16 Health Coach Productivity Tools for Streamlining Your Business
Samara Al Badri
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Do what you love, and it won’t feel like work. Now if only that were true!?
As health coaches, we’re fortunate that this can be true for a lot of what we do. But nobody loves admin?(and running your own business takes a lot of admin!)?
You can be the best coach in the world, with clients who love you. But, ignoring finances, allowing tasks to pile up, and messages to go unanswered will catch up with you in the end. And ultimately impact your client experience.?
So, I have put together some health coach productivity tools that can help lighten your load in terms of productivity. Choose a few to try out at a time, not every tool works for everyone, and see which is the best fit.?
I’m just one person – how can I do it all and still coach clients??
Staying on top of admin used to be a catch-22 situation.?Either you could keep your records up to date but not have any time to coach. In which case, you soon wouldn’t have any need for admin.?
Fortunately, smartphones now give access to a variety of affordable, time-saving productivity apps. These apps make it possible to handle admin on the fly, whenever and wherever you are.?
Even better, they’re paperless and backed up in the cloud. So you always have everything at hand.?
I want to add a quick caveat to this! If you’re spending more time using a tool than the time saved not using it, don’t force yourself to keep using it.
Ultimately you need to pick the tools that are best for you and your business, if that’s pen and paper, stick to that. If you need something else, here are various different options you can try:?
#1 Client Progress Tracking and Measurement Tools
Your clients may love you, but they’re with you for results. So let’s start with the kind of admin that you both might find exciting. What better way to prove your worth than giving clients visibility of their progress?
Today, many health coaching apps allow you to share progress tracking data with your clients. Some even allow clients to link their wearable devices so that you can monitor them remotely and real-time like some of these:
Customise one of the health and nutrition plans provided on the app or build your own from scratch. MYBODY360 lets you deliver them electronically to your clients. It stores all the necessary information to allow you to monitor client progress and hold them accountable.?
Heads Up is a health professional’s app that tracks health metrics on a dashboard. You can share documents and programmes with clients via a portal. And you can view metrics over time to assess progress.
Coach Accountable is a total coaching solution. You can create individual and group programs with action steps and reminders. The metrics feature provides a “scoreboard” to keep clients motivated and disciplined. You can even build it into your website.?
Top Tip:?Apps often allow you to apply your brand to their screens and documents – called “white labelling”. Always take advantage of this. Apply your brand colours as backgrounds and be sure to use good quality, professional images.?
#2 Marketing & Social Media Tools
Marketing and social media are the cornerstones of a thriving coaching business. It can be expensive to employ professional help. But doing it yourself can take time, and sometimes the results look amateurish. That’ll be a thing of the past with these fabulous apps:
GetResponse helps you send sales emails and create landing pages. Sophisticated?automation?and?analytics?will help you target viewers for conversion. The app has more than 500 email customisable templates and gets a delivery rate of 99.5%, so you can be sure your emails are reaching your readers.
Canva is an online design tool that lets you make professional images with no design experience. They have thousands of designs for anything from social images and ebooks to training programmes and loads of stock pictures that are perfect for health coaches.
Buffer helps you schedule your social media across all of your channels, and you can add members of your team to help you in higher tiered packages. You can structure your time to prepare everything on a single day but schedule to look like you’re active all the time.
BuzzSumo monitors your competitors’ content to suggest the best topic ideas for effectively influencing traffic, links, and shares. No more hours racking your brains to think of topics that will interest your audience, or wishing you had posted something and a competitor beat you to it.
Top Tip:?Comprehensive practice management apps may claim to incorporate all you need for marketing. But this is the one area where it pays to use individual “best-of-breed” apps.?
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#3 Communication Tools
Communication apps have catapulted forward due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clients who might have been resistant to online sessions are now loving them. The right communication tools can allow you to service clients globally, expand your service area, and running sessions online drastically cuts down on costs and commuting times.
Zoom is a webinar and video conferencing app. It will let you hold 1-on-1 sessions with your clients, host online classes and hold webinars and training sessions. You can share your screen with your audience and record sessions. Best of all, it’s free if you’re happy for your sessions to be limited to 40 minutes.
GSuite is not a single app but a collection of Google apps that work together seamlessly. They cover email (Gmail), file sharing, scheduling (Google Calendar), web conferencing Google Hangouts, Meetings, and Chat), and storage (Google Drive) so you can seamlessly integrate everything together.
#4 Scheduling and Organising Tools?
Being organised is one of the single most important attributes of a good health coach. Not only must you remember who you see when, but you must remember what was discussed at your last session. You need to remember your clients’ goals and the programmes you’ve assigned them.
Even remembering the names of spouses, children, and pets can mean the world to clients. When you choose an app to manage your scheduling, look for options that allow you to store the information that makes your relationships with your clients special.
Bookly is an automatic?appointment scheduler?that can be added to your WordPress website. It will save you time by allowing your clients to book directly with you by showing them what times you have available. No more backwards and forwards. And no more frustrated clients going elsewhere when you can’t get back to them promptly enough.
Healthie?is a?practice management app?for service businesses. You can store your client records, manage appointments and do your invoicing. Healthie also has a virtual care video chat facility to hold client sessions online. And it allows your clients to log their workouts and metrics themselves. This will save you time and make them more accountable for their progress.
Shore?management software?gives you access to schedule bookings online and to send appointment reminders. It helps you store contact details and handle customer payments. Shore prides itself on its marketing functionality, which helps you design newsletters and targeted Google adverts.
#5 Nutrition Service Tools?
For food-focused health coaches and nutritionists, apps can provide you with an endless supply of exciting recipes with nutritional data included. Your clients will have no excuse to complain of boring food, no matter the limitations of their diets.?
MealGarden has thousands of healthy recipes and allows you to develop meal plans that target your clients’ personal goals. You can brand the meal plans, recipes and shopping lists as an extra value for clients.
NutriAdmin is another meal planning software app. But it also has appointment scheduling, a payments acceptance system, client relationship management and extensive reporting functionality. You could run your entire business off this app if you’re a nutrition-focused coach.
#6 Pomodoro Tools?
The Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francisco Cirillo, was named after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro?means “tomato” in Italian). It’s a technique of breaking work into intervals that maximises productivity. Each work period is called a Pomodoro and breaks increase in length after each four Pomodoros.
The technique has become very popular, and its principals have been incorporated into several apps. If you are easily distracted or struggle to be productive, give the Pomodoro Technique a try.
Time Stream is a simple time management and productivity app.
RoundPie integrates with other productively tools like Evernote and Asana. You just tap on the app’s icon to start timing your work sessions.
Overall the selection of tools available to health coaches is extensive – I’ve only just touched the surface here. But I’ve tried to categorise them so that you can start with ones that solve your biggest productivity problems first. Though, as you can see, many of them serve multiple functions.
If you’re still struggling, then it might be time to outsource parts of your business. If you need a hand,?drop me a message?and I’ll see how I can help. But whether you use one of these tools or outsource, consider your productivity problem solved.