Life Coaching Business Plan Template
Whether you want to start your own life coaching business or expand an existing one, you need a business plan. The following life coaching business plan template lets you know what elements you need to include in a successful life coaching business plan.
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To ensure your life coaching business success in this highly competitive market, you need a properly structured life coaching business plan. With over 12 years of experience, we have helped over 5,000 entrepreneurs create business plans to start and grow their life coaching businesses. Using the following life coaching business template, you can put together an effective business plan for life coaching.
Things to Know Before Writing a Life Coaching Business Plan
Life coaching is the act of helping others sort through the challenges of life including personal, social, or professional challenges.
Before you start on the journey of becoming a business and life coach, let’s see what is the difference between coaching and counseling. The counseling is about diagnosing mental health issues and helping someone cope better with them, coaching is more action-oriented that discusses how you should act to achieve your goals.
If you are a people person and you find joy in helping others succeed, you can build, grow, and become successful in the life coaching business.
According to the life coaching industry report from IBISWorld, the life coaching industry has reached over 90,000 life coaches worldwide and the estimated size of the life coaching industry is about $1.4 billion. This is a small industry and the rate of new entrants is low. The industry is set to grow at only 0.1% in 2023.
The industry grew at 3.4% in 2022. The industry grew at an average of 6% from 2017 to 2022. The industry offers employment to over 22,300 people in the US.
The industry is set to grow in the USA and worldwide. The economy is recovering from Covid and disposable income will increase. The industry will benefit from better disposable income as people will be able to afford the industry services.
The life coaching industry offers these products and services:
- Leadership coaching and training
- Business Executives coaching
- Personal improvement
- Relationships and Family
- Career coaching
- Personal Wellbeing coaching
Key Success Factors for the Life Coaching Business
The basic skill you need to start and become successful is experience and becoming credentialed. The other factors that can help you become successful in the life coaching industry are:
Better Education and Professional Background: As a life coach, you are your brand. When you have better education about life coaching and you have had practical experience in the area of life coaching, you increase your chances of success.
For example, if you have selected the niche of career coaching, your working experience in the corporate sector will help you gain credibility and get more customers. People tend to trust coaches with practical experience.
Selecting Niche for Life Coaching Business: The niche is the area of life coaching you want to get into. The common niches we mostly hear about include family & relationship coaching, money coaching, mental health coaching, career coaching, etc. A good strategy is to grow in the life coaching area where you have real life experience.
Good Work Premises: Having a good in-house setting for coaching sessions helps you give good coaching experience. You will need to invest in the office space but that results in more satisfied customers and more revenue.
Offer Life Coaching Services Online: You can expand your area of service by offering services online. This helps you go beyond your local area. Also, people can schedule a session with you online and get connected with you from the comfort of their homes.
You can also offer low cost life coaching videos online in the form of a course. This way, you can tap into the market segment with a low disposable income.
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What is a Life Coaching Business Plan?
A life coaching business plan is a road-map for starting and growing your life coaching business. Your business plan outlines your business concept, identifies your target customers, presents your marketing strategy, and details your financial projections.
Any bank or investor you approach will require a life coaching business plan, so putting one together will be critical to securing funding.
In short, writing a business plan can help you succeed if you’re thinking of starting a life coaching business or pitching to investors or venture capitalists.
Why You Need a Life Coaching Business Plan
Life coaching business plans can be used to gain interest from potential investors or to secure loans from banks. They are also helpful to you as the owner. A life coaching business plan allows you to thoroughly analyze every aspect of your potential business.
A solid, detailed plan gives you a clear path to follow, forces you to examine the viability of a life coaching business idea, and may help you better understand your company’s finances and competition.
Life coaching business owners who have a business plan grow 35% faster than those who don’t, and 75% of fast-growing businesses have one.
A life coaching business plan is a living document that should be updated annually as your company grows and changes.
Free: Business Plan Examples
Do you need help creating a business plan? Check out these six free, proven business plan examples from different industries to help you write your own.
Sources of Life Coaching Funding
The cost of starting a life coaching business can vary between $5,000-$16,000 depending on the scale of launch.
If you have the passion for helping people and practical experience in some field of the life coaching area, you can start your business with a computer, a webcam, an internet connection, and a few basic life coaching certifications.
You can do bootstrapping and start a life coaching business with your own savings. Friends and family money can also be enough for this low cost business model. However, if you have a lot of experience in a field and want to grow quickly, you will need to use other funding options for your business.
When you are very good at what you do, you can get funding from an angel investor. However, the angel investor may ask for a share of equity from your business.
The SBA 504 loans can be a good option too. Read everything you need to know about SBA loans for your life coaching business here.
You can get funding from banks and financial institutions for your life coaching business. However, since many life coaches are self-employed in the start, the banks will require a very good personal credit score.
How to Write a Life Coaching Business Plan
To write a life coaching business plan, you don’t need to be an expert. Our step-by-step guide will show you how to write a life coaching business plan, or you can just download our proven sample business plans to get a better idea.
Executive Summary
The executive summary is the most important part of the document since it outlines the whole business plan. Despite the fact that it appears first in the plan, write the executive summary last so you may condense key concepts from the other nine parts.
It’s a part that catches the investor’s eye and provides key information about your company’s overview and upcoming short- and long-term goals.
Tell them what kind of life coaching business you have and what stage you’re in; for example, are you a startup, do you have a life coaching institude that you want to expand, or do you have a lot of life coaching businesses?
Finally, an executive summary should provide investors with a preview of what they may expect from the rest of your document.
- Provide a high-level overview of the life coaching industry
- The name, location, and mission of your life coaching business
- A description of your life coaching business, including management, advisors, and a brief history
- Discuss the type of life coaching business you are operating, Give an overview of your target customers., and how your company differs from competitors in the industry
- Create a marketing plan that describes your company’s marketing strategies, sales, and partnership plans.
- And give an overview of your financial plan
Check out these executive summary examples to help you write a perfect one for your life coaching business plan.
Free: Executive Summary Examples
An executive summary is the most important part of your business plan, and it need not be challenging to write. This is why we have put together some awesome free Executive Summary examples for you.
Company Analysis
- Company summary:
- Company history: When and why did you start your life coaching business?
- What milestones have you achieved so far? Among the milestones might be the number of people helped, growth year over year, etc.
- Legal structure and ownership: Do you have S-Corp status? Is it an LLC? A sole proprietorship? Describe your legal structure.
- Mission statement: An overview of your life coaching business’s guiding principles. Learn how to write a perfect mission statement.
Industry Analysis
Provide a brief overview of the life coaching industry in your industry analysis. This may seem unnecessary, but it serves multiple purposes.
First, researching the life coaching industry will educate you. It gives you an understanding of the market in which you are operating. Secondly, market research can improve your strategy, especially if it identifies market trends.
Third, market analysis shows readers you are an expert within your field. Conducting research and presenting it in your plan is the most efficient way to accomplish this.
Industry analysis can be presented as a 8-step process when written as part of a company’s business plan.
- Give a quick overview of the life coaching industry. Define the life coaching business in terms of size (in dollars), historical background, service region, and products.
- Examine previous trends and growth patterns in the life coaching industry.
- Identify the market’s major competitors.
- Age, gender, and general lifestyle of the targeted market
- Determine the factors that have an impact on the life coaching industry. These might include government regulatory rules and other businesses’ competitive activities.
- Using research data, the industry forecast expected growth over the next five to ten years. Predictions should be made for both the long and short term.
- Describe how your life coaching business intends to position itself in the industry. Concentrate on how your life coaching business can benefit from opportunities highlighted in the industry.
Customer Analysis
The customer analysis section is an important part of any life coaching business plan since it evaluates the consumer segments that your company serves. It identifies target customers, determines what those customers want, and then explains how your life coaching services will meet those requirements.
Customers can be categorized into the following segments:
- Business Executives
- Professional looking for help in advancing careers
- Couples looking for relationship advice
- Affluent millennials
- Organization working on improving employee performance
Customer analysis may be divided into two parts: Psycho-social profiles (why your life coaching services suits a customer’s lifestyle) and Demographic profiles (descriptions of a customer’s demographic qualities).
With regards to demographics, include information about: the ages, genders, locations, and income levels of your customers. When targeting businesses, describe what kind of business, size, and location your target customers are.
The psychological profiles of your target clients reveal their wants and needs. The better you understand and identify these demands, the better your chances of attracting and retaining customers will be.
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Competitor Analysis
It is necessary to do a competitor analysis. Because you may use their data to define your goals, marketing plans, tactics, new product lines, pricing, and more. Use competitor analysis to:
- Identify the strength and weakness of your life coaching business competitors.
- Search for opportunities to distinguish your life coaching business from competitors.
The first step is to determine who your direct and indirect competitors are.
The direct competitors consists of other life coaching businesses that offer essentially the same services to the same people as you do.
Indirect competitors are other life coaching options that people have in addition to direct competitors. The indirect competitors are other forms of therapy, yoga and other meditation techniques teachers, free self-help material, and self-help books.
Once you’ve identified the competition, concentrate on the direct, head-to-head competitors, since they are the most threatening to your life coaching business— but keep an eye on the indirect competition as well, just in case.
Provide an overview of each direct competitor’s business and detail their strengths and weaknesses.
You will be able to position yourself competitively in the market if you perform proper competition research. Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and competitive advantages in the following areas:
- Prices – Are they offering cheaper life coaching services or more costly than you and other competitors, what value do buyers get for that price?
- Quality – Are they offering life advice backed with more experience? Is the perceived worth in the eyes of the customers high?
- Customer service – How they respond to their consumers, whether they treat them poorly or well, and the degrees of satisfaction customers show
- Reputation — The sum of everything mentioned above: their credibility, how loved the brand is, and the loyalty of their customers
The final section of your competitive analysis should include a list of your areas of competitive advantage. for example: Are you going to offer premium, therapeutic life coaching advice? Do you offer life coaching services and life advice that your competitors do not? Will you offer better pricing or will you offer greater customer support?
Consider how you will outperform your competitors and include them in this portion of your life coaching business plan.
Free: SWOT Analysis Examples
Take advantage of our free SWOT analysis examples. Make your business future-proof by identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats using this free SWOT Analysis Template.
Marketing Plan
Creating a marketing plan for life coaching business involves identifying the target demographic and offering the life advice they need.
As part of your marketing plan for a life coaching business, you should include:
Pricing and Product Strategy
Your life coaching business must advice on topics that not being addressed in the target community. You can also develop a unique angle to life coaching and create your brand. Research what other life coaches are offering, what type of life advice they are offering, how are they pricing their services, are they pricing per session or per package. Explore the ways you can differentiate from the current portfolio being offered in the market.
Placing and Promotions
Place refers to the location of the business office of your life coaching company. Describe how your location might attract customers. As an example, is your office easily accessible? Since most of your customers will be from the affluent backgrounds, being closer to the rich neighborhoods and near to downtown maybe a good choice.
Promoting your life coaching business is the final part of your marketing plan. In this step, you document how you will drive customers to buy your services. A few marketing methods you could consider are:
- Pre-Opening Events
- Offering free advice for early signups
- Flyers
- Social media marketing
- Get referrals from current clients
- Optimize your Google My Business listing
- Maintaining a blog
- Reaching out to local bloggers and websites
- List your business on industry-specific sites
- Community Outreach
You should also think about your life coaching company’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP), which should explain why clients should choose you over other life coaching businesses. Ensure that your USP is reflected in your marketing.
Read Later: How to create a marketing plan in a business plan.
Operations Plan
While the previous sections described your goals, your operational plan in a business plan discusses how you will achieve them.
An operations plan is helpful for investors, but it’s also helpful for you and employees because it pushes you to think about tactics and deadlines.
Your operations plan should be divided into two individual parts, as seen below.
Your daily short-term processes include all the tasks involved in running a life coaching business, including hiring and training employees and administering the business. etc.
Your long-term goals are the milestones you hope to reach. It may include the date when you hope to lease the facility or remodel the facility: or when you hope to reach $X in revenue.
Management Team
The management team section in a business plan‘ outlines your management team, staff, resources, and how your business ownership is structured.
This part may be easily organized by dividing it into the following points:
- Ownership Structure
- Internal Management Team
- External Management Resources
- Human Resources
Ownership Structure
This section outlines your life coaching business’s legal structure. If your company is a sole proprietorship, it may simply be one phrase. It might be longer if your company is a partnership or a corporation. You should make it a point to clarify who owns what part of the business.
Internal Management Team
This section should not only outline who is on your management team but also how each person’s skill set and experiences will contribute to the growth of your life coaching business. Ideally, you and/or your team members have direct expertise in the life coaching business. If this is the case, highlight your experience and skills.
External Management Resources
Think of these external management resources as your internal management team’s backup. Consider forming an advisory board if you are lacking expertise and experience with life coaching business.
An advisory board would consist of 3 to 7 people who would serve as mentors to your life coaching company. They would assist in answering queries and providing strategic direction.
If necessary, search for advisory board members with expertise running life coaching business.
Describe all of your company’s external professional advisers, such as accountants, bankers, attorneys, IT experts, business consultants, and/or business coaches.
Human Resources
The final topic to consider in the management area of your life coaching business plan is your human resource needs.
Financial Plan
As part of your financial plan, you should present a 5-year financial statement broken down monthly or quarterly for the first year, and then annually. Financial statements include your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.
Income Statement
A profit and loss statement is more commonly called an income statement. It shows your revenue and subtracts your expenses to determine whether you were profitable or not.
As you develop your income statement, you need to develop assumptions. Will you serve 30 customers per month or 200? Will sales grow by 2% or 10% per year? Your choice of assumptions will greatly impact your business’s financial forecasts. Conduct as much research as possible in order to ground your assumptions in reality.
Free: Income Statement Template
Create a financial statement for your business by downloading our free income statement templates.
Balance Sheet
While balance sheets include much information, to simplify them to the key items you need to know about, balance sheets show your assets and liabilities.
The balance sheet shows your life coaching business’s net value at a specific point in time. It categorizes all of your company’s financial data into three categories:
- Assets: Tangible goods with the monetary worth that the company owns.
- Liabilities: Debt owing to a company’s creditor.
- Equity: The net difference when the total liabilities are subtracted from the total assets.
The equation that expresses the relationship between these financial data elements is Assets = Liabilities + Equity.
Create a pro forma balance sheet for your life coaching business plan that highlights the information in the income statement and cash flow projections. A balance sheet is normally prepared once a year by a company.
Balance sheets indicate your assets and liabilities, and while they contain a lot of information, they are simplified to highlight the most important things you need to know.
For example, spending $200,000 to build out your life coaching business will not result in instant revenues. Rather, it is an asset that should help you earn money for many years to come.
Similarly, if a bank sends you a check for $200,000, you do not have to pay it back right now. Rather, that is a liability that you will repay over time.
Cash Flow Statement:
Your cash flow statement will help you determine how much money you need to start or grow your life coaching business. In developing your Income Statement and Balance Sheets be sure to include several of the key costs needed in starting or growing a life coaching business:
- Design fees, construction, and other costs associated with location development.
- Cost of equipment like furniture, software, workbooks, literature, etc.
- The cost of maintaining the office
- Staff payroll or salaries
- The total cost of insurance coverage (general liability, workers’ compensation, and property casualty)
- Start-up inventory costs
Pro Tips: Learn how to write a financial plan in a business plan to help you write a winning life coaching business plan.ite
Free: Balance Sheet Template
Create a financial statement for your business by downloading our free balance sheet templates.
Appendix
List any additional material you cannot include elsewhere, such as resumes from key employees, licenses, equipment leases, permits, patents, receipts, bank statements, contracts, and personal and business credit histories.
Attach your full financial projections along with any supporting documents that make your plan more compelling in the appendix.
Bonus Tip: Learn how to write a business plan appendix for your life coaching business.
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Summary of the Life Coaching Business Plan
A life coaching plan is a worthwhile investment. As long as you follow the template above, you will become an expert in no time. By following the template, you will understand the life coaching business, your competition, and your customers. The plan will help you understand the steps necessary to launch and grow your life coaching business.
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Since 2010, Wise business plans’ MBA professional business plan writers has developed business plans for thousands of companies that have experienced tremendous success.
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