What is One-on-One Coaching and How to Get Started

If you are thinking about starting your own online coaching business, you are probably familiar with the concept of one-on-one coaching.

There are many different types of coaching products you can sell online: 1-on-1 coaching, group coaching, masterminds, online courses, membership sites, digital products and so on.

In today's article, we will focus on one-on-one coaching and learn what it is, its benefits, and how to get started as an online coach.

What is One-on-One Coaching?

One-on-one coaching helps clients overcome their problems, achieve their goals, and improve their performance.

The essence of one-on-one coaching revolves around sharing experiences and knowledge about specific topics, helping clients overcome their issues, and creating a plan structured to assist them to reach a specific result.

With this kind of coaching service, the coach is helping one client at a time. As the coach, you are offering your time and expertise in exchange for money, and you are focusing on your client's unique and specific needs.

1-on-1 coaching often happens in the form of coaching sessions, live calls, meetings and a highly personalized course of action.

Benefits of Individual Coaching

One-on-one coaching is the most popular coaching service out there, and for good reasons! There are many benefits to this type of coaching, let's review them below.

High Earning Potential

One-on-One coaching involves coaches giving a large percentage of their time and energy to each individual client. So naturally, this business is extremely profitable for the coaches. Because of its personalized and individual approach, one-on-one coaching can be incredibly lucrative as coaches can charge a high fee per client, and generally only work with a small handful of clients at a time.

Provides Great Value

Offering advice and helping people achieve their goals can give tremendous value to your clients and to you. With one-on-one coaching, you are not only offering advice: you are offering highly personalized suggestions tailored to your client's individual situation.

The insights your coaching clients will receive are generally more actionable and personal compared to an online course or other indirect types of teachings, even group coaching programs.

Fulfilling Work

Most coaches feel extremely fulfilled from their work, as they help people transform their lives. If you enjoy talking to people, providing advice and helping others, online coaching is for you. Especially when it comes to one-on-one coaching, you get to build a rapport with your clients, watch them grow and achieve their goals thanks to your work.

Great Learning Potential

Offering one on one coaching can help you gain experience in your niche and better learn how to help your clients. A single coaching client will offer you huge insights into your ideal target customer, and what you learn from the session will help you better assist other clients in the future and potentially differentiate your business model.

Cons of 1-on-1 Coaching

Like with any business, there are downsides to online coaching as well. Especially when it comes to one on one coaching, as the benefits are so high, there are a few cons too. Let's see them now:

Not Scalable

1 on 1 coaching does not offer any opportunity to create a leveraged income stream.

You might be familiar with the term "passive income", where you can create recurring revenue by working a limited amount of time. Similarly, leveraged income includes earnings that are not directly tied to your time.

With one-on-one coaching, you are helping one client at a time, so it will be much harder to scale your business once you reach the capacity of how many clients you can handle without reducing the quality of your service.

Harder to Attract New Clients

Even though with online coaching you are offering a high value, the expensive fees and longer sales process to build the trust in order to charge those high fees can make it harder for you to attract new one-on-one coaching clients.

Having other coaching products on your value ladder can help you solve these two issues. If you are getting started and you are completely new at coaching or online business, it is recommended to start with a lower product offering and build an audience before you launch your online coaching business.

We wrote an article about ways to attract new coaching clients easily: 6 Actionable Tips to Attract Your First Coaching Clients

How to Run a 1-on-1 Coaching Session

Now that you learned the basics about online coaching, let's see how to actually structure a one-on-one session with a client.

Assuming you are offering virtual online coaching sessions, you will need to make sure that your technology is working correctly. Do a test run of the meeting software you are going to use for your call, and check your internet connection before the start.

It is good practice to inform your client beforehand about the tool you will be using and ask them to choose a quiet place in their home for the session.

Online coaching requires a high amount of focus and concentration from both you and your client, so finding a spot free from distractions and interruptions is ideal.

Once you have set up your tech, start preparing for your session by outlining the goals you and your clients wish to achieve by the end of the call. For the first coaching session, the goal can simply be to get to know each other on a human level and understand where your client wants to go and which issues they want to overcome in order to reach a result.

We are big fans of asking clients "The Dan Sullivan Question". Here's a link to Dan Sullivan's book on Amazon if you want to learn about it in detail. (This is an affiliate link, but we only recommend it because we purchased this ourselves and have used this question in our own coaching.)

Here's the question itself:

"If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were looking back over those three years, what has to have happened in your life, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?"

Dan Sullivan

Depending on the goals you set for each call, you will run the session in a different way. You can now start to draft possible questions you want to ask your client that will help you reach the set goal.

The "right" questions will always vary depending on your client's needs and goals, but there are some common questions that generally work best for online coaching. Here is a guide of great coaching questions to ask depending on your situation.

The first coaching session is a very important one that will define the tone of your work with that client and will give you insights into their goals, issues and possible solutions. From this introductory coaching session, you will understand what is needed in order to solve your client's problems: how many sessions you will need, how long will the sessions be and how frequent, what kind of approach the client needs and so on.

Get Started With 1-on-1 Coaching

To get started with one-on-one coaching, the first thing you need is an online presence.

Assuming that you have already found your ideal niche and the topic of your coaching, you can start by creating a website and generating content to promote your business.

If you are looking for the perfect platform to sell coaching programs, Heights Platform is the ideal choice for you.

With Heights Platform you can build a website for your coaching business, personalize the branding and style of your site and create coaching programs, sell digital products, online courses and membership sites. You can also create a blog for your learning platform to promote your business, create an affiliate program and much more.

Heights Platform offers all online coaches need to build the ultimate learning platform to reach their business goals.