have Made & Actionable Ways To Fix Them
In addition to the things you did right when building your business, I want you to think deeply about the mistakes you made along the way: maybe you hired too many employees, set up your company under the wrong tax scheme, spent thousands of dollars on marketing that returned zero sales. Look, we’ve all been there.
Do you have your mistakes in mind? Great, now let’s determine how we would fix them if we had the chance to do it all over again. Understand the exercise? By evaluating how you would take action and avoid your mistakes - you will be able to give your entrepreneur the guidance to bypass the problems that cost you time, money and stress.
For example, if you grew your team too quickly - you can give the advice to the entrepreneur that a smaller team will help you put more money back into the business. Urge them to do as much as they can on their own and only outsource skills they have no experience in, such as coding and developing a website or product. The 1 man team is often underestimated.
Update Your Website / Social Media To Reflect Your Service
Now that you have the strengths of your startup journey and actionable ways to fix and prevent your own mistakes - you’ll want to start marketing yourself as an entrepreneur coach. If you don’t already have a professional website for your work and information about what you do - this is the time to make one.
Squarespace is a great place to start and they have many templates that can effectively express your personal brand.
Your website should contain information about your experience as founder, what your business is about and how you’re using your knowledge to help guide the careers of budding entrepreneurs. You can also write some blog posts on the topic of entrepreneurship, growing a business - to help new clients find you via Google Search. And lastly, make sure all of your contact information is clearly present and easy to access. If a potential entrepreneur comes across your site, they will want to know your email so they can set up a coaching session.
In addition to your personal website, leverage your social media to showcase your entrepreneur coach skills. Use hashtags that are relevant to your coaching, interact with entrepreneurs and build a community that is passionate about business. Not only is social media a good way to get the word out there about your business, but it’s an effective way to turn followers into excited clients.
Start Coaching For Free
Now that your marketing strategy is in place, utilize the power of your existing friends, family and community to find students right away. Post on Facebook and let people know you have 10 spots available for entrepreneur coaching sessions. And use a call to action to reel them in - you’re currently offering their first session for free.
You may be wondering, why in the world would I offer anything free? We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, I have to make money somehow. The answer: you want students to give you a shot to prove your capabilities and often a price tag turns people away if they are unsure of what a person can truly offer.
Think about it. Have you ever been given a free sample of a product you never tried? Weren’t you more willing to accept it because you didn’t have to pay for it? Of course.
But, if you ended up liking that product that you got for free - did you by chance go back and end up purchasing more of it? Again, there’s a good chance the answer is yes.
When you offer your services for free to a select number of people, you’re giving them the opportunity to test drive your business. And, if you perform well - which you obviously will - they will realize how valuable your service is to their journey and come back for a paid session.
The only thing you lose when you give a session for free is your own time. But in the bigger picture, isn’t 10 hours of your time worth it for months or years of fully booked coaching sessions? I’ll let you answer that one.
----
So, there you have it - a quick and easy guide to help you get started as an entrepreneur coach. Did you find this information helpful to starting your own coaching business? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
And, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for a coach to help grow your business - always feel free to shoot me an email at james@thehhub.com to discuss your startup journey.