It is dawn. After having a short breakfast, you pour out another cup of coffee. You sigh when you gaze into your busy agenda. At least you have your morning ritual to energize yourself.
You wonder for a second why you thought it was a good idea to have your own coaching business.
Let’s get started…
Are you feeling overwhelmed by your full-booked agenda?
Then there are some possibilities for getting your freedom back and experiencing joy again. Possibilities like hiring people for specific tasks, automating parts of your business and/or switching to a more scalable business model.
In this article you can discover five steps for automating your coaching business in a way that it still aligns with your values, personality and the desired experience for your customers.
When I help clients with structuring their program, in a way that it can be scaled and/or automated, I always consider what the desired experience is for both my client as for his or her customers.
What I feel is that it’s important to automate only the parts that you are not passionate about. In a way that it is still authentic, personal and while keeping integrity intact.
You don’t need to drastically change the way you make a personal connection with your clients. Even when you would consider an automated system for creating clients.
Here is a five-step framework that will help you to automate parts of your business:
prepare, choose, simplify and structure, implement, and evaluate.
Prepare your customer journey map
In the first step, you outline the different steps in your business. Start with the bigger picture and list only the most important steps. Starting from where people discover you and your business. Up to where they are no longer your client.
For each step, investigate what the needs and expectations are. What is the before and the after? What do they think and feel? List also what you are doing or what external things are needed.
Choose what you don’t like to do or does not align with you
From your customer journey map, choose one step where you feel resistance when you think about it. What are you not passionate about? What does not align with your born talents? What takes up a lot of your time? What looks like could use some more simplicity?
With these questions in mind, you can feel and brainstorm about what you would like to automate. Then it’s time to choose. No worries, you can always repeat the framework for other choices.
Simplify and structure
Okay, great. You have selected a step in your customer journey that you would like to change.
As humans, we like having routines. Sometimes we keep doing specific tasks, because we are used to. Even when they don’t contribute to the goal of the task. This happens very unconsciously.
Having a structure or system is always a good idea. Mostly, when we are starting as entrepreneurs, we do a lot of things that are not really contributing to our goals. The more you gain experience and by getting help from coaches, we start to see what is needed and what is not.
Let’s dive deeper into the selected step in our customer journey. Write out the different subtasks or sub steps that you do. What is (not) required for doing this step? What is the desired experience and outcome?
Can it be simplified? Ask yourself every time “Why am I doing this? What’s the purpose?”.
Then it’s time to kill those little darlings that are not really contributing to the goal. Strike through those items on your list.
Implement: evaluate what can be automated
Alright, now we have the essential ingredients for this particular step in the customer journey and what are the deeper processes. Now let’s look at what can be automated. Repeatable steps that are part of a routine can be automated. They are mostly also the things that you are not passionate about.
Let’s take booking a meeting with a client as an example.
- You need to find a date and time where the both of you can show up.
- At the selected time, each person notes the event in their agenda.
- In the event description, you write details about the meeting (location or link for online meetings, who is attending etc.)
- A time before the meeting, each person gets a reminder, so that everyone shows up at the correct time and date.
- After the meeting, you do something with what you have discussed. Optionally book another meeting.
We can easily automate or facilitate this by using some calendar tool. If you have a bunch of clients, then you can quickly see how much time you can save by hiring a tool to automate this process.
It can also be done for more complex parts of your business. Like lead generation or having online courses for passive income.
Always look back at your customer journey map, to see that the automation is aligned with the desired (customer) experience. If it’s a right fit, then start with implementing the tool or the new process. This could mean that you need to hire someone to help you with it.
Evaluate your solution
You have selected a process to automate and implement it in your business. Let’s evaluate. How does it feel for you? How about your clients or other types of users (like team members)?
Does the solution give headaches or is it helping you to save time, money or some other desired outcome?
If not, what can be improved? Do you need to pick another tool or is it just a matter of adjusting? It could also be that you find out that you need to restructure or re-simplify. That is okay.
Conclusion
When you have a busy agenda and a budget, then you can look at automating parts of your business. This can be done in small steps. Please remark that in order to automate, you need to first have a system that is replicable.
Picking the right tool can make you save a lot of time and money. Most important is, whatever you choose, it is also aligned with your values and personality. Automations can also be used without integrity. This can harm your business.
When I help coaches with structuring, scaling and automating their business, then I check what is aligned: the customer experience, their personality and purpose.
For coaches, I can recommend using My Coach Office. This is a platform that helps coaches to automate and facilitate working with clients.
I hope that this article has inspired you and helps you to identify how you can automate. I will gladly help you, if you need support. You can contact me for a connection conversation.
Steven Poelmans
Steven Poelmans has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies to build scalable products and grow meaningful businesses. He decided to restart his career and founded The Freedom Story Academy to support impact-making coaches and entrepreneurs worldwide to rewrite the way they work, live, and breathe and help them to structure and launch online services.
Steven Poelmans
Steven Poelmans has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies to build scalable products and grow meaningful businesses. He decided to restart his career and founded The Freedom Story Academy to support impact-making coaches and entrepreneurs worldwide to rewrite the way they work, live, and breathe and help them to structure and launch online services.
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