How to build a six-figure coaching business for more impact, freedom, and fulfillment.

If you’re here, I already know that you feel called to help other people improve and transform their lives. You’re passionate about supporting others in creating lives they love…

And you also might be wondering if it’s possible for you to create a life you love with a life coaching career. Can you really make a six-figure income doing what you love?

The short answer is, “Yes!”

In this post, we’re going to reveal our top six secrets for building a 6 figure coaching business… and we’ll show you how to integrate each one into your coaching business starting now!

How to Build a Six Figure Coaching Business

Click the links below to navigate to each of best 6-figure coaching business tips!

1. Get Specific About What You Do, How Your Do it, and Who You Do it For
2. Build (or learn) a System of Transformation
3. Diversify Your Offerings
4. Ask Big Questions & Take Even Bigger Action
5. Do What You’d Love, Not What You Should
6. Find a Mentor
7. Download Our Blueprint for Life Coach Business Success [Free Resource]

1. Get Specific About What You Do, How You Do it, & Who You Do it For

There is a common misconception that highly successful coaching businesses are complex and overwhelming.

The truth is, six, or even seven-figure businesses can all be boiled down to one sentence…

I help [________] to [________] by [________] so that they can [________].

The more clearly you can fill in this sentence for your own business, the more clearly you’ll be able to craft services, programs, offers, and marketing strategies that appeal directly to the people you feel most called to help.

Coaches who struggle to complete this sentence with clarity and simplicity often also struggle to build a sustainable, profitable business. Your life coaching business is no exception!

If you want to turn your life coaching practice into a 6-figure business, clarity and simplicity are your friends!

Try it for yourself:

I help: Fill in the audience you and your coaching business are most aligned to help, and be as specific as possible! (Need help identifying your coaching niche? Try this exercise.)

To: Fill in the solution to the primary problem you help your ideal clients solve. For example, “achieve their ideal weight“, “find true love“, or “achieve their dreams in all areas of life.“

By: Fill in the primary mechanism you use to help your ideal clients reach that solution. For example “overcoming emotional eating“, “learning to set boundaries and prioritize themselves“, or “using proven systems to replace fear, self-doubt and limiting beliefs with courage, confidence and clarity“

So that they can: Fill in the result your ideal client will experience when they achieve their goals. Typically, this can be represented by something they would be able to do, have, feel, or be that they weren’t able to before. For example, “live vibrant, healthy lives doing things they never thought they could“, “finally be loved for exactly who they are“, or “create lives they truly love living.“

Then, put it all together!

• I help [women over 40] to [achieve their ideal weight] by [overcoming emotional eating] so that they can [live vibrant, healthy lives doing things they never thought possible].
  
• I help [divorced women] to [find true love] by [learning to set boundaries and prioritize themselves] so that they can [finally be loved for exactly who they are].
  
• We help [people who are longing for change] to [achieve their dreams in all areas of life] by [learning to use proven systems to replace fear, self-doubt, and limiting beliefs with courage, confidence, and clarity] so that they can [create lives they truly love living].

Challenging yourself to craft your own “I help” sentence will help you:

• Attract more of your most aligned clients who are experiencing the types of problems you specialize in solving.
  
  The result? Better client results and more great word of mouth about your business
  
• Craft a marketing and business strategy that appeals directly to your ideal customers and speaks to their needs, struggles, and fears.
  
  The result? Faster, more significant business growth
  
• Refine your messaging to work specifically for your audience so you spend less time in trial and error, struggling to figure out what to post.
  
  The result? More time connecting with real potential clients
  
• Align every business asset (programs, offers, courses, and digital products) with your “I help statement.” You’ll know a good idea by how well it fits.
  
  The result? No more guessing!

2. Build (or learn) a System of Transformation

Your six-figure business ultimately depends on the results you help your clients achieve.

Truly successful coaches know they need a reliable, repeatable, effective system to help their clients achieve consistent results.

As a coach, your system of transformation helps you:

• Support your clients in experiencing consistent, repeatable results, no matter what challenge they face, increasing your confidence as a coach
• Ease any anxiety you might have when starting out with new clients– you don’t have to know where to start, you start with the first step of your system
• Help your clients achieve their goals more quickly with a clear, step-by-step guide to change, empowering you to help more people and make an even bigger impact
• Offer a clear, proven path to each client increasing their confidence in investing to work with you to achieve the results they desire
• Guide your clients on a journey of transformation, ensuring that each coaching experience builds on the success of the last, rather than getting stuck trying to make each individual appointment count on it’s own
• Sell packages of sessions or programs based on the system your business uses, so that clients don’t give up before they’ve had a chance to experience results

A system of transformation still allows you to tailor each session directly to the needs of each client. But, unlike coaching without a system, it also allows you to confidently rely on a pathway you already know works. 

Think of it as taking each of your clients from struggle to success with the help of a map. You make progress and build small wins as you go!

So how do you create one?

You can spend your time, energy, and resources creating your own systems for your coaching business…

But that takes both time and enough coaching experience to understand the science of getting consistent results. This can make it a challenge, especially for those who don’t already have years of successful coaching experience already under their belts.

Or you can learn a system of transformation that already has results to back up how well it works.

We’ve learned that the life coaches who struggle to create truly successful businesses are almost always without reliable systems! 

As a result, certification through Brave Thinking Institute includes a clear, repeatable, and tested system of transformation. We also provide our coaches with everything they need to apply it with individual clients or in group programs. 

3. Diversify Your Offerings

You may have heard the statistic that millionaires have, on average, 7 streams of income.

And while that quote wasn’t originally about an online coaching business, the sentiment holds true! If you want to build a 6-figure life coaching business, you cannot rely on a single stream of income.

The mistake that keeps most coaches stuck is trying to make all of their income through one-on-one coaching alone. There are two primary problems with this approach:

• The number of one-on-one clients you have as a life coach will naturally ebb and flow. At times, this can make income difficult to reliably predict month-to-month.
• While one-on-one coaching sessions are a valuable tool in any life coaching business, if this is your only source of income, your income will always be limited by how many clients you can see on a daily basis. You’re still trading your time for money!

The 6-figure solution?

Expand the ways that you can serve your clients… and you’ll also expand the ways in which your business can generate income!

Here are a few different ways that you can diversify your life coaching business’ offerings and income streams, all while continuing to offer value to your existing and potential clients:

1. Low-cost products: Low-cost products are typically a resource that you create to offer value to potential clients. These products can help with generating leads and increasing the like-know-trust factor for people who have yet to invest in your coaching services.
   
2. Online courses & self-paced learning: Online courses can be a great way to create a higher-priced, passive-income generating product that encourages people to invest in your private or group coaching containers. DIY platforms like Podia, Kajabi, and Teachable make it easy to create and sell your courses.
   
3. Workshops & Retreats: Creating interactive workshops, either in-person or virtually, or multi-day retreats allow you to offer immersive experiences that speak to your ideal client’s needs. These are a great way to bring in additional income, or, in the case of workshops, to offer for free as a way to engage with and build like-know-trust with new or potential clients.
   
4. Coaching Programs: Instead of selling single sessions or even packages of multiple sessions, we recommend offering your clients the opportunity to enroll in coaching programs. These are usually based on a pre-defined pathway or curriculum and help meet a need for your ideal clients.
   
5. Group Programs: Group coaching programs can be a great way to help a lot of people at once, making more impact in a shorter amount of time. For example, you could spend 5 hours working with 5 different clients in separate one-on-one sessions, or you could potentially help the same 5 clients in one hour in a group program.
   
6. Products & Publications: Like online courses and self-paced learning, products and publications can be a good option for creating streams of passive income in your growing coaching business.
   

To help you choose which options might be best for your business, ask yourself:

1. Which of these diverse offers would I love to create? What makes me feel the most excited and aligned with the potential of my business?
2. Which of these diverse offerings would my ideal client be most interested in? Which would support them the most in overcoming their unique challenges and achieving their goals?
3. Which of these diverse offerings might both support my personal freedom and the dream I have for my business? Which will also empower me to better coach and support my ideal clients?

For example, if the idea of writing and publishing a book feels like the least-enjoyable way you could imagine spending your time, then that isn’t the offering for you! And that remains true no matter how much success some other coach may have had by writing a book.

Or, if your ideal clients are women over the age of 60, complex online courses might not be the best offer.

If you value the location freedom that your coaching business offers and want to keep your freedom to work from anywhere, in-person intensives or strategy days might not be an offer that feels aligned with your goals.

You’ll have the most success when you choose to diversify your business’ offers in ways that work best for you and your ideal clients!

4. Ask Big Questions & Take Even Bigger Action

Three distinct things that set successful people apart are:

1. Asking better questions
2. Making quicker decisions
3. Taking intentional action

Developing these three habits have the power to transform your typical results into extraordinary ones!

How to ask better questions

One of the greatest tools you have on the road to success are the questions you ask. 

If you’ve struggled with feeling stuck, frustrated, or overwhelmed in your coaching business, learning to ask better questions is key. This skill will help you develop the mindset and strategy needed to generate massive success. 

Commit to reframing every question you have about your life coaching business into questions that are empowering, evocative, and aligned with the best possible outcome.

These kinds of questions are rooted in the assumption that you already have all the answers you need within you. They work to inspire aligned action and forward movement.

For example:

• Instead of “Why is this always happening to me?” ask “What can I learn from this outcome that can help me prevent it from happening again?”
• Instead of “What am I supposed to do now?” ask “What can I do now with what I have?”
• Instead of “Why can’t I find more coaching clients?” ask “What do my potential clients need to know-like-trust me more that I’m not yet giving them?”
• Instead of “Why can’t I make more money in my coaching business? ask “What would my ideal, future business do to connect with and serve potential and existing clients that I’m not yet doing?”

How to make quicker decisions

Research shows that people who make decisions more quickly and effectively tend to experience more success. In fact, a recent study showed that decision making was 60% more impactful when determining success than goal-setting! (source). 

Delaying decision making in your coaching business can not only waste your time and resources, but it can also indicate deeper mindset blocks that could be keeping you stuck. These could be a fear of making mistakes, perfectionism, a fear of being disliked or judged by others. It may also indicate a lack of clear vision for your business.

To help you practice making quicker decisions, try these tips:

1. Enforce a time limit: Giving yourself a time limit for considering pros and cons (and sticking to it!) can help you analyze the available information more effectively
   
2. Focus on the best next-step: Give yourself permission to just choose the best next step. Taking even a small amount of action is likely to inspire more!
   
3. Use your vision as a measuring stick: Clarity about what you would love your business to look and feel like gives you an objective method of measuring the alignment of your choices.
   
   To do this, consider the decision at hand, make a short list of the possible options. Then ask yourself: What choice would the version of me who has already succeeded make in this situation?

How to take intentional action

Your six-figure life coaching business requires action. All the manifesting, vision-boarding, hoping, and dreaming in the world won’t get you any closer to a 6-figure coaching salary without action.

Get into the habit of asking yourself:

What can I do right now to move in the direction of my goals?… and actually doing it!

Intentional action aligned with your goals moves you closer to achieving your dreams and inspires even more action. 

The actions you take now will give you the opportunity to gather information to take another step that’s even more aligned with your goals! You’ll learn what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll see what your ideal clients are responding to and what they aren’t. And you’ll learn what you should do more of or where you should redirect your energy.

Remember, even baby steps are still valuable steps!

5. Do What You’d Love, Not What You Should

Life coaches who end up stuck in frustration and struggling are often stuck in the “shoulds” of running their businesses.

There’s a simple explanation for this:

The decisions and actions those struggling coaches make are externally motivated and not aligned with their authentic desires and vision!

While there are guidelines that tend to make some life coaching businesses more successful than others, your most successful coaching business is ultimately driven by you! 

Your unique gifts, talents, message, and story are what set you apart from everyone else. These are the very things that will help you attract more of your ideal life coaching clients.

The final measure for whether or not something is ‘right’ for your life coaching business isn’t what you should do… 

Instead, it’s this: Is this what I would love for me, my clients, and my life coaching business? And, does this move me closer to the successful, 6-figure coaching business I would love to have?

Don’t allow what you’d love to get buried in an unnecessary pile of shoulds.

6. Invest in Mentorship

All of the greatest, most successful people in the personal development industry have one thing in common: They invest in mentorship.

Highly successful people seek out and learn from the wisdom of others who have gone before them. Successful people understand the value in leveraging the insight from others who have achieved the success they want to achieve.

Research has shown that people with mentors are 5x more likely to achieve their career goals! 

Other benefits to mentorship for your new or growing life coaching business include:

• Learn more, faster: Tailored insight and direction from someone who has already achieved the kind of success you desire wastes far less time and resources than learning by trial-and-error alone
• Greater Confidence: Having an experienced, supportive person to turn to helps you gain more confidence as a coach and as a business owner
• Unbiased Insight: Friends and family may have great intentions when they offer advice for your coaching career. But the insight from an objective, experience mentor is more likely to be accurate than the opinions of our well-meaning close connections
• Peace of Mind: A good mentoring relationship is built on trust and honesty. Having a person in your corner no matter what allows you to spend less time worrying and more time helping people
• A Growing Network: Connecting with a mentor has the ability to open up new connections and exciting opportunities you may not have had access to otherwise

At Brave Thinking Institute, we believe so strongly in the positive impact of mentorship for our coaches that we include post-certification support and mentorship in all of our coaching certification programs!

What’s Next? Start Your 6-Figure Coaching Business Journey the Easy Way!

In addition to having certified thousands of successful life coaches, every one of our expert faculty here at the Brave Thinking Institute is a 6-, 7- and 8-figure coach in their own right – true master coaches who built their businesses from scratch…

They’ve spent decades testing, experimenting, and learning “in the trenches” of the coaching industry, seeing what works (and what doesn’t!) across multiple niches, all around the world.

The result is a clear, effective blueprint that works time and time again to help aspiring coaches:

• Learn what coaches need to launch their business and get started quickly (even if they have no experience)
• Map out the road to leaving behind their unfulfilling career and replacing their current income (and creating even more abundance!)
• Design a successful coaching business that makes a difference in the lives of others, while also improving their own lives in too many ways to count!

Download your exact blueprint to a successful, 6-figure life coaching business now!