How to Grow Your Executive Coaching Business in 2024 

$9.3 billion. That’s the size of just the executive coaching market in 2022! Executive coaching is in demand so, needless to say, there’s a lot of scope and opportunity to scale your business, provided you employ the right strategies and techniques. 

As much as there’s room for growth, you should also expect steep competition from other executive coaching businesses. To get an edge over your competitors, you will have to come up with ideas and strategies that aren’t run-of-the-mill. Wondering how? Here’s a curated list of unique ideas that would help you tower above others in the industry and scale your executive coaching business to new heights. 

1. Session giveaways at speaking engagements 

Justin Patton, the CEO of The Trust Architect Group, believes in and practices session giveaways whenever he is invited as a keynote speaker. According to him, offering a free one-hour coaching session to their clients (which they can offer to anybody in the audience) gives his services the exposure it needs to expand the coaching business. 

Indeed, you cannot deny the benefits of session giveaways when it comes to scaling your executive coaching business—whether small or big. This practice is instrumental in creating brand awareness and generating relevant traffic to your business. Here are some of the benefits of session giveaways at various speaking engagements: 

• It boosts reach and enhances engagements 
• Serves as a free brand advertisement 
• Can convert receivers into long-time loyal clients, thereby increasing sales  

Don’t have a speaking engagement lined up in the near future? You can adapt this strategy to apply to session giveaways in any relevant forum. 

2. More group coaching engagements 

It is widely believed that to deliver the best results, coaches need to conduct one-on-one coaching rather than group coaching. In doing so, they end up jamming their calendar and putting in more time & effort than the income generated. Group coaching is one alternative to overexerting yourself. 

Group coaching also lends itself extremely well to executive coaching – as a coach, you can help teams grow in alignment with the company’s goals, while working on individualized growth as well. 

As you dive deep, you see that many clients tend to have similar challenges and clubbing them together would prove beneficial (both for the coach and the client) in the long run. With platforms like Simply.Coach, you can create cohesive coaching experiences that work both at the group level as well as on an individual level. You can track the progress of the entire team and also focus on individual development. 

For example, with Shared Goals you can set goals for the team and also break them down for each group member. You can set up, manage, and review responses on digital tools (like 360° Feedback Surveys, Self-reflections, etc.) for the whole cohort from a single dashboard. 

Being a coach is one thing, but running a successful coaching business and having consistent revenue growth are different ball games altogether. 

Check out our blog post on How to Maximize Coaching Income with Coaching Management Software!   

3. Targeting the public sector 

Executive coaching is mostly associated with private businesses and corporations. But how about exploring executive coaching in the public sector? The stakeholders in the public domain are different from those in the private sector, but the former too need effective leaders. Executive coaching can have an equal impact in guiding public sector leaders. 

Although different in their outlook, the DNA of private and public sector companies are fast becoming alike. Employees of public corporations need some critical business skills for growth, good leadership to lead productive teams, motivated employees for productive work, and so on. Therefore, one of the top focus areas for your executive coaching practice in 2024 can be in the public enterprise domain, helping draw in clients from a completely different background.  

4. Having a multi-channel marketing strategy in place 

A sure-fire way to scale your coaching business is by optimizing marketing strategies via social media platforms, paid ads, and email marketing. Your focus should be to drive as much relevant traffic (I.e. interested people) as possible from these platforms to your dedicated landing page or website, to schedule a call with you. How can you leverage these marketing routes? Here’s how: 

a. Social media

It plays a significant role in marketing your online coaching business. It helps:  

• Create brand awareness and establish business credibility 
• Project yourself as a thought leader 
• Gain the trust of the target audience 
• Meet the right audience at the right time 
• Get in touch with coaching influencers 
• Run ads to attract more leads 

Choose the right social media platform that is frequented by your potential clients. In this case, your target audiences are mostly executives or business professionals. Therefore, you are more likely to find them via LinkedIn. Alternately, you may reach out to your existing clients and assess their social media practice or the platforms that they prefer over others. You may also run a poll on LinkedIn and see how your target audiences react to it, to guage their engagement level. 

b. Paid advertising

Paid marketing pushes your brand to new potential clients in a way that helps convert them into paying clients. Online advertisement strategies like banner ads, social media ads, pay-per-click-ads like Google AdWord, etc. help you reach out to people interested in coaching who haven’t yet discovered you, and even specifically people who are looking for executive coaches. 
 
However, it is very important to fine tune paid marketing strategies with social media marketing and website maintenance for the former to prove effective. For instance, if you haven’t updated your website or social media page for a long time and you run paid ads, when a user clicks on the ad and comes to your page it will create a poor first impression. 

c. Email marketing

Email marketing is instrumental in generating a high return on investment. It’s more economical as compared to advertising. It can also be customized as per buyer persona and user behavior. Let’s see how you may use email marketing in lead nurturing. Suppose you establish a new coaching package. You can mail its details to your list of subscribers, those who have shown interest in other packages or those who’ve been your clients in the past.  

Make sure your emails have short subject lines, powerful preview text, a concise body and relevant CTAs wherever required. 

5. Automating business and client management 

Running a successful coaching business is more than just conducting regular sessions and tracking client progress. A major chunk of a coach’s time goes into managing the daily administrative tasks involved in running the business. This often leads to burn out and takes the focus away from more constructive activities that directly contribute to business growth.  

Digitization and automation are a natural way to delegate tasks that take up unnecessary time and hamper your productivity. Automation can help save the time you spend scheduling sessions (all the back & forth messages!), running exercises, keeping clients motivated, tracking client progress and making reports, generating invoices & tracking payments, and so much more. 

This apart, there are several factors that drive coaching businesses towards automation: 

• The emergence of remote and hybrid work culture: thanks to online communication software like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, etc., collaborating with global clients has become easy and pocket friendly 
• The need for proving return on investment: More and more clients today look for a visible return on their investment in coaching executives. Automation platforms help you create visible client trajectories & journeys. 
• The emergence of all-in-one digital platforms: With software platforms like Simply.Coach offering comprehensive coaching management tools, coaches no longer need to be “tech experts” to digitize and automate their practice’s daily functions. 

It’s very important for coaches to retrospect on their business’ growth path and adopt any new practices and tools necessary for success. We hope the ideas in this blog post help you find new avenues to serve your clients better and scale your practice to new heights. 

Sources: Forbes, Entrepreneur, Simply.Coach 

FAQs

1. How to grow my executive coaching business? 

Running and growing an executive coaching business is not easy. Some unique ideas to scale your executive coaching business to new heights are: 

• Session giveaways at speaking engagements 
• Opting for more group coaching 
• Targeting public sector companies 
• Having a fool-proof marketing strategy in place 
• Automating business and client management 

2. Can I make a living as an executive coach? 

According to ZipRecruiter, executive coach salaries currently range between $49,500 and $124,500 annually across the United States. The wide gap indicates many opportunities for advancement as a professional in the field. 

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.