How Do I Become A Business Coach?
A lot of people ask me how you get to be a business coach, and how you start out working with clients, and perhaps, if you’re on this page, you’re wondering the same thing.
I’m a multi-award-winning business coach, based in Boston, MA. I’ve started and run multiple successful businesses before beginning my own coaching practice over a decade ago. Before that, I worked in the financial services industry both on Wall Street and in London’s financial district.
If you stick with me for the next few minutes, I’ll walk you through answers to some of the most commonly asked questions around coaching:
1 How do I become a business coach?
2 How do I become a reputable and well-respected business coach?
3 How do I get certified as a business coach?
4 How much study is involved with becoming a business coach?
5 What life experience should I have to become a business coach?
6 How I became an award-winning business coach
So let’s get down to business…
1 How do I become a business coach?
There’s a huge amount of preparation that goes into becoming an impactful business coach. I’m talking decades of study, work experience, and personal growth.
However….
In the most technical sense, literally anyone can call themselves a business coach.
Coaching is an unregulated industry. You don’t have to have gone to university, taken any particular exams, or even worked in business.
So beware. It’s the wild west out there, and as a business coach, you’re up against some real cowboys. In order to be successful, you’ll need to differentiate yourself from these people, and work to build your own credibility.
2 How do I become a reputable business coach?
So. To become a reputable business coach, you have to be able to assist your clients to get massive, earth-shaking results.
Word of mouth is incredibly important in coaching. If your clients don’t love working with you or achieve massive success as a result of working with you, you won’t be able to demonstrate your potential impact to new potential clients, and you will struggle to gain new clients. And we all know that clients are the lifeblood of any business.
One of the best ways to become credible as a coach is to get a recognized qualification from an internationally-recognized training program.
3 How do I get certified as a business coach?
I’ve always been a high achiever. So even when I was starting out with coaching, I knew I had big ambition for my future business. I knew I wanted to work with ambitious and passionate business owners, with interesting and varied businesses. I wasn’t going to get that if I didn’t take my training seriously. I also knew I wouldn’t be content being a low-ticket business coach. My offering was only ever going to be premium.
So I was very careful when choosing my qualification.
If I was going to work with high achieving clients, they would expect a fully trained and qualified coach. Yes, I’d worked on Wall Street and I had a lot of business experience working in a globally important industry, but I also wanted to ensure that I was fully trained and had the tools I would need to be as effective as possible for my clients. For my own benefit as well as theirs, I enrolled on this training program and became a qualified coach that way:
Coaches Training Allliance is one of the top training programs in the world, with internationally recognized accreditation.
Before embarking on this qualification, I took my time to research all the possibilities for training, to ensure it met my stringent requirements. It was very important to me that the organization was well recognized and respected within the coaching industry by coaches and students alike. I also wanted to ensure that my qualification would be recognized not just in the USA, but also internationally. And I wanted to make sure that my own training would be as rigorous as possible.
I would always recommend gaining some form of qualification before trying to get work as a business coach, as this is a very clear signal to clients that you are serious about your training, your personal development, and that you have fully committed to helping them in their businesses.
4 How much study is involved with becoming a business coach?
As I’ve said before, anyone can call themselves a business coach. But let’s say you wanted to get certified as a coach. The steps involved with getting a coaching qualification vary wildly from program to program.
If you’re considering becoming a coach, the kind of qualification available to you will partly depend on how much time you have. Most courses are part-time and others are more immersive and full-time.
When I decided to become a coach, I wanted to help people as soon as possible, and I was short on time, so the course I chose was one of the most intensive ones available. I did 6 months of coach training, which included private study combined with weekly training sessions. In addition to that, I had to complete 20 hours of private practice coaching with people who were not friends.
At the end of the course, there was a verbal and written exam. It was grueling and intense, but it gave me powerful coaching tools, which I was able to implement immediately, and which I’ve learned to harness even better over time to help clients shift their perspective, build awareness, and gain clarity.
So the coaching qualification is one aspect of becoming a business coach, but it’s only really the icing on the cake. I’ve always found my business experience to be the most fundamental part of my work as a coach.
Before I even started training to be a coach, I spent two decades gaining business experience: gaining my Bachelor of Commerce in Financial Analysis, working in sales on Wall Street, and building my own businesses as an entrepreneur. These were the experiences that made me good at what I do.
For that extensive experience, there are no shortcuts. So if you really want to know how much study is involved in becoming a business coach, my own personal answer is: my entire life. And my training is not over, and will never be over.
Everyone who works as a coach will have a different journey to coaching. This is how I got here.
5 What life experience should I have to become a business coach?
In addition to any qualification, you need to have relevant life and business experience. In order to be able to coach someone meaningfully, you have to have some firsthand experience of working, workplace dynamics, working intensively with other people in a professional environment.
That usually means having worked in some form of business enterprise for the formative years of your career, in a professional environment.
The majority of the time, people who become business coaches have transitioned from a different career into business coaching, after learning through the experience gained along the way that they are well suited to this role.
It’s often through mentoring other people in a job, or starting a business from scratch, that people discover their zone of genius, whether it be in strategy, innovation, implementation, or project management.
6 How I became an award-winning business coach
My journey to becoming a business coach was a long one. You can read more about my background here and in my bestselling book, The Up Level Project.
Here’s a very much abridged version of events:
I started work in London’s financial district, then I worked on Wall Street. Burnt out and unhappy, I became a pilates instructor and built a very successful pilates business. But I became frustrated that I had so much expertise, and was only using a small amount of it while teaching. It became very clear that being a Pilates instructor no longer felt like my true calling.
I retrained as a life coach, and finally, over a decade ago now, used all my business experience to niche down into business coaching. I’ve been recognized by Boston magazine as one of the top coaches in Boston.
7 How we can work together
I hope this was a useful article for you to better understand what it takes to become a business coach! Thanks for taking the time to read it.
If you liked what you read here, here’s how you can get more support from me to become the best entrepreneur you can be:
Accelerate your growth with this free handy download
Read my bestselling book, The Uplevel Project
Join my group accountability program: Business Growth Achievers
Work with me: Book a 1:1 consultation with me here
If you’re in Boston yourself, you might also enjoy this: Wanted: Business coach, Boston.
