Why your Life Coaching Agreement should be your business life raft
Looking for our life coaching agreement template? Go here.
Perhaps you are considering setting up your dream life coaching business, or maybe you’re already established your business and are looking for ways to tighten up and improve what you have in place. Either way, you should have a life coaching agreement in place that truly serves you and protects you from the inevitable issues that commonly occur in life coaching work.
In this article, we unpack five common issues that coaches like you come across with clients regularly, and what your life coaching agreement should cover off to avoid them, or resolve them easily.
Are you looking for a Life Coach Contract to give to your clients? Take a look at these editable templates:
1. Coaching without a tight client agreement
As a life coach, you are constantly helping your clients fly on the trapeze of life. When you apply that analogy to your own life coaching business, you are on the trapeze. You are skilled at your craft, so it is unlikely you will fall. However, if things do go wrong, you should have a harness and safety net to catch you. The harness is your life coaching agreement and the safety net is your business insurance. Even if you have these things in place, not all are equal, and in this article we dig into the life coaching agreement.
Your life coaching agreement that you give to clients should set out:
What you will do and what you will not do (the scope of the work)
What you will get paid (costings involved)
How you will get paid (online bank transfer, pre-payment methods, cash, cheque)
When you will get paid
It also means that your business is protected in the event that a client:
Does not pay you
Asks for a refund if they do not get anticipated results
Contacts you outside of business hours
Cancels without notice
Copies or uses your coaching resources without permission
Having a life coaching agreement in place that covers these elements (and more, as we’ll cover below), sends a clear message to your client of what you expect and sets the tone of your coach/ client relationship. It also provides you with a contract to rely on if things ever go wrong. Hopefully you will never fall from your trapeze, but if you do, you know the harness is there to support you.
2. Running your coaching sessions before you are paid
You may run into issues of clients not paying you, or may find yourself having to chase up late payments. This is why it is important to stipulate within your life coaching agreement that your clients must pay you before their coaching sessions.
Life coaching is all about boundaries. Those boundaries begin with your coaching agreement and the way you take payment. Client and coach relationships should be built on mutual trust and respect, and this begins with transparency around your preferred pricing and methods of payment. Coaching and then chasing payment is not a great display of boundaries and can leave you open to bad debtors and extra stress.
You may sell your coaching services as ‘once off sessions’ or you may sell packages of sessions bundled together, to be used within a certain time frame. No matter how you choose to deliver your services, it is always important that your client is aware from the outset of how and when to pay you. The price you set and how and when you take payment is ultimately up to you. But, however you choose to take payment, make sure you are paid before your sessions.
Taking payment is often an add-on function to appointment setting tools such as Acuity or Calendly. You may be surprised at how much your clients will appreciate the convenience of being able to pay online in advance, and this will save you the time and stress of having to chase payments after the fact. After all, you need to make it easy for your clients to work with you.
Having pre-payment as an expectation is important, and it must be detailed within your life coaching agreement. Then you have ensured that your coaching clients have agreed to the payment terms, and you will never miss out on that income again.
3. Being available 24/7
Setting boundaries with your clients is not only about early payment, but also about your interaction with them. As a life coach, lines can often be blurred in your line of work, and clients can become reliant on your guidance.
It doesn't matter who your clients are, whether they are executives or a single parent struggling to make ends meet, it is crucial to be setting clear boundaries around when and how you will interact during the coaching process.
This may be through a no email reply between sessions, or an automated out-of-office email reply. Some life coaches use solutions like Voxer between certain hours, with clear rules that the client should have no expectation of an immediate reply.
Whichever way you choose to set boundaries about availability with your client, remember that there is no right way. Given this is your business, you dictate when and how this happens. It is crucial that you do have these boundaries clearly documented within your life coaching agreement, because this underpins your coaching relationship and regulates expectations.
4. Letting clients cancel without adequate notice
Letting clients cancel with minimal notice can be detrimental to your business. When a client cancels their appointment at short notice, it is hard for you to replace that income source. And put simply, it is inconvenient as you’ve already planned your day with that appointment in mind. This is why we recommend that you have detailed terms about the notice period for rescheduling or cancellations. We recommend a minimum of 48 hours.
Also consider delays in time of people using pre-purchased coaching session packs. For example, if someone has purchased five sessions upfront, and then doesn’t use them within six or twelve months, that leaves you with pre-purchased sessions to deliver later on. The last thing you want is someone coming to you in 5 years time demanding their unused sessions. Your life coaching agreement should ensure that all pre-purchased sessions must be used within a certain time frame. We recommend either six to twelve months, and then they expire.
5. Sharing your coaching resources without protecting them first
We understand that you want to be generous with your clients. Most life coaches go into this field because they care about people and want the best for them. However, it is important for you to be aware of the need to protect your resources, your intellectual property.
Always be mindful of who you are sharing your resources with. If your client is in a similar industry, decides to try their hand at life coaching, or perhaps has friends in the industry, this may result in your resources becoming a source of inspiration that become too closely copied. There is always a very fine line between inspiration and flat out plagiarism.
We recommend that you take the time to ensure that all of your resources are marked with the copyright (©) symbol, and that your name and year are also marked to indicate your copyright in the ownership. It is also important to consider trademarking certain methods, program names or business names.
You work hard to create and deliver your sessions, and make resources that are helpful, so don’t let your time and effort go to waste by making it easy for a copycat. In addition to the copyright symbol, make sure you protect your resources by having clear terms set within your life coaching agreement. If you would like to chat to us about your trademarking options, you can get in touch by booking a call here or read our trademarking article here.
Set yourself up well from the outset
We know it is tempting when you are starting out to cut corners on some business expenses and as a result, some people search online and find some generic terms and conditions to copy (or copy their own coaches terms), however, you want to be sure that you’re covering all of your bases.
In reality, having a comprehensive life coaching agreement in place from the very beginning, alleviates the need to have to argue with a client about what they thought they were getting or what your expectations are.
If these key issues (amongst others) have been detailed properly in the life coaching agreement they signed, then the terms cannot be argued about!
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Are you setting up a life coaching business, or already have one? You will want to check out our Life Coaching Agreement Template. Don’t end up stuck because you put off taking action. If you aren’t sure if this template will suit your coaching business, you are invited to book an obligation free chat with me here.