The Craft of Coaching, Live Q&A: How to Expand Your Coaching Services

Coaches looking to grow their business may be inclined to offer more services in order to increase revenue. Joe Friel cautions that expanding your focus in this way can cause clients to shop for a cheaper deal, which will not help your bottom line at all. Worse yet, if the athlete chooses to work with a subpar service provider, it can actually compromise the athlete’s performance.

Don’t miss the valuable resources available in Friel’s Craft of Coaching series on the topic of running a successful coaching business. Coach Philip Hatzis of Tri Training Harder provides a plan to build a platform for growth—one that values your experience and expertise, your time, and what you are passionate about as a coach. For most coaches, there is limited growth from offering more services. It’s focusing on what you do best that is likely to pay off in the long-term.

Module 5, Assembling a Winning Roster described how independent coaches can look to grow through partnerships, both those that expand the services they can offer athletes, and those that off-load the business management roles to dedicate more time to coaching.

Where to start building out your platform? Both Ryan Kohler and Grant Holicky stress the importance of knowing where your expertise starts…and ends. Look for services that fill in the gaps of your own knowledge and experience and your athletes will take notice!

Video Transcript

Joe Friel [0:04]:

One of the ways to resolve this problem is to have specialists that you work with within your coaching company—like a bike fitter, for example. You find a bike fitter you trust, and that bike fitter provides a service to your clients at a reduced fee because you’re going to promise a certain number of clients to be able to come to them. So they’re going to make money just because of numbers of athletes as opposed to how much they charge per athlete. So they’re going to give you a discount because of the group setting you’re bringing to them.

So you may be able to work this out in such a way that you can kind of cover all the bases. You can get the athlete’s bike fit the way it’s supposed to be, or their nutrition, or any number of other things that may be going on here, to a way that you’re satisfied with, without sacrificing the athlete’s performance in the process of doing that, by leaving them open to somebody who’s going to [have] a very haphazard way of dealing with their nutrition or their bike fit.

So, give it a lot of thought, but what you want to make sure you’re doing is not jeopardizing your business at the same time that you’re trying to make a few more bucks. But if you’ve got a skill, and you can use it, and you can make money off of it, then figure out a way to go about doing that.