How to grow your coaching business (hint: consider an assistant coach)
One of the limitations that all coaches face when scaling their business is the finite number of hours they have available to actually coach. That’s why you may offer alternative services such as group coaching or perhaps even diversified into memberships, online courses and programs.
Over the years we’ve shared a number of helpful articles about how to grow your coaching business and protect your coaching business however this time we want to share what we are seeing our clients who are coaches are enjoying, thanks to them taking on an assistant coach.
Coaching contract templates for your clients and assistant coaches:
When your core services are either 1/1 coaching or a program with a one-to-many model that includes face-to-face contact, there are still limits to your capacity. Everyone wants a piece of you, and it takes a LOT of energy to be present and fully involved in your coaching sessions.
The benefits of an Assistant Coach
Having the help of another person to deliver your approach or method of coaching is often overlooked but is worth serious consideration. It allows you to bottle that essence only you have and have others deliver it for you. It means you are free to do other items of business development, have down time or work on other things that light you up.
How do you find this unicorn (aka assistant coach)? While you can advertise for the role, often they are people you already know. Oftentimes they are people who have experienced that transition and transformation that coaching can facilitate. They may have been a past client of yours, understand the needs of your target audience and want to help others experience the benefits too.
Here are some other positives to bringing on an Assistant Coach:
Clients who take on coaching services typically expect human contact, whether that is in person, on a phone call or online.
More coaching clients equals more revenue.
Having someone you bring on can help share the load and free you up to focus on other projects you’ve been unable to get to. Preserving your energy rather than spreading yourself thin is always better for you and the work you do with clients.
Sometimes coaching can be a lonely business. Having someone alongside you who has the same values as you makes a big difference in running a business; and
What happens if you were to get sick? At least with an assistant coach in place they can step in and help without everything business-wise having to go on pause.
But it wouldn’t be right to focus just on the positives and not identify the nitty gritty of what needs to be considered and managed when bringing on an assistant coach, such as:
How to stop them from taking clients
What degree of interaction with your clients or community you give them
How to ensure they do not steal or ‘borrow’ your intellectual property
How to ensure confidentiality
Whether they are (or should be) a contractor or an employee
Avoid the risk of them taking clients
It's not enough to expect people to behave like decent human beings and not solicit your clients. This is the number one issue I see for coaches that leaves them frustrated. Their employee goes out on their own and has the audacity to take their clients. Once it happens, it can be hard to trust again and often it puts them off bringing anyone else on in the future in case it happens again.
This can be avoided and it does not need to be an issue when you do these two things:
Discuss the nature of the role at the outset with your potential assistant coach. Have a discussion and be clear that this is the expectation. If they do have plans to go it alone down the track, at least flush that out and be clear that they are not to take your clients if they do; and
Back it up with specific restraints built into your assistant coach agreement that you should have them agree to and sign.
You may also want to impose non-compete or restraint clauses. And, when you’re going through the process of discussing the role and your expectations, ensure you determine what their motivation is. What do they intend to do in the future? Plenty of people will happily work alongside someone while others may have intentions to set up shop in direct competition. Cutting you out of the picture is a genuine risk and you will need these specific clauses in place to stop it and to make sure you hire the right person.
Connection and accessibility to your clients
If you have a community such as a Facebook group, you should consider how much accessibility you give to your assistant coach. Outside of the coaching role, can they:
Access and communicate with people in the group?
If they can, how much do you want them to contribute to the group?
Will they use their personal profile or create a unique profile for this group - e.g. setting up a profile as ‘Coach Michelle [Name of your program]’ that is exclusively for use in the group?
Using their personal profile often leads to friend requests and blurry relationships outside of the assistant coach/client relationship. When someone leaves, this blurring of lines leads to the coaching clients following the assistant coach.
You may also want to ensure that if the assistant coach doesn’t work out, they are not to approach that community or the people in it, for a set period of time (eg, 12 months), this is known as a restraint period.
Protect your coaching IP
If you’ve been developing your method and programs for a number of years, you will have a whole lot of intellectual property (or IP), even if you don’t realise it at this moment. It’s often only later that people can identify just how much they have developed over the years.
Examples of IP you may already have include:
Recordings of webinars or training
Worksheets
Sales page content
Templates
Email and social media content
Often when bringing someone on, you give them access to a number of platforms, systems and resources. Whatever they have access to, they need to know that they have a licence to use it for that role but not beyond that. It is not their content to download, repurpose and use under their own name.
Consider whether your assistant coach will need access to everything or perhaps create a shared folder or provide permissions for specific smaller parts. If they were to have full access and the ability to search all of your documents, including sensitive and financial information that you don’t wish them to have access to, this could be a real issue.
It is also helpful to give others access to your systems through a password manager like LastPass so you can revoke it quickly and easily if you ever need to and the access doesn’t require the disclosure of an actual password.
Be vigilant
Even if your Assistant Coach is brilliant and you have every confidence in them, we recommend you monitor how people in your community and coaching container or program are finding the coaching delivered by them.
Ensure you schedule in a bit of a ‘pulse check’ regularly so you don’t end up caught out or surprised by negative feedback or backlash later on. It can be so much harder to recover from an issue like this if you aren’t making those check-in’s a regular habit.
Remember too, that as much as people love the assistant coach, you are likely the drawcard and you can’t completely step back, your community still needs some of you as well.
Confidentiality
As an extension of protecting information, you need to ensure your assistant coach understands and complies with the confidentiality expectations you have in relation to the client information you hold and the conversations and information disclosed by clients.
While having the conversation can be helpful, including the specific expectations about confidentiality must be included in your assistant coach agreement.
Are they a contractor or employee?
In Australia, whether an assistant coach is a contractor or an employee is a thorny question. The Australian Tax Office (or ATO) has published some guidelines or tests as to whether a team member is considered to be an employee or a contractor in an effort to avoid what the ATO calls “sham contracting”. When the ATO considers sham contracting it considers things like:
Can your assistant coach set their own hours?
Does the assistant coach use their own tools and equipment?
Is the assistant coach able to subcontract to others below them or delegate the coaching to another person?
Will your assistant coach take on the commercial risk if something goes wrong? This means they must fix it and have their own insurance.
If the answer is no to the above, it is likely you have an employee rather than a contractor and if you treat them as a contractor then you may be penalised with fines and other action by the ATO. It is always a great idea to get advice from your accountant and/ or a lawyer or HR professional to make sure however you hire your assistant coach they are hired in the right way for your country of residence.
The consequences of engaging them incorrectly can incur hefty penalties.
For more information about the difference between employees and contractors, read this article here.
What happens if things don’t work out?
If your assistant coach doesn’t work out and you want to let them go, you need to be able to terminate their employment agreement or contractor agreement in a way that doesn’t leave you open to legal recourse. That also needs to be detailed correctly in your contract.
To learn how to grow your coaching business with an assistant coach the most seamless way, then you must have an agreement in place that is specific to the needs of the assistant coach role. And, if you already have an assistant coach onboard but don’t have these core items covered in your current contract, now is the time to act.
Related Articles: Why your Life Coaching Agreement should be your business life raft
Coaching success starts with these Business Coaching Agreement must-haves
Group coaching success: 5 essentials for life and business coaches
If you are engaging them as a contractor, then our Assistant Coach Contract is what you need to protect you, your clients and their business. If they are an employee, then our Employment Agreement Template is best and is suitable for both full-time and part-time assistant coaches.
If you are unsure, we can help you determine which option you need. Book an obligation free chat with us here.