Coaching Management Platform vs Virtual Assistant for Coaches: Which One is Better for Your Coaching Business?

Running a successful coaching business seamlessly isn’t child’s play. It’s as demanding and overwhelming as any business venture can get — client management, sales and marketing, and daily administrative tasks take up a major chunk of the work besides the actual coaching. Try to do all at once and you could be compromising one area or the other, and can even end up burned out. So how do you prioritize what’s important and delegate the rest?  

To concentrate on the core job of coaching and updating yourself with the latest industry trends, consider outsourcing other activities that you feel are beyond your bandwidth, such as social media management, appointment booking, and other admin and marketing tasks. 

When it comes to delegating tasks, most business owners are aware of virtual assistants as one solution. Qualified independent individuals, they are professionally equipped to work alongside business leaders remotely, taking the load off from them. You can delegate a wide range of activities like business administration and strategies, scheduling appointment, lead management, customer service and more to a virtual assistant. 

But with technology having a significant role to play in coaching businesses now, will a coaching management platform score over virtual assistant for coaches? Here’s a lowdown on some of the benefits online coaching management platforms offer your business over a virtual assistant for coaches. 

Why an online coaching management platform should be your first pick 

1. It’s more economical 

While a virtual assistant for coaches usually charges a fee ranging from $5 to $15 per hour/day, online coaching management platforms like Simply.Coach are a more scalable alternative that require you to pay somewhere around $9/month (for solopreneurs) and $129/month (for businesses). 

2. It’s automated 

An online coaching management platform helps save time and effort on admin tasks by automating functions such as scheduling and appointment booking, social media management, email marketing, contact management, invoicing and billing, feedback collection, etc. Platforms like Simply.Coach also help streamline onboarding and automate legalities by offering ready contract templates. This offers an opportunity to the coaches to get these client management and admin tasks done all by themselves just at the click of a button instead of relying on another individual. What’s more? With automation, you tend to reduce error to almost zero. Also, any sensitive information related to your clients enjoy absolute confidentiality owing to various security compliances. For example, Simply.Coach is SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR-compliant, being the most secure platform to manage your business. 

3. It’s customizable and more efficient 

As a coaching business, you will have your own set of coaching tools to use at different points in the journey. There are so many tools life coaches use, for example, that help clients introspect, or help you gather feedback, run exercises and so on. These tend to be stored in different ways and end up being an organizational nightmare. Plus, you have to be the one to collate all the answers and feedback (and even create reports from them). An online coaching management platform like Simply.Coach does this all for you by allowing you to run customized surveys, gather feedback and create reports for you, at a click, something that a virtual assistant for coaches would take a significant amount of time to do. 

Explore Simply.Coach’s reservoir of coaching tools right here. 

4. It works round the clock 

With the ever-increasing use of technology in coaching today, many coaches work with clients around the world. Say your virtual assistant is based out of a different time zone too. If any task needs to be handled outside usual business hours for any client or for the company, it will be difficult to collaborate with a VA immediately. On the other hand, you have access to a virtual coaching platform 24/7. Most of these online coaching management platforms run either on cloud-based technology or on vendor-hosted software. Hence, you can now manage your coaching business even on the go. 

Wish to learn more about the benefits of an online coaching software? 

We have it all that you need to know here! 

Key takeaway 

But is technology a complete & total for virtual assistant for coaches in the real sense of the term? According to executive coach Ram Gopalan, if you have the financial means for it, a virtual assistant and online coaching management platform can be put to work simultaneously by a coach for faster, flawless output, and better productivity overall. In fact, virtual assistant for coaches may help integrate technology solutions in their practice. Both the coach and the VA can work with the same coaching management platform that brings together multiple digital tools under one roof. This also helps bring consistency and avoid confusion between the coach and the assistant as they are now on the same page. To draw a parallel, when coaches collaborate with advanced Artificial Intelligence to offer an added edge to their clients’ coaching experience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that AI will replace human coaches altogether – they simply work better together. 

Sources: InboxDone, Wing, Virtualassistantsupplier, Profi, Simply.Coach 

FAQs 

1. Do coaches need virtual assistants and how can they help a coach? 

With an increase in the number of clients and growth in your business, you would need a virtual assistants who would adeptly handle the admin side of your business so that you can focus primarily on coaching. Whether you are a life coach or a business coach or an expert in any other niche, some of the tasks a virtual assistant can help you with in your coaching business are: administrative tasks, email management and customer support, social media management, scheduling coaching sessions and calendar management, bookkeeping, data entry, research and brainstorming with session topics, report compilation, finding clients, etc. 

2. How can technology replace virtual assistants in running a coaching business? 

An online coaching management platform helps save time and effort on admin tasks by automating functions such as scheduling appointments, social media management, email integration, contact management, invoice and billing, report creation, etc. at a lower cost as compared to a virtual assistant for coaches. 

3. Can coaching management platforms and virtual assistants work together to support coaches’ businesses?

A coaching management platform and a virtual assistant for coaches can compliment each other for a faster, flawless output, and enhanced productivity. You can collaborate with your virtual assistant on the same coaching management platform to avoid confusion and bring about operational consistency.

4. What main factors should coaches consider when deciding between coaching management platforms and virtual assistants?

Some of the main factors that you should consider while deciding between coaching management platforms and virtual assistant for coaches are: cost efficiency, time efficiency, error reduction, open to customization, 24/7 accessibility, etc.

About the author

Jayashree Mukherjee

Content Specialist @Simply.Coach

Jayashree Mukherjee is a content specialist by day and a content junkie (on OTT) by night. Passionate about traveling, street food and overturning the underuse of em dashes — she would have been a globe-trotter if she hadn’t been so lazy.