Top 4 Profitable Niches To Grow Your Coaching Business

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What should my niche be? How can I grow a successful and profitable coaching and consulting business? Many entrepreneurs exit the corporate world and have some measure of uncertainty about what type of coaching or consulting business they should start. While there are many different kinds of coaches and consultants out there, today I wanted to talk about the top four profitable niches to grow your business.

Now I focus on primarily high-end B2B coaches and consultants. This means individuals who want to sell their services to organizations. I also support B2C coaches and consultants who are targeting professionals and want to sell services to them directly. Their target clients are high net worth individuals that have a substantial salary and are looking for career guidance or even support for executive coaching and willing to pay out of pocket for it. While you can make money in many different types of coaching and consulting niches, in this newsletter, I am focusing on profitable niches for the ultra high-end market.

#1) Executive Coaching

The first type of profitable niche to grow a coaching business is executive coaching. Executive coaching is when you work typically with a senior level leader on their personal development. It's a strategy that can help this individual to unlock awareness of who they are, they're blind spots, how others perceive them and through this awareness ultimately help them improve their potential and meet their goals. Executive coaching can often include assessments such as Hogan or 360 or DISC to help support that awareness and optimize a person's potential.

Now many executive coaches may start off by billing by the hour and making a few hundred dollars per session. The real opportunity is in shifting to selling high-end packages and focusing on the transformation and the outcomes that individuals will receive rather than billing by the hour. I've helped many of my executive coaching clients shift into selling $25,000 to $50,000 packages.

As you can see at this price point, working with a few dozen people per year would take you to a mid to high six figure business.

Sometimes executive coaching will be company sponsored, meaning the company allocates a certain budget for their senior level leaders to get professional development support. Other times, the individual pays out-of-pocket for executive coaching. You may be thinking, “Will someone pull out $25,000 of their own money for their development?” The answer is absolutely. Sometimes it's a combination of both where the company pays a portion and then the individual will pay the remaining.

Also it’s important to keep in mind that with executive coaching, once you get your foot in the door and are working with one leader, you can also shift into working with multiple of their leaders and end up creating a six-figure contract with that organization. You can also scale by creating a "one to many offer" in which executives from many different companies come into your programs. I have a client who I helped create a $25,000 group coaching program for executives.

#2) Leadership Coaching

Another profitable niche to grow a coaching business is leadership coaching. Leadership coaching has some similarities to executive coaching but instead of working with one individual, you begin to work with teams. These could be anything from small teams of say five up to 20 people to much bigger teams. Sometimes leadership coaches will work with the senior level executive team and other times they may be working with management throughout the organization.

With leadership coaching, there can be a greater focus on navigating workplace challenges such as conflict management, communication, retention, engagement and even change management. It's about not only the individual's performance, but the team's performance as a whole to drive organizational goals.

Leadership coaching can take place on site, it can be done virtually or a combo of both. You can even offer leadership coaching as a licensing product in which the organization pays a fee to use your materials. This is a nice passive income stream for leadership coaches and a great down-sell for those that may not be ready to invest multiple six figures in leadership coaching.

As far as price point, leadership coaching can be a really big ticket item. I've helped my clients sell $120,000, $180,000 even $360,000 leadership coaching programs.

As you can see, this has the potential to be a very profitable model in which you only need a handful of clients to reach mid to high six figures all the way up to seven figures. It's also where working with an expert strategist is really important to be able to position you to not only create an offer of this magnitude but also know how to build enough value to sell it. By the way, if you haven't already read our 7 figure leadership case study, be sure to download it.

#3) Business Coaching

Another profitable niche to build a coaching business is business coaching. Now there are many different kinds of business coaches out there and whenever I post anything about this on LinkedIn, I've had people literally arguing in the comments about what is the difference between a business coach versus a business consultant versus a strategist versus a mentor and more. I'm not here to argue about semantics.

What I will say is that many business coaches I know do a combination of strategy and coaching and even some consulting. A business coach is someone that is going to support you in getting you to your goals. There may be some coaches out there that just help you set goals and hold you accountable. To me, an effective business coach is someone who does all of that and has the ability to offer you strategic guidance. If you're a business coach that has a strategy skillset, this is going to be a more profitable niche for you than just helping someone set goals and hold them accountable.

There are also people who consider a coach someone who really uses that process of inquiry like you would do with an executive coaching client to pull the answers out of someone. While others may consider a consultant someone who either tells someone what to do or actually does it for them. Again, I'm not concerned with semantics because most of the really successful business coaches and consultants that I know, will often do a combination of these.

However, there are people that are pure consultants and they make a lot of money. They go in and they do everything for the client, like the research and writing reports and ensuring things are distributed to the team and it's implemented. There are also certainly coaches who have a handful of sessions and help people get to their goals. So there's a wide range of what can fall under that umbrella of “business coaching" and there is certainly potential success in all of them. For me, the way that I do things is I help people develop strategy for their businesses and then support them in executing to ensure their success.

As far as what you can charge for business coaching, it can range from billing by the hour to selling smaller packages all the way up to selling six figure packages.

With business coaching there is also an opportunity to have a scalable "one to many" offering where many different business owners join your program and you're able to offer them guidance in a group setting.

By the way, business coaching can also be further niched down to say industry specific. For example, I work with coaches and consultants however, I have clients who are business coaches for the manufacturing industry, interior design, retail services, professional services and more.

#4 Career Coaching

Finally, another profitable niche to build a coaching business around is career coaching. Career coaching also works with an individual and is centered around helping position that person to reach the next level in their career. This can mean everything from getting clear about what is their career path to how to improve their skills to how to present their accomplishments and the value they bring to an organization to how to negotiate and stand out to hiring managers.

Some career coaches focus more on things like getting a great resume together and updating a profile on LinkedIn and landing a job this way. Others are going to support you more in positioning you as an expert within your organization so you can strategically land a leadership role with a higher salary.

Some career coaches bill by the hour and others sell lower end packages. If you're targeting leadership roles and helping them climb the corporate ladder even higher to land senior level roles and even get into the c-suite, you can command a lot more money. Again you can also scale a career coaching program as one to many as well where individuals from all different kinds of organizations are participating in your group program.

There's also opportunities for career coaches to work directly with organizations. Sometimes again just like executive coaching, the organization will carve out a budget to invest in an individual's professional development. They're also opportunities to support the organization during layoffs, for example to offer career guidance as part of their severance package. Again this can be a huge opportunity for career coaches to build a profitable model that works with organizations.

This wraps up my newsletter on the top 4 profitable niches to build a high end coaching business around. If you found this valuable, be sure to hit share to your network.

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About Jessica Yarbrough

Jessica is a genius at showing entrepreneurs how to build an expert platform, rapidly raise their value, build their credibility online and attract high paying clients. She travels the world teaching and inspiring entrepreneurs and helping them grow their influence and make the income and impact they desire.

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