Successfully Building A Health Coaching Business While Working Another Job – Part 1

One of the most challenging situations a health coach faces is when they are trying to build their wellness business while also working another job. We get it – you need to keep paying the bills until your coaching business can replace your income.

When this is the case, it’s important that you become extremely intentional with your time as well as streamline your day-to-day tasks as much as possible. That’s why we’re bringing you a 2-part series on the podcast called: Successfully Building A Health Coaching Business While Working Another Job

If we’ve learned anything over our 10 years in business, it’s that time management is key. Whether you have 5 hours per week to work on your business or you have a full 40 hours, the goal is always to get as much done as possible in that allotted amount of time. That requires good time management skills.

In this series, our plan is to start with the big picture and slowly zoom in on routines and planning tools that will help you to be your most productive.

Successfully building your health coaching business starts with planning and we love the 12-week planning model. We’ve talked about this method many times before on the podcast. We learned this method by reading the book The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran. The premise of the book is that rather planning in advance for an entire year, (which is what we used to do), you instead plan in 12-week or 90-day increments. Each 90-day window is its own year inclusive of list growth goals, revenue goals, and any other goals that are important to you.

When you take time to plan your next 90-day window you’ll have your marching orders for what tasks you need to prioritize and when they need to be completed.

For example, let’s say your goal is to grow your email list by 150 subscribers in the next 90 days. You can break that down to a weekly goal of 13 new subscribers. Next, you can decide if you already have a freebie that will attract those new subscribers or if you need to create a new one. Once you have that answer you can decide where you will share the link to your freebie and how often you’ll need to share to obtain those subscribers.

It could look something like this…

13 new subscribers each week means that you need to create 1 Facebook group post, 2 Facebook page posts, 1 Instagram post and 2 Instagram stories each week to meet your goal.

Do you see how the goal of 150 new subscribers can be broken down into weekly, and even daily tasks? With this method you always know what you should be working on. No more shiny object syndrome.

Now that you understand the 12-Week Year planning model, let’s zoom in a little closer to weekly time management. Again, it comes down to planning ahead. Time management looks different for each individual. Some work better first thing in the morning, some need periodic breaks to be their most productive and some are actually more creative and productive in the evening. More than likely, you have some idea of what that looks like for you.

Karen prefers to start working in the morning and power through until lunch, whereas Kathleen breaks up her day by taking a break ever hour or so. 

Let’s say you are at your best in the mornings, you’re working a full-time job, and you have 10 hours per week to dedicate to your business. If that’s the case you may want to block 1 hour off in the evenings on Monday, Wednesday & Friday and then split the other 7 hours in the mornings on Saturday & Sunday. The evening hours can be spent doing repetitive tasks like uploading your blog, scheduling your social media, and answering questions in your Facebook group. Then the weekend can be used for content creation, coaching calls, and planning an upcoming promotion. These types of tasks require you to be at your best.

One of our mentors, Amy Porterfield, always says, “If you don’t schedule it, it’s not real”. We couldn’t agree more. Having set work hours is part of a successful business. When you wait to have everything else done before you prioritize your business the time will never come. It has to be scheduled to make it happen. This may require a conversation with your family to let them know when you need privacy to get things done. We know it can be a tough conversation sometimes but setting boundaries for your dream business is as important as time management. Maybe you need to remove yourself from the proximity of your family by going to a local co-working space or coffee shop. It’s up to you to set the tone related to your schedule.

One of our favorite time management tools is time blocking. Time blocking is a time management method that asks you to divide your day into blocks of time. Each block is dedicated to accomplishing a specific task, or group of tasks, and only those specific tasks. Instead of keeping an open-ended to-do list of things you’ll get to as you’re able, you’ll start each day with a concrete schedule that lays out what you’ll work on and when.

The key to this method is prioritizing your task list in advance — a dedicated weekly review is a must. Take stock of what’s coming up for the week ahead and make a rough sketch of your time blocks for each day. At the end of every workday, review any tasks you didn’t finish — as well as any new tasks that have come in — and adjust your time blocks for the rest of the week accordingly.

Time blocking works no matter how many hours you have to dedicate to your wellness business each week because you always know what your top priorities are for the following day/block of time.

The beautiful thing about this process is you can create routines for certain days of the week.

For example, each morning the first 4 things Karen does is:

• Check her email
• Go through her social media accounts to reply to any posts
• Review her project management software ClickUp to see what her team needs reviewed as well as what due dates she has coming up
• Check Slack to see if her team has any questions for her

She does this first thing every morning without fail.  Because she’s made it a habit the process using takes 10-15 minutes. It’s super quick.

She also knows that every Wednesday morning she’ll be writing the next podcast email and social media post so her team can get those uploaded and scheduled. These rituals keep her on track and allow to work on other projects that are being prioritized.

Kathleen’s weekly tasks are structured a little differently, where she doesn’t have set specific days that she does things, but she had due dates for each task, so she knows when she has to get them completed.

Now let’s zoom in a little bit more by discussing outsourcing.

We know that some of you are saying, “I don’t have the funds to outsource”. We get it because there was a time that the two of us felt the same way. It’s one of those scenarios of what comes first the chicken or the egg? Should you wait until you have the extra funds to outsource or will outsourcing help you make additional funds?

We actually did an entire episode dedicated to this topic called: The Secrets to Outsourcing Even if You’re on a Tight Budget, so we recommend listening to that if you haven’t done so already (or if you need a refresher)

Here is a simple exercise you can do before part two of the series comes out next week.

We will be diving deeper into the outsourcing topic next week but in the meantime, start making a list of the recurring tasks that you do week after week that anyone could do. Things like scheduling posts on social media, uploading emails into your email management system, posting a blog to your website, tracking stats, etc. Having this information will arm you with data that will help you make decisions around outsourcing in the coming weeks. Feel free to make this a brain dump for now by listing everything you do.

Join us back here next week for part 2!

Freebie: Karen’s Ultimate Health Coach Success Plan Blueprint

The Secrets to Outsourcing Even if You’re on a Tight Budget

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