How many customers per week can a coach have?

A question I am often asked by coaches who are starting their business or trying to scale it is:

How many customers can I have each week?
How do you know when I am reaching my upper limit?

You ask, I answer

Well, that’s an interesting question that requires a good answer.

The first thing I always suggest is to plan.

Once you have a plan, you are starting your journey to the achievement of your goals. If you skip this step, you will probably end up failing.

So, let’s see how to plan a week’s worth of coaching.

We will use a quite standard model of a working week: 8 hours a day per 5 days a week. This makes 40 hours free for your business activity.

Of course, every self-employed coach knows that working 40 hours is just a reference: I personally know coaches that work up to 60 hours and others who are satisfied with just 20 hours. But, for this model’s sake, we will use a standard 40 hours week.

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Now, running a coaching business usually requires more than coaching alone: you will need to do some customer acquisition, or marketing, you will be studying, learning, getting new skills or certifications, if you are online you will be also doing some social media related activity, as well as taking care of your web presence, including your website, your courses, your webinars and so on.

So, let’s make some proper planning:

5 hours / week social media & online presence
10 hours / week marketing & customer acquisition
5 – 10 hours /week learning, studying, being certified

All these activities sum up to 20/25 hours, so we roughly have 15/20 hours per week we can dedicate to proper coaching.

You need to tailor your pricing according to this factor, and not on a 40 hours coaching week, as you will not have all the hours available for your preferred activity.

Personally, I advocate a different schedule, but I am aware it’s not easy: it’s a schedule designed for growth and scaling and is based on these two key assumptions:

• delegate the activities that are not directly bringing you money: marketing is not bringing you money directly, but through a series of other time-consuming activities
• concentrate on doing what you do best: coaching

In this second schedule, you will free 15 hours more, coming from having delegated your customer acquisition process, the marketing, and the online activities to someone who you can pay on a percentage base, meaning that you pay for what you get instead of paying upfront.

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In a 40 hours week, you now have 30 to 35 hours directly available for coaching, letting you grow quicker. If you adopt a coaching method where you have 45 minutes sessions, you could end by doing up to 6 coaching sessions per day, in person or online.

You also have, in case of need, the chance to use the 15 hours saved from delegating in other tasks like:

• writing a book
• expand your coaching to other niches
• helping other coaches
• setting up an online course

I hope this brief scheduling proposal may help you succeed in you coaching. If you want to learn more about planning, scheduling, or how to run your (coaching) business, contact me today!