What Metrics Should You Track as a Life Coach?
The metrics you track as a coach and KPIs that you follow in your career can inform your decisions and help you build a flourishing coaching business.
As a Life Coach, What Should You Measure for Success?
The world of life coaching is deeply personal and rooted in human interaction. A coach and a client come together to dream big, select some goals and co-create an action plan for the client to get there – with accountability and guidance from their coach.
So, you might wonder, why would metrics and numbers have a place here?
So much of life is a numbers game – for example, if you only ever have one coaching conversation and something doesn’t go the way you planned, you might be shaken up about it. But, with experience comes mastery, and by “getting your reps in” and having many conversations, you begin to gain the skills, wisdom and ability to coach effectively.
In the same vein – what isn’t measured can’t be improved on. As a life coach offering a service to the world, you’re also a business owner that’s been hired to deliver a service! Keeping track of a few key measurements can help you understand if what you’re doing is producing the end result you’re looking for.
Why Metrics Matter in Life Coaching
- Validation: Metrics can offer validation that you’re making progress as a coach. Tangible numbers or clear milestones can be incredibly motivating.
- Refinement: By tracking certain metrics, coaches can see what techniques or strategies are most effective and which areas might need a different approach.
- Accountability: As a coach, you’ll have a clearer picture of your journey, leading to better accountability.
Which Metrics Should Life Coaches Track?
While not everything can be boiled down to ones and zeros, selecting a few of the following metrics to track on a weekly or monthly basis can help you get some insight into your business.
Ultimately what you track should be the metrics that are most important to you, or give you the most insight into what’s working and what isn’t as you grow your coaching business! Here are some ideas to get you started.
What to Track on the Coaching Side?
Goal Setting Frameworks
SMART Goals: A framework ensuring goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This method provides clarity, precision, and a timeline for goal attainment.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): A system where you set an Objective (the goal) and measure it using 3-5 Key Results. This is effective because it gives a broader objective with specific measurable outcomes.
Progress Journals
Daily or weekly journals where clients document their activities, challenges, and achievements. This method allows for reflection, tracking of small milestones, and beginning to gain some clarity around patterns or roadblocks.
Digital Goal-Tracking Platforms
There are numerous coaching platforms out there that can do everything from managing finances to creating custom programs for your clients. Here are a few to explore and consider how they might streamline your business.
Allows coaches to define and track actions, milestones, and metrics. Provides the ability to schedule sessions, manage billing, and send out reminders. The automated reporting lets coaches see client progress over time, ensuring that feedback is data-driven.
Satori
Offers booking automation, client management, and invoicing in one platform. Includes a client dashboard for goal setting and progress tracking. Reduces administrative tasks, giving coaches more time to focus on actual coaching. The client dashboard gives an extra boost for keeping the client engaged.
Nudge Coach
A client relationship platform that integrates with wearable tech to track health metrics. It also offers a mobile platform for easier client communication. For health and wellness coaches, this can help inform coaching decisions using real-time data from wearables.
NOTE: Not every coach needs a tool like these! Use them for inspiration for your own practice, but make sure you have enough clients to know that the investment is worth it before diving in. Most new coaches manage their coaching business using free tools at first!
Regular Check-ins or Review Sessions
Dedicated sessions, apart from the usual coaching sessions, to review and discuss progress. These of course are a huge benefit because of the direct feedback, and opportunity to recalibrate goals or methods.
What to Track on the Business Side?
Client Satisfaction
Keeping track of how satisfied your clients are ensures you're meeting or exceeding client expectations and allows you to make adjustments as needed moving forward.
Post-Session Surveys: After each coaching session, you might like to provide clients with a brief survey. This way you can get immediate feedback – allowing you to gauge how impactful individual sessions are and adjust your techniques accordingly.
Periodic Feedback Forms: Longer, more detailed surveys can be given quarterly or twice a year. These surveys can give more in-depth insights to help you craft your long term strategy.
Tools for Surveys and Feedback: Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Typeform.
Testimonials and Reviews: Encourage satisfied clients to leave testimonials or reviews. This quickly builds credibility, and provides social proof for potential new clients. Collect reviews via email, and place them on your website and if it makes sense – your social media platforms. Always check with clients before posting!
Want some tips on how to collect killer reviews? Check out the blog post: The Power of Client Testimonials (And How to Get Them!)
Client Retention Rate
This metric directly affects your bottom line. The longer clients stay, the more stable your income. You can calculate this by taking the number of clients at the end of a certain period minus new clients acquired, divided by the number of clients at the start of that period. Monitor frequency of repeat sessions and packages purchased – see what your “bestsellers” are and how you can expand on your success.
Referral Rate
Referrals are often one of the strongest sources of new clients for a coach. Organic referrals, coming from your existing client, often convert better than leads from paid advertising. Make sure you have a system in place to ask every new client how they heard about you, and offer referral incentives or programs to your existing clients to encourage word-of-mouth recommendations.
Financial Metrics
Revenue:
This indicates the total income before any expenses. This is often an exciting number! The sum of all payments received from clients, workshops, or any other income sources. But beware your pesky expenses that can quickly reduce the impact of your revenue.
Expenses:
Knowing your expenses helps you understand where your money goes and identifies potential areas to cut costs. Categorize and record all business-related expenditures, such as platform subscriptions, advertising, office rent, or equipment. You should know accurately how much it costs you to work as a coach so you can set your prices and create new products accordingly.
Profit Margins:
This demonstrates the profitability of your business and can be a bit deceptive! Subtract total expenses from total revenue. For a more nuanced view, calculate margins for individual services or offerings. Once you get more advanced, you’ll want to create products or services with a “high margin” – more profitable for you to run!
Cash Flow:
This will ensure you have enough liquidity to meet ongoing operational costs. Keep a close eye on incoming and outgoing cash, paying attention to payment cycles and any outstanding invoices.
Marketing and Outreach Effectiveness
Marketing yourself as a coach can be intimidating at first, but remember that it’s a numbers game. Take a look at ways you can put yourself out there and set a goal for yourself. Some starter goals could be: outreach to 5 new potential customers per week, one community event per quarter, outreach to 5 possible event spaces to hold a workshop, etc. etc.
Lead Conversion Rate
A lead is someone who is potentially interested in hiring you as a coach. Keeping track of how many leads become clients can help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For your records, track the number of new clients divided by the number of leads contacted or reached.
Pro Tip: While every coach has a different standard for outreach, making people aware of your existence as a coach is
Website
Your website is often the first impression prospects have of your services. Make it easy for people to find you, see what services you offer and have a clear cut way for them to contact you.
If you’re web-savvy, use analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics) to monitor page views, average session duration, bounce rate, and other relevant metrics – but again, the best metric of all is whether people are reaching out to you!
Social Media Metrics:
Social platforms can be a valuable tool for engagement and attracting new clients, although not all coaches need or want to be on social media! If you are, you can keep an eye on metrics like followers count, engagement rate, post reach, and click-through rates. But all of these are only useful if you can correlate them to new paying clients so don’t get too bogged down.
Business Growth Rate:
These indicators can show you the long-term viability and scalability of your coaching business. This can take some time to see any meaningful information in the data, but you can begin by tracking the month-to-month or year-to-year increase in new clients. Also, keep a record of the expansion into new services, workshops, or offerings and how that impacts your bottom line.
More Resources:
5 Marketing Priorities to Boost Your Business Fast
16 Ways to Find Your First Paid Coaching Client
How to Get Your First Coaching Clients
13 Strategies for Building Your Coaching Business Offline
Incorporating metrics into your life coaching practice doesn’t diminish the human element, as you can see – it works right alongside and enhances it.
By putting together data with intuition and personal connection, coaches can give more to their clients and their business by relying on facts, not just feelings, to make decisions and become more effective. But remember, the intuition, empathy, and personal connection a coach brings to the table can't be quantified.
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