As a coach, your unique experiences, insights, and the personal connection you offer sets you apart and draws prospective clients to your door.
Yet, as you stand at the crossroads of growth, the challenge of scaling your business without compromising the quality of your personal touch looms. How do you expand without cloning yourself or diluting the essence of your service? The key lies in the strategic outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant (VA), enabling what we term “freedom-based scaling.”
1. Strategic Task Outsourcing: Be strategic and outsource tasks that are more so rinse and repeat for your programs, such as booking sessions, managing participant data, issuing, and following up pre-work. Reserve your energy for facilitating workshops and delivering impactful 1:1 coaching sessions.
2. Unified Brand Communication: While a VA may not be a replica of you, they can be trained to echo your communication style. By sharing your personal values, brand voice and comms templates with your VA, you will ensure interactions remain consistent with your brand, preserving the preserving the personal touch your coaching clients value.
3. Empowerment with Clarity: Begin with a comprehensive onboarding for your VA, making sure to introduce them to your clients as a key part of their coaching journey, not just a background figure. Explain the VA’s role clearly to ensure they are seen as an extension of the personalised experience you offer. Empowerment doesn’t mean giving them free run; set clear boundaries on what they can handle independently and what requires your input. You may be delighted for your VA to book coaching sessions or issue DISC profiling tools, but there may be areas that require your direct expertise such as addressing client concerns or discussing coaching methodologies.
4. Continuous Development: Invest in your VA’s ongoing training, extending beyond administrative tasks to include your coaching ethos and techniques. Familiarising them with the tools and methods you use, such as DISC or Gallup assessments, enriches their understanding and enables them to support your business more effectively.
5. Clearly Define Roles and Processes: Clarify the roles within your team, ensuring that both your clients and staff understand the extent of your VA’s involvement. Invest in solidifying processes that guide your VA in handling tasks in a manner consistent with your approach, thereby reducing the need for constant oversight.
6. Quality Control Measures: Regular check-ins with your VA and feedback loops with your clients, whilst sometimes uncomfortable, ensures refinement and delivery of high-quality coaching programs. Happier clients and more money, by doing less? Win-win!
7. Technology Utilisation: In our opinion, tech makes everything better – when used appropriately of course. To successfully scale, at a minimum you will need a Task Manager not just to provide a centralised place to delegate but provide transparency, so you don’t feel out of control and stressed. A CRM is another must, so that both you and the VA know where everything is at with prospects and current clients. For those more comfortable with tech, we highly recommend automating highly repeatable such as reminders, surveys, forms etc.
8. Embracing Change: Don’t take it personally. Executive coaches are generally high performers, and it can be hard to have your systems judged. But VAs are here to constructively help not be critical. If you have been doing it all on your own, and its working…that’s great…getting a VA is only going to amplify what you have survived with.
If you are still on the fence, take it from some of our current coaching clients, who have experienced the magic of trusting outsourcing as the vehicle for scale!
Linda Murray – Athena Leadership Academy
Linda’s zone of genius and passion is delivery programs to Bluechip clients. however, administrative tasks and process management, despite their necessity, do not align with her interests or the best use of her time. Recognising the value of streamlined systems, Linda wisely chose to outsource these aspects of her business. By entrusting these labour-intensive tasks to an external team, Linda capitalised on a cost-effective strategy. This shift not only relieved her of the administrative burden but also opened up opportunities for her to focus on what she does best—conducting additional workshops. The financial logic is undeniable: the investment in outsourcing is dwarfed by the revenue generated from her core activities, making this approach an unequivocal win for her business.
‘Empire Virtual Support are always so many steps ahead of me. They’re making sure the systems and the business actually run smoothly. I don’t know how I would do it without them.’
Watch the full case study
here.
Alex Coward – The People Factor
Working closely with government and large corporates, the programs facilitated by Alex are large and complex. Add in a Master’s degree as well as 1:1 coaching and locking in a VA was a no brainer.
‘You solve a problem of scale for me. So I can scale up and scale down with you. I can scale deep. I can scale wide. So you actually give me the opportunity to have arms and legs when I need them, where I need them.’
Watch the full case study
here.
Leesa Tongoulidis – Human Art Coaching
Having recently gone out on her own, Leesa had the skills to deliver coaching, but needed support with the back end and driving the business forward.
‘I was really struggling to stay on top of everything. I was down in the detail, and trying to be strategic and I just recognised I couldn’t do it all at once. I had things coming at me from all directions. It was time for change. How I feel now is in control and that wasn’t the case a year ago. They have the skills and knowledge to be able to understand my business, to work out where I sit in the market and what makes sense around the tools and services we use. I’ve been introduced to a range of tools that allow me to work right across my portfolio in a much smarter way. I wouldn’t have been able to do that on my own. I’ve now got a nice operating rhythm. After I do my billable work, I am not stuck with admin or marketing. I start the next day clearer. The support is just phenomenal.’
Watch the full case study
here.
