As a coach, your business plan is a great jumping off point for finding clarity, focus, and direction with your brand.

There are tons of awesome business plan templates out there for freelancers and creative entrepreneurs, but what I’ve found with my own business and with my clients who are also coaches is that it can be hard to find a template that fully fits our business model and needs. 

A business plan has two main goals:

1. Clarify your business idea and all the nitty gritty details
2. Get you moving forward with your business goals and plans

As a coach, whether you work within the life, health, fitness, creative, business, or relationship industries, the way our business works behind the scenes differs slightly from other freelancers such as designers, photographers, and writers. I’ve found with almost all of my clients that without a solid business plan in place it’s hard to move forward in a way that is purposeful, strategic, and productive for their brand. And for my clients who are coaches, what I’ve seen them struggle with the most is to find a style of business plan that hones in on what it is they’re really trying to build.

That’s where today’s post comes in.

I’ve pilled together some of the core tasks that I have my clients work through when they’re getting stuck into figuring out their brand, their business plan, and how to bring it all together in a way that is purposeful and profitable at exactly the same time. For coaches specifically, I’ve outlined this into a ten step business plan to help you clarify your vision, your ideas, and how to translate that into a profitable business with a community, raving fans, and a schedule booked up with clients along the way.

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When you run your own business, you either love making money or you hate it.

Maybe you love the excitement of making a sale and seeing the money coming in, or maybe to you money feels like a necessary evil. Either way, there are probably times along the way in your solopreneur journey when money starts to freak you out. When you’re not making enough. When you’re making more than you expected. When you have no idea how to manage your finances. When you’re afraid the work will stop coming in.

I know exactly how you feel.

I used to have a terrible relationship with money. I was in debt before I even turned 20, I had no concept of what it meant to truly live within my means, and I would recklessly spend come payday with no real thought given to the consequences to come. By the time I got myself together, debt free and starting from scratch all over again, my relationship with money had really changed. Money started to scare me. I was afraid that I would fall back into old habits again, and that I had absolutely no idea how to take control and manage my finances in a way that worked for me.

When you’re running a business and being boss, there’s no time to freak out about money.

Freaking out about money as a solopreneur when you’re first getting started is a given. Being in charge of your own paycheque is absolutely petrifying, and giving yourself permission to go out there into the world and charge for your services or products is seriously scary stuff. It’s taken me almost a year to full take control of my finances as a creative business owner. But I now no longer feel trapped in a feast and famine cycle, I’m able to make a sustainable living from my work, and I’m no longer overwhelmed by the fear that I won’t be able to provide for myself in the months to come. Here's why:

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Getting booked out in advance can change everything when you’re a service based business owner.

Knowing in advance your client workload means:

• Less feast and famine and more financial stability
• More control of your schedule and routine
• Less anxiety and sleepless nights about how you’re going to pay the bills next month
• More freedom as a freelancer and creative business owner

When I first started my business I never even thought about getting booked out in advance. I didn’t even know if I’d be able to book enough clients to bring in a full time income, let alone have up to 4 months client work on the books in advance. But as my business grew so did my waitlist and being booked out in advance has played a huge part in helping me to feel more stable and secure in my work along the way. 

The strategies behind getting booked out in advance will look different for everyone and depends completely on your business model, who you serve best, and the structure and systems behind your work. After being able to get booked out for 2015 three months in advance, and now with availability for new clients from February 2016, today I want to share what I’ve learned so far and some of the key takeaways for any other service based creatives who are ready to fill their schedule up with clients and work for the months ahead to come.

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I’m a big believer in contributing way more than we consume and I've consciously been cutting back recently on how much I’m consuming so I can silence the noise more and get back to doing the work that I feel inspired to do. But one area where I’ll happily give a few hours to each week is podcasts; I may be a little biased as I’m also a podcaster, but I really do believe that audio content is currently where some of the most insightful, game changing, and original ideas are being shared in the creative and small business world online.

And today I want to share with you five of my favourites that I think you will love too.

Way back in January I shared five of my favourites, which I still love (especially Being Boss, if you’re not listening to that one definitely head over and check it out now), but these five are more recent discoveries that I get crazy excited to listen to each time a new episode goes live.

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ONE OF THE BIGGEST THINGS I’VE LEARNED THIS YEAR IS THAT YOU DO NOT NEED A HIGH TRAFFIC WEBSITE TO BUILD A PROFITABLE ONLINE BUSINESS.

This time last year I thought my Google Analytics were the bottom line when it came to defining the potential success of my online brand. Now a year later I very rarely check my analytics, unless I want to find out more about certain conversions and which pages are attracting more visitors, and when it comes to assessing the health of my business, tracking my page views is at the bottom of my list. And today I want to share in depth why this is and how I’ve built a profitable online business without relying on traffic, because I see so much in my clients and community online how much anxiety there is around website traffic and how much that anxiety can hold you back from making big and beautiful things happen online.

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If you’re anything like me, something you probably say on a daily basis is: I just don’t have enough time.

When we’re hustling hard to create a life of creative and financial freedom for ourselves, showing up for our business every single day, and making a daily commitment to doing the work, we can sometimes struggle to carve out time to do everything we want to each day. We sacrifice self care, passion projects, and time with loved ones in the hopes of just keeping our head above water with our work, and what we find ourselves with is burn out, resentment, and a life that’s nowhere near as dreamy as we want it to be.

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Being a freelancer is awesome. There’s a reason so many of us are saying no to the traditional 9-5 life and choosing the road of self employment instead. From the lack of a ceiling on our earning potential, to the fact that we can shape and define our own routines, it’s a pretty awesome way to make a living. But we also have to wear many hats; the list of things we need to do each week to stay on top of our clients, finances, systems, and marketing strategies is enough to leave anyone feeling overwhelmed from time to time. 

THAT’S WHERE TODAY’S EXERCISE COMES IN. 

After a year so far of some serious hustle, I’ve found myself feeling a little scattered and in need of a little time out to reevaluate things and touch base with my business and freelance life. Like with any job, sometimes it’s far too easy to just get stuck going through the motions, and I’ve put together an exercise to help me find some focus, clarity, and lose that scattered feeling once and for all. And if you’re struggling with that scattered feeling too, I’ve broken it down step by step below so you can take the time to get your freelance life together and touch base with where it is you want to go next.

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Sometimes there are guests on Make It Happen that I get super, super excited to interview.

Today's guest was definitely one of them.

Halley Gray of Evolve + Succeed is without a doubt one of my favourite people on the internet. She's witty, wise, and super, super smart when it comes to business and marketing and she's always bringing fluff-free and super valuable insights to the table which have led me to so many a-ha moments along the way. And that's exactly why I asked her to come on the podcast today, as I just know her insights and knowledge around marketing and positioning yourself online as a leader and an expert will be super valuable for Make It Happen listeners too.

In this episode we talk about how to become a leader in your industry, reasons why your marketing may not be working and what you can do about it, and how you can avoid the bulls*t online so you can thrive instead. This one definitely will work best with a pen and paper to take notes as you listen as Halley shares some seriously good stuff with us today.

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This past weekend, Maya Elious and I hosted a live workshop all about building a profitable online presence (the replay has expired but if you want to hear us talk all things business you can in our episode of Make It Happen here) and the idea for this workshop came from a conversation we were having around the struggles we see many of our coaching clients go through when they’re trying to make big and beautiful things happen online.

Here’s the thing: you can create all of the courses, eBooks, paid-for workshops and services in the world, but if you don’t have a community who is invested in your brand, who cares about your message and your voice, and are ready and waiting to dive into working with you, you’re going to struggle to build something profitable and sustainable along the way.

Creating the products is the fun part. Packaging up your services and products and thinking how much money you could make and how that could change your life is a daydream every budding online entrepreneur finds themselves lost in from time to time, but sometimes you can get too lost in the dreaming and scheming stage and forget to focus on building the core foundations that your online business needs to survive and thrive.

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