Top 8 Ways Business Coaching Can Help Freelancers

Last Updated: 

June 10, 2024

As a freelancer, you may feel like you're the only one who's trying to navigate the often-confusing waters of entrepreneurship. But that just isn't true! There are many other people out there who want to help support freelancers and make their journey easier. In fact, some of them even specialise in helping freelancers with their business goals! 

This is where a business coach comes in: they can help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals so that you can expand your client base and set yourself up for success.

Key Takeaways on Ways Business Coaching Helps Freelancers:

  • Gain Clarity on Your Business: Business coaching helps freelancers define attainable and realistic goals, providing direction and ensuring that every day counts toward reaching those objectives.
  • Create a Plan to Achieve Your Goals: A business coach assists in creating a realistic plan to achieve set goals, ensuring efforts are focused on tangible results.
  • Build Your Confidence: Business coaching aids in building confidence, helping freelancers overcome fear, procrastination, and providing clarity on goal achievement.
  • Objective Support and Guidance: Coaches act as objective sounding boards, offering unbiased guidance and support, helping freelancers make informed decisions.
  • Manage Overwhelm: Business coaching provides strategies to manage feelings of overwhelm, set deadlines, break tasks into smaller ones, and delegate when necessary.
  • Set Healthy Boundaries: Coaches emphasise the importance of setting boundaries between work and personal life, ensuring a balance and preventing burnout.
  • Learn Effective Communication Skills: Business coaching enhances communication skills, ensuring meaningful relationships with clients and team members.
  • Gain Feedback and Accountability: Coaches provide feedback and accountability, ensuring freelancers stay on track and make informed decisions.
  • Business Coaching for Freelancers: Business coaching offers tools and strategies tailored to freelancers, helping them achieve success in their careers.
  • Freelance Coaching Online: Online coaching offers flexibility and convenience, allowing freelancers to learn new skills and strategies from anywhere.
  • Expertise in Your Niche: While it's beneficial for a coach to have expertise in a freelancer's niche, it's not always necessary. The primary focus is on business aspects, and a good coach can provide valuable insights regardless of the niche.

Business coaching can be a valuable investment for freelancers, offering guidance, support, and tools to achieve success in their careers. Whether it's setting clear goals, managing overwhelm, or enhancing communication skills, a business coach can provide the necessary insights and strategies to thrive.

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1. Gain Clarity On Your Business

When you start a new business, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle of getting clients and making sales. But without a vision for where you want to go with your business (and how), you won’t be able to focus your efforts effectively. 

Business coaching can help you define your goals so that they are attainable and realistic, giving you more direction with which to run your company. 

You can also use this time as an opportunity to take inventory of all the aspects of running a successful business—things like defining what kind of clientele will appeal most strongly, ensuring that everything is properly organised and accounted for in terms of finances, or even setting aside time management skills so that every day counts toward reaching those goals!

2. Create A Plan To Achieve Your Goals

If you don’t set goals, you’ll never know what success looks like. But the most important part is actually setting the right ones—and that's where we come in. 

A business coach can help you create a realistic plan for how to achieve those goals, so that your efforts are focused on real results rather than just busy work. Here are some examples of objectives that might be useful for freelancers:

  • Increase revenue by 25% in 6 months
  • Complete every project within 2 weeks (or 1 week, or whatever)
  • Reduce client churn from 5% per month to 2% per month

3. Build Your Confidence

If you’re a freelancer, you know how hard it can be to find the confidence and motivation to keep going when things get tough. But as any successful entrepreneur will tell you, confidence is a skill that can be learned.

Here are just a few ways that business coaching can help build your confidence:

  • Confidence helps you overcome fear and procrastination by making sure that you do what needs doing whenever it needs doing—no excuses!
  • Confidence means knowing who you are and where you want to go with your life, which gives meaning to everything else in the day-to-day grind of running a business (or being freelance). Knowing that there’s something bigger out there than just this moment makes all those little annoyances less annoying.
  • Confidence also helps with setting goals and achieving them because it gives clarity on what exactly needs doing next; every step along the way feels more achievable when there is clear direction.

4. Get Objective Support And Guidance

Freelance Business Coach UK
Robin Waite - Freelance Business Coach UK

In addition to the upsides we've already discussed, business coaching can help freelancers in other ways. One of the most significant is that it provides an objective source of guidance and support. Often, when you're working on a project, it's easy to get stuck in your own headspace. 

You might find yourself second guessing your decisions and doubting yourself so much that your work suffers. A coach can help with this by acting as a sounding board for your ideas without judgement or bias.

When you're not in the right place mentally or emotionally and need someone who understands what you're going through but doesn't have an invested interest in knowing all the details of your situation? 

Well, that's another thing coaches are good at; they'll listen openly while giving advice based on their experience as an outsider looking in—but they won't pry too far into things they don't need to know yet (or maybe ever).

5. Manage Overwhelm, Procrastination And Perfectionism

If you’re a freelancer, you know the feeling well: You have so much to do and not enough time to do it. You also have a tendency to get overwhelmed by what feels like an insurmountable task. In fact, one of the most common reasons we procrastinate is because we feel overwhelmed by the size or scale of what we need to accomplish.

The good news? Business coaching can help you manage this feeling and move past it so that you can get things done in a timely manner—and return your attention back where it belongs (i.e., on your business). Here are some strategies:

  • Set deadlines for yourself
  • Break down big tasks into smaller ones
  • Delegate tasks where possible
  • Don't let yourself get overwhelmed by how many hours/days/weeks might go by before something gets done

6. Set Healthy Boundaries Between Work And Personal Life

When you're starting your own business, it's important to have boundaries between work and personal life. In fact, setting boundaries is one of the first steps that many successful freelancers make when they decide to go out on their own. But what exactly are boundaries?

A boundary is a rule or an expectation that helps you manage your time, energy, and resources in a way that keeps you focused on what matters most while preventing burnout. Boundaries can involve anything from how often you check email to how much time you spend working each day. The trick is finding what works best for YOU!

Once you've figured out how much time is right for YOU (and this may change over time), it's important to stick with it so that others know where your limits are when interacting with them: their behaviour will adjust accordingly if they respect these limits; furthermore, if someone tries telling me what I should do because "it's just good practice," then I politely tell them no thanks."

7. Learn Effective Communication Skills

Communication is the cornerstone of any business relationship. You can have the most detailed, eloquent contract in the world, but if your clients don't feel like they're being heard and your team members don't feel like their ideas are being considered, then everyone loses. Effective communication skills help you create meaningful relationships with others that can last for years to come.

How do you communicate effectively? Here are some tips:

  • Listen as much as possible—don't just wait for your turn to speak! Listen carefully when someone else is talking so you understand their point of view fully before responding. Then paraphrase back what they said so they know that you listened attentively (this also helps with reducing misunderstandings).
  • Be honest and transparent—your clients will appreciate it! Don't sugarcoat feedback or try to be diplomatic when giving criticism; just say what needs saying without beating around the bush too much (and definitely don't lie). Your honesty will make it easier for both sides to work through issues together; people always appreciate knowing where they stand even if there isn't a solution yet or change isn’t coming immediately because there’s still time left before something critical happens like an invoice goes unpaid due to late delivery beyond expectations because it takes longer than anticipated due to bad communication between both parties involved which caused delays along each step along this process…

8. Gain Feedback And Accountability To Reach Your Goals

No matter what you're trying to accomplish, there are certain things that can help you reach your goals. These include feedback and accountability.

Feedback is information about how well a person is doing something. It's often given when someone gives their opinion on the quality of a performance or product. Feedback also includes information about what went wrong, so that it can be fixed in future performances or products. For example: "I think this article could be better if you added more detail to section two."

Accountability means having to answer for what you've done or not done; being responsible for something based on the actions of others holding one accountable; usually used in a negative sense as "being held accountable". Accountability makes sure people take responsibility for their actions and do not shirk from answering for them if they fail at something important because they didn't do enough work beforehand (or at all).

Business Coaching Gives You Tools To Achieve Success In Your Freelance Career

Business Coaching for Freelancers
Robin Waite - Business Coaching for Freelancers

If you're a freelancer, business coaching can be one of the most valuable investments you make in your career. Business coaching gives you tools to achieve success in your freelance career.

It's important to define what business coaching is and what it isn't. Business coaching for businesses is not just about helping them "be better" at running their company, but also includes helping them reach their goals and create more value for themselves and their customers. This is exactly the kind of help that freelancers need as well! But instead of focusing on growing an existing business (which may or may not be possible), we focus on helping freelancers achieve success right now--through setting clear goals, getting unstuck when they come up against roadblocks or challenges along the way, developing new skills that will help them do better work every day...and so much more!

Business Coaching for Freelancers: Frequently Asked Questions

A freelance business coach helps you create and implement your long-term success plan by focusing on where you are today, how you got there and where you want to go next. You will learn how to build a solid foundation for your business that is based on a clear vision, goals and strategies for achieving them. A good coach will also help you get unstuck by helping guide the decision making process when it comes to making changes in the direction of your business or career.

A small business coach can be anyone who helps small businesses succeed (or even just get started) by providing counsel and advice on everything from market research, financial planning and forecasts, hiring/training employees (including yourself), marketing strategy development all the way down through implementation of sales campaigns using social media tools like Facebook advertising or Google AdWords.

This makes them especially valuable as they’re able to leverage their own experience in eCommerce online marketing while still being able to offer guidance explicitly tailored specifically toward each individual client based upon their unique needs & challenges when it comes down to having enough cash flow available at any given time throughout year long cycle known as “seasonality” which means things like inventory levels need adjusting accordingly depending upon how busy holiday seasons are going into 2023

So, if someone wants advice about finding reliable suppliers overseas who know what they're doing then this type would probably be best suited

What Does a Freelance Coach Do?

A freelance coach will help you to reach your goals by providing guidance and support. Coaches help you find solutions to problems, develop new skills, and set goals so you have a plan for achieving them. In more general terms, coaches help freelancers with any aspect of their business that they may need additional help with.

A coach can also be an accountability partner who keeps you on track by helping you make decisions about what needs to get done and when it needs to get done by. They can also give feedback on how well your plans are working out in practice so far as compared against the original vision for what success should look like for your project (or even just for today).

What is a Small Business Coach?

A small business coach can help you with a variety of things, including:

  • Setting goals and objectives. If you're still not sure what your long-term objectives are, working with a coach is an excellent way to get clarity on them. A coach will ask questions about what you want for your future, and help guide you toward creating good practices that will ensure those goals are met.
  • Creating a plan to achieve your goals. Regardless of the type of freelancer you are—writer, designer or web developer—coaches can help create plans for how best to market yourself through social media or other avenues like in-person networking or cold calling. They can also help develop systems which will allow clients/customers/clients access at any time without having to wait until business hours have opened up again (for example if they need something right away).

Is it Worth it to Pay for Coaching?

Because coaching is a one-on-one relationship, you get the time and attention of your coach. The coach can help you to:

  • make more money with your business
  • build a better business
  • understand what's working and what isn't in your business
  • get accountability and support from someone who has no other agenda besides helping you reach your goals (and who will tell you when something is stupid)

Coaching helps freelancers like us because we're running small businesses, which are inherently complex by nature. We need someone who understands our industry, but also knows how to break things down into bite-size chunks so we don't feel overwhelmed or discouraged by those complexities.

Can I get Freelance Coaching Online?

Yes, you can get freelance coaching online.

Online coaching is a great way to learn new skills and strategies for your business. You'll have the opportunity to get feedback from someone who knows what they're doing and accountability from someone who cares about your success. That's not all: because you can work on your projects from wherever you like, with flexible times, it's a lot easier to fit into your schedule than in-person coaching would be!

Do You Offer Free Business Coaching for Freelancers?

If you're a freelancer and you're looking for business coaching, be wary of any service that says it offers "free coaching." Business coaching isn't free. It costs money.

However, many business coaches offer a free consultation before asking for a commitment.

This is what we do, you can book a free coaching session here.

The cost of hiring a great business coach is far less than the lost revenue from not having access to the right tools and strategies that can help you grow your freelance business. And when you consider how much time, energy, and anxiety are involved with starting up a new venture—and keeping it going—that investment is well worth it!

Does a Freelance Coach Need to be an Expert in Your Niche?

While a coach may need to be an expert in your niche, they don't necessarily have to be.

If you're looking for someone who can help you with the business side of things, but don't have time or money to invest in Google Ads or PPC management (or even know what either are), that's okay! A coach should still be able to help with other aspects of your business like creating a marketing plan and setting goals. They may also be able to give feedback on how well you're doing at reaching those goals.

While it would definitely benefit you if your coach knows about what you do for work, it's not necessary. It's always better if they do because then they'll be able to understand their clients' needs better and provide more personalised advice based on their experiences—but if all else fails, just take comfort knowing that there are plenty of coaches out there who specialise in helping people overcome challenges despite having little knowledge about their businesses' niches.

Conclusion

There are many benefits to business coaching, but it's not for everyone. If you're looking for a way to stay motivated and productive as a freelancer, consider hiring a coach who can help you build a better business. A good coach will work with you on areas like time management, sales funnels and more so that your business runs smoothly from start-up until retirement!

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