Want to know how to become an executive coach?
You’re in the right place. Today, you’ll learn how to start an executive coaching business that’s massively abundant and profitable—not just financially, but also personally.
So that you can get results like this:
Ready to learn more? Read on!
Quick overview:
- As an executive coach, you help managers, executives, and CEOs become better leaders and improving their organizations
- You don’t need a certification to qualify as an executive coach, but many organizations might require one of executive coaches.
- You can get your first paying clients by tapping into your network or building relationships online (for example, on LinkedIn).
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What is executive coaching?
Executive coaching is coaching provided to senior managers, executives, and CEOs of an organization. You as the coach offer support and help your clients become better leaders by understanding their strengths and weaknesses, clarifying their goals, and taking steps to reach their goals.
Executive coaches tend to have years of experience, often as executives themselves.
For example, my student Carol is an executive coach who uses her 30+ years of experience as an attorney, executive leader, associate professor and dean, and social scientist, to help organizations and leaders unlock their innovation potential.
Another famous example of an executive coach is Bill Campbell, who coached CEOs from Apple’s Steve Jobs to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. For instance, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, says that Campbell helped them grow past the trillion-dollar mark and that: “All of our interviews indicated that everyone agrees they would not have been nearly as successful without that coaching.”
Ultimately, 61% of coaching clients say that coaching has helped them improve their business management skills. Another study shows that executive coaching can have a 788% ROI thanks to improvements in areas such as productivity and employee satisfaction.
The average ROI of executive coaching can be almost 6x the cost of coaching. It can also help female leaders improve in areas such as performance, well-being, self-awareness, leadership, and relationships.
75% of coaching students say that the value of coaching is considerably or far greater than the money and time they’ve invested.
Businesses need executive coaching, too. For example, employee retention and overall sales increase due to higher employee engagement–a few coaching benefits executive coaches can help organizations achieve.
And an executive coaching business is an excellent business model for those who want more freedom and flexibility, AKA a Freedom Business that is all about supporting your life and not the other way around. A coaching business can help you replace your salary (and more) and be in charge of your own time.
But what do executive coaches do? That’s what we’ll look at next.
What does an executive coach do?
What does a leadership coach do? As an executive coach, you help your clients improve their:
- Communication skills
- Work relationships
- Confidence
- Decision-making abilities
- Overcome challenges
You might also act as a sounding board for ideas and offer accountability.
You can either offer one-on-one coaching or group coaching (but if you’re new to coaching, start with private coaching). Down the line, you can offer online courses to scale your business, as well as hire other coaches to help build your business.
Your coaching can be online or face-to-face. Online coaching is getting increasingly popular and offers the most flexibility. Plus, you reach a far bigger number of people than if you offer your services locally.
What skills do you need as an executive coach?
As an executive coach, you need the right experience. This often means you’ve honed specific skills, including:
- Being interested in helping people develop themselves
- Strong communication skills
- Being emotionally intelligent
- Having a thorough understanding of business strategies and operations
But how does executive coaching differ from leadership coaching, mentoring, or consulting? Let’s take a look.
What is the difference between an executive coach and a leadership coach, consultant, and mentor?
Executive coaching and leadership coaching are very similar. However, there are subtle differences.
Leadership coaching focuses on leadership development.
Executive coaches, again, can support top-level executives to achieve strategic goals. The focus is less on just improving as a leader.
In terms of consulting, “traditional” coaching is more about helping clients find the answer for themselves. Consultants focus on solving a specific problem; they don’t help people develop themselves.
However, I personally subscribe to “coach-sulting” as my coaching philosophy. This approach combines coaching and consulting so that you both help people develop themselves and build the tools they need to tackle problems on their own, while you also help them achieve results faster.
Finally, what’s the difference between executive coaching and mentoring? Traditionally, mentors share their experience, while coaches focus on helping clients find their own answers.
Again, I believe in a mix of both approaches. You can be a great coach and mentor – and ultimately, help your clients get the best results.
How do you qualify as an executive coach?
Executive coaching requires a solid background as a leader who has been where your clients are now. If you don’t have that background (yet), you can start as a career coach and work your way to executive coaching.
Career coaching means that you coach employees on goal setting, skill development, and other professional skills. But the difference is that career coaches don’t focus on leadership and so you don’t need the same background as an executive.
If you want to learn more about career coaching, read my guide on how to become a career coach here.
What’s more, the requirements for you as an executive coach are likely higher than for other types of coaching. Many higher-level organizations might require well-recognized executive coaching certifications.
Let’s take a look at them next.
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6-Figure Coaching Business so you can achieve more freedom!
What are the best executive coaching certifications and courses?
As an executive coach, you don’t necessarily need a coaching certification. There are niches where coaching certifications are needed, but those are typically in health-related niches. Plus, some clients might require you to have a certification.
Ultimately, your success as a coach is based on the results you help your clients get. If you build a great reputation thanks to all the results your clients achieve after working with you, certifications and courses don’t matter that much.
But the International Coaching Federation (ICF) reports that 80% of leadership, executive, and business coaches say a certification is important to their clients. Many organizations only hire coaches with those certifications.
Coaching programs are unregulated, though. When you look for a certification program, focus on those that are accredited by a credible organization like the ICF or offered by a reputable university.
With that, here are some of the top institutions in the world that offer executive coaching training:
INSEAD Coaching Certificate
The INSEAD coaching certificate is a program for executive coaches who want to improve their leadership and executive coaching skills. You’ll improve your coaching effectiveness to coach individuals or groups by developing your personal, professional, and coaching skills.
Duration: 11.5 days (3 modules)
Price: €22,650 ($25,000)
Brown University Leadership and Performance Coaching Certification
This certification helps you develop your leadership potential, improve employee engagement and development, and business performance. The Leadership and Performance Coaching program is ICF-accredited.
Duration: 8 months
Price: $10,495 for the online program ($11,495 for the hybrid program)
CaPP Institute Certified Personal and Executive Coach Program
If you want a program that also integrates life coaching, the CaPP Institute program offers just that. You’ll also learn the basics of building a coaching business, from creating a coaching offer to marketing your coaching services. The program is accredited by the ICF.
Duration: 6 months
Price: $3,495
How do you become an executive coach?
How do you start building your executive coaching business? Here’s what you need to know about starting your coaching business from scratch.
Find a niche
The first thing you need is a coaching niche.
In other words, who do you help and how?
After all, branding yourself as an “executive coach” is far too broad.
Instead, think through what you help people with.
For example, do you offer coaching for C-suite executives? For women leaders?
Do you help organizations improve their culture? Operations?
It all goes back to your experience and what you’re an expert on.
Set up your coaching business
Your executive coaching services are fairly easy to set up. You first need a coaching agreement and, eventually, a coaching business structure.
While you don’t need to set up a business before you have paying clients, you also shouldn’t overthink your business structure.
Lisa Fraley, a legal coach, helps coaches set up their businesses in the right way. Her first package helps you set up a coaching contract template and the second one is a business starting pack with all the essentials for your business.
Offer a package
Apart from a coaching agreement, you also need a coaching package. If you’re taking on your first clients, start with a three-month package. This timeframe is long enough for them to get results and short enough so that it’s easy to say yes.
And remember to make your coaching package results-focused. That’s what people truly care about, rather than any features you might offer (the number of coaching calls, supplementary material, and so on).
To create a results-focused coaching program, think about the ultimate goal you help your students get. That’s the goal you should build your coaching program around.
Plus, figure out WHO you want to sell to. Be very specific and exclusively focus on one ideal client, at least until you’ve passed multiple six figures, if not more, in annual revenue.
When you get this piece right, you no longer have to spend time explaining the “value” of your price, or convincing your ideal clients why it’s smart to invest in themselves via your offer.
If you want to learn more about how to quickly set up your business, take a look at this short video:
Price your package
Executive coaching can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 and more. It all depends on who you’re coaching. For instance, if you coach managers, you wouldn’t charge as much as if you’re coaching a CEO of a multi-billion dollar business.
Obviously, the experience you need for coaching high-level CEOs versus managers is very different. And you might work your way up from first coaching lower-level executives and ultimately, working with CEOs.
Either way, I always recommend my students to start with a three-month $1,500 package unless they already have coaching experience. Once you have a few clients and testimonials, you can increase your rates.
When you start at a relatively low rate, you give yourself space to improve your coaching skills (this applies to you if you haven’t coached before). Your clients get a good deal and so it’s a win-win situation.
Get clients
To start your business, you need your first paying clients. But how do you get them?
There are a few ways in which you can market your coaching services. Here they are:
#1: Your network
First, your network. Your network is an excellent place to start when you’re first marketing your services.
For instance, I sold my first coaching packages thanks to my network. I reached out to people I knew who had previously asked me for advice on the things I wanted to coach on and got my first few clients.
What’s more, people in your network might know other people who need your services and refer them to you.
#2: LinkedIn
The second strategy is LinkedIn. As a professional social media platform, LinkedIn is perfect for your services. By publishing posts and connecting with other users, you build connections on the platform.
For instance, that’s how my student Emily Liou grew her career coaching business.
Obviously, you need to be mindful of how you use LinkedIn to make this strategy work.
When I first started my business, I used Facebook groups to connect with potential customers.
I went in with the mindset, “How can I offer as much value as possible?” rather than “How can I sell as much as possible?”
I offered my expertise for free, helped people by answering their questions, and wrote posts that people could relate to and found entertaining. As a result, I built relationships and soon more and more people started signing up for my sales calls.
#3: Podcasts and guest posts
The final strategy is to get interviewed on podcasts and guest posts. These are some of the most effective strategies out there because you get in front of an engaged audience. I’ve used both of these strategies to get clients; in fact, people still buy my products years after I’ve published a guest post or been on a podcast.
Those are the three top ways to get your first coaching clients. By using these strategies consistently, you’ll quickly start selling your first coaching packages.
And if you want to know how to get those dream clients who love working with you, watch this short video I put together:
Market your business
Once you have a few clients in your business, the next step is to build out more systematized marketing channels.
You might…
- Create content on social media. Continue posting on a platform like LinkedIn and start conversations with people you meet there.
- Use paid ads. Get in front of your audience by paying for ads on social media or Google. Start with a different strategy, though – learning how to use paid ads takes time.
- Use SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you rank your website on Google and other search engines. However, like paid ads, this is a more advanced marketing strategy.
But how do you ultimately scale your coaching business? Here’s what you need to know.
Scale your business
Finally, how do you take your executive coaching business from a steady six figures to multiple six figures and more?
You need to scale your coaching business. There are a few ways in which you can grow your business:
Group programs
First, we have group programs. When you run a group program, you coach a group of people rather than one person at a time. You reach more people and can scale your coaching.
This type of coaching program is beneficial for coachees, too; they learn from other group coaching students and get access to you for a lower rate than your one-on-one program.
Online courses
You can also use online courses to scale. Online courses are essentially your coaching offers in an e-learning format. Courses offer the most flexibility because you create them once and don’t have to actively put in more of your time.
However, you should have coached at least a few people before you start selling courses. That way, you can simply take your coaching methodology and turn it into a course.
Team of coaches
Last, you can train and hire coaches who coach your students so that you don’t have to put in your personal time. You continue selling your programs but your hired coaches take care of the actual coaching.
The alternative you use to scale depends on your goals and the type of business you want to build. Typically, my students start with one-on-one coaching, then move on to group coaching, and ultimately, create an online course.
Get the Ultimate Guide
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6-Figure Coaching Business so you can achieve more freedom!
How do you become a great executive coach?
We briefly talked about coach-sulting as a coaching style.
This coaching style helps your clients get results.
And a great way to do so is to break down the ultimate goal of your coaching program into monthly sub-goals.
For instance, if you help executives improve their leadership style (with defined goals in terms of what good leadership means for your student), you could organize your program like this:
Month 1 – Communication
The first month is all about helping your client improve their communication style. Maybe you have them do different exercises, journal, and in other ways work on their communication skills.
Month 2 – Goal setting
In this fictional example, your client might have defined goal setting as an important leadership trait for them. Here, you might have them nail down their goal-setting skills, be it with the help of OKRs or other goal-setting methodologies.
Month 3 – Employee satisfaction
As the last sub-goal, you might work specifically on improving employee satisfaction and bringing your program together. See how this is much more results-based than if you don’t organize your program into these goals?
In this short video, you learn even more about becoming a great coach:
What is the average executive coach salary?
According to the International Coaching Federation, the average annual salary for coaches is $67,800. The average hourly rate is $272. However, that’s just the average, and you can make more or less compared to this figure.
Plus, executive coaching is a high-end service, so once you’ve established yourself as a coach, you could easily make six figures, multiple six figures, or even seven figures.
For example, Jacquelynn, the student here above, is a life coach for professionals. Not an industry that immediately comes to mind when you think of selling a $5,000 package. As a new coach, to boot. (AKA no matter what industry you’re in, you can build a great business.)
What’s more, she actually initially struggled to even sell a $1,500 package.
She didn’t give up though. Jacquelynn continued following my proven steps to building her business, created a quick intensive offer, and…here we are.
And Carol, the executive coach we talked about before, says:
“We’re going to position quarter two for another $200K or $250K. And there’s still stuff in the hopper that’s waiting to roll in!
I have 3 people on my team supporting me, which is SO freeing. Yesterday I was just chilling, and my business was covered by these women who were working their magic behind the scenes. Which was so freeing and amazing.”
As you can see, creating a Freedom Business that makes great money is totally possible.
How long does it take to become an executive coach?
You can start your executive coaching business right away (assuming you have the right experience). However, if you want to get certified, certification processes usually take at least a few months.
That’s why a hybrid approach is a great solution. Start selling your coaching services right now, develop your coaching skills, and educate yourself further while you build your business.
But how long does it take to get your first few clients?
Getting your first paying client can happen fast or take a few months. It all depends on how fast you figure out your offer and how fast you start selling it. Some of my students start selling their offers right away and some want to take it slower.
Are executive coaches in demand?
Yes, executive coaches are in demand.
For instance, 1.5 million online searches are made every month by people and companies who want to find executive coaches, life coaches, and business coaches. Coaching is also a billion-dollar industry. In 2023, the revenue was estimated to be $4.564 billion.
70% of organizations say that they offer some type of leadership coaching. Over 40% of them say that they increase their spending on leadership coaching. Coaching is increasingly seen as an important tool to achieve leadership success and improve the bottom line.
Get the Ultimate Guide
for building a
6-Figure Coaching Business so you can achieve more freedom!
Over to you!
There you have it! Now you know how to become an executive coach.
Executive coaching can be incredibly fulfilling and challenging. But at the same time, building a business can be incredibly overwhelming.
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