3 Steps to Streamlining and Scaling Your Online Coaching Practice

3 Steps to Streamlining and Scaling Your Online Coaching Practice

by | Sep 27, 2020

3 Steps to Streamlining and Scaling Your Online Coaching Practice

I have a special guest post for you today from Jen Miller at .  The team at Practice Better are experts when it comes to all things client management and communication for your wellness business.  If you are coaching clients online or working towards incorporating online coaching, this article will give you a few helpful tips to ensure a smooth transition, workflow, and scalability.

 

A few months ago, many coaches were faced with the sudden need to transition their practices fully online without much notice or warning. It was time to pivot and take a leap in your business, whether you were ready or not! With that, you may have been in a situation where you had to choose the quick and easy path to support your clients and keep your practice afloat.

For many coaches that unfortunately meant they didn’t have systems in place to fit their workflow and the growth of a virtual business. You were likely able to get online to conduct telehealth sessions fairly painlessly, but what about other aspects of supporting your clients and scaling your practice?

When you think about the journey for not only your client but for you as a coach, there are multiple tools required to make it all happen. From scheduling, communication, and accountability, to sharing resources, recommendations, and documents with clients…there is a lot involved in a virtual coaching practice.

The Problem

If you don’t have a workflow in place that brings this all together, it can result in many challenges for you and your client.

As a coach, you’ll end up spending too much time on the administrative side of your practice, which isn’t sustainable. There will be greater potential for information to start falling through the cracks, and your client’s experience will suffer.

  • When processes aren’t streamlined and structured, it feels less professional for your client
  • The expectations likely aren’t as clear for them, and they feel less accountable to the process
  • If your clients don’t have access to the resources provided to them in an organized and easy-access fashion, their engagement will drop off

As a coach, it’s essential to reinforce a consistent structure and system for how you work with your client so they can create a routine. This will allow them to focus on their health journey and ultimately get amazing results, rather than getting distracted by the logistical aspects of working together.

The result is a better client experience, which leads to more referrals (an important part of every health practice!).

So, what do you need to be successful and scale your virtual health practice outside of simply running a telehealth session?

The Solution

Here are three simple strategies to not only ensure a seamless and high-level client experience but also help you streamline your workflow to save you more time and earn more money.

1. Seamlessly schedule and allow your clients to book online

Scheduling might seem like a simple task but can become a manual process that takes up way too much of your time! Perhaps you constantly go back and forth with clients to find suitable time slots or manually send confirmation and reminder emails for every client. This can get exhausting for both the coach and the client.

As well, the chance of information getting missed, or lost in translation is high. Are you in the same time zone as your client? Did you remember to include all of the pertinent information in your confirmation email? Is your client clear on your cancellation and reschedule policies?

We highly recommend using a scheduling tool that helps to streamline this process for you.

These are some key features to look for in a scheduling tool:

  • Automated confirmation, reminder, and cancellation emails to ensure there is no missed information
  • Ability to customize copy in those emails to align with your branding and ensure you can include all of the pertinent information
  • Syncs with your external calendar to eliminate the worry of overlap
  • Allows you to set up multiple service types with variable duration, as well as customize availability slots for those services
  • Integrates with your telehealth service provider to create a seamless experience for you and your clients
  • Has a public booking page feature to allow clients to book with you online

2. Enhance your client communication & accountability

As a health coach, you know that communicating effectively with your client is essential to keeping them accountable and supporting positive outcomes. When you are working together virtually, this becomes even more of a priority since you may not be seeing each other in person.

Accountability is something to keep in mind throughout the whole duration of working with your client virtually. Often clients will come in strong and might be self-motivated, however, this can be lost as time goes on.

How can you mitigate a drop off in engagement and ensure strong communication? Here are some strategies you can use:

  • Utilize a one-on-one or group chat to connect with your client in real-time
  • Send a voice memo or video message to add a personal touch
  • For daily engagement, use a check-in form, or create tasks for clients with due dates and reminders
  • Have your client submit a daily food and mood journal

3. Share your client resources in a streamlined and secure fashion

Sharing resources with your client, whether it be notes and protocols or educational materials, is something that has the potential to quickly become disorganized. Maybe you’re using email to share your notes and protocols, Google Docs to share handouts or worksheets, and Facebook to share links to educational videos. Not only is this confusing for your client but will drain your time when you have to consolidate all of that into their client record.

As you can see, without a streamlined system to share these resources, both you and your clients will suffer.

Here are some key questions to keep in mind when considering how to share resources with your clients:

  • Are the resources you share housed all in one organized place?
  • Can your clients easily come back to all of the valuable content you provide to them and feel they know where to find everything?
  • Are you sharing resources in a secure way that protects your client’s information?
  • Do you have the ability to share a large amount of information in a consolidated and streamlined fashion?
  • Can you share the same resources with specific groups of clients at one time?

all of this is housed in one secure platform. This allows you to take your client through the journey of working together in a completely organized fashion. From scheduling sessions with automated confirmation and reminder emails, to secure real-time communication via chat or voice memo, as well as sharing resources seamlessly. You can even conduct your telehealth sessions and run your online programs all in one system!

As you continue to take your health practice online, it’s important to think not only about what your needs are today, but what your future needs are to be able to run a successful virtual business. What tools and systems do you require, beyond telehealth sessions, to scale and grow?

Jen shared so many great tips and as you can see, streamlining your business will allow you to save time, help more people, and earn more money.. 

  You can start for free with up to 3 one-on-one clients. If you want to use the online coaching features, you’ll want to sign up for the paid version.

Here’s to your business success!

Kathleen

 

This post includes an affiliate link which means if you make a purchase, I may earn a commission. 

 

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How Streamlining Your Business Will Make You More Productive and More Profitable

How Streamlining Your Business Will Make You More Productive and More Profitable

by | Aug 17, 2017

Today’s post is from someone who is an expert at creating and implementing systems to streamline your business to make your life easier and much more productive.

If you feel bogged down with tasks, and you’re spinning your wheels when it comes to working with your clients, this post will be tremendously helpful for you.

Here’s Nathalie Garcia….

Being a Healthpreneur means wearing many hats, but I don’t have to tell you that.

You have two options – either charge more or get more efficient.

To grow a successful practice, you need to focus your time on creating content to engage clients and keep them coming back. The real question is; what systems do you have in place to manage these clients once you get them?

There are common areas where Health & Wellness Practitioners continuously spend too much time. Keeping yourself occupied with busy work means spending more time IN your business and not ON your business.

You have to be able to justify anything that takes you away from finding, engaging and coaching clients–that’s where you really need to be spending your time if you want make money.

I get it. I was there…I struggled.

 Yippee! I got my first client! It was exciting to help someone transform their health, but, man, it was time-consuming. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I wasn’t organized enough, or good enough…

Then client #2 came and client #3 and I was already starting to feel overwhelmed with the workload. What?! How was that possible? How was I ever going to be able to scale this business and make money?

I was shocked to see how much time I was wasting on repetitive work like scheduling appointments, reminders, sending forms and documents, deciphering handwriting and digging through papers.

I realized it wasn’t my fault; I was only one person and my business wasn’t set up in a way to help me succeed.

Without a system, you’re hurting your bottom line.

If you spend one hour coaching a client and then an additional hour (or two) on creating client recommendations and communication, it won’t take long to realize that your hourly rate is slashed in half…or worse! So you have two options– either charge more or get more efficient.

Charging more is only a short-term fix as you will always be capped at the number of clients you can take on without improving your efficiency.

 Technology can really help streamline your work to save you lots of time… if you find the right tool.  So many of our users say that they used to piece together multiple, single-function applications that just didn’t integrate with one another.

Another common complaint I’ve heard is that coaches were paying too much money for systems that just weren’t built for them.

As a Nutritionist, I struggled with both expensive tech tools and many single-function applications before co-founding Practice Better.  Practice Better is a cloud-based Client Management Platform that was created specifically to support you so you could be more efficient and profitable at any stage of your career. (You can start your own Practice Better account for FREE HERE)

Take a look around–all successful businesses have systems in place to ensure high standards of quality, consistency, and efficiency.  Your business requires the same if you plan to grow.

Are you making some of these common mistakes?

There are many places that Healthpreneurs spend too much time. Booking and re-booking clients, sending and collecting forms, and digging through papers & files are just the tip of the iceberg.

#1 Wasting time booking clients?

How much time does it take really take to book a session with a potential client? Sometimes it may take up to four emails to decide on a date and time. Don’t forget the email reminders before appointments and another sequence of emails if they need to reschedule!

This is your client’s first impression of what working with you will be like. Sure, maybe you’re very kind in the emails or funny, but will EVERYTHING take this long, they may wonder?

Clients may already be on the fence about seeing someone to help them address their health concerns. Don’t give them another opportunity to back out!

These emails, quite frankly, are a waste of your valuable time. Unless you’re in a large clinic or willing to put down extra cash on an assistant, you are not using your time to maximize your profits.

Thirty minutes of emailing back and forth over the course of days or playing phone tag simply reduces your hourly rate. Now multiple this 30 minutes by 10 clients.

That’s hours that you’re not using to create content, engage your audience and build your brand and business.

Using a tool like Practice Better to streamline your booking process allows you to setup your availability and services so clients can book from their client portal or from your website.

Email reminders for upcoming sessions are sent automatically because you have other things to do.

If you don’t want to automate this process, you can still improve your email efficiency by creating templates.

This will save you the time of having to recraft an email that basically says the same thing over and over again. Take the time to plan out what these emails will

include so you can get more information in one email to reduce the back and forth.

Information you can include in your template:

  • A bit about yourself and what you do.
  • A choice of two services offered. Include a short write-up about the benefits of each service, their duration and price.
  • Options of how sessions can be conducted. E.g. online or in person @ address.
  • 2 or 3 time slots you’re available.
  • If they’re not available during that time, what times and days work best for them.

Follow-up emails can include:

  • Directions to location where session will take place
  • Instructions to complete forms and waivers

Set up a system that makes it easy for clients to book and rebook without thinking twice. This is important for you, but let’s get real– our clients’ time is just as important.

#2 Wasting time sending and collecting forms?

Sharing documents and forms is a key part of coaching health and wellness clients. Completing forms is anything but fun for clients, but, of course, we know they’re important.

Most coaches send these forms over email to clients who then have to print, complete, scan, upload and submit.

Most coaches send these forms over email to clients who then have to print, complete, scan, upload and submit.

Completing forms in-person forces clients to fill out forms under a time constraint, in one go, and often without all the information on hand.

You, the coach, are then stuck having to print and store lengthy forms.

Form-building applications allow clients to complete their forms online.

Oh but wait… many of these applications don’t actually allow clients to sign their forms. Hmm… you’ll need an app for that too.

Practice Better lets you send forms straight to a client’s email address and client portal so that forms may be completed 100% online. And they can even sign!

You’ll be notified once forms are completed and you can access completed forms from anywhere you have internet. Streamline and save yourself some time trying to decipher what your client has written!

#3 Wasting time digging through emails & documents?

“Where did that paper go?” “When was it that we discussed…?” “Ahhh, that file is at the clinic/at home/not here!” As much as you try to keep yourself organized, it’s near impossible to be truly efficient if you’re managing files from multiple locations or using multiple methods.

Streamlining your practice using a system like Practice Better means that you’ll always know where to find what you’re looking for. Your session notes, forms and professional recommendations, you’ll never lose anything again.

All these documents are time-stamped and organized in chronological order for both you and your clients.

That’s why this is so important. Saving time is saving money. If you’re spending 15 minutes looking through your computer’s hard drive or through a stack of papers with torn edges, your hourly rate is going down, down, down.

Forget what happens to your rate if you have to physically go to another location just to access your records.

Streamline your practice and use your extra time and money building your business, spending time with your family, or however you want!

Practice Better offers a FREE account option where you can coach up to 3 clients at no charge!

Nathalie Garcia is a Holistic Nutritionist and Co-Founder of Practice Better, an online Client Management Platform designed specifically for Health & Wellness Practitioners. Nathalie loves that through Practice Better she can now support other practitioners to help transform the health of so many more!

You can start your own Practice Better account for FREE HERE

 

Note: This post includes affiliate links which means I may receive a commission if you use the paid program level. I only recommend tools and services I believe in, but do your own research to determine if this is the right resource for you.