How to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant

Want to know how to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant?

For many coaches and consultants being fully booked is the dream. It is a dream that many never achieve and there are those who achieve it momentarily but struggle to stay fully booked. That doesn’t have to be you though. Keep on reading to find out how to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant.

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What does being ‘fully booked’ mean?

Before I explain how to stay fully booked, I want to quickly talk about the idea of being ‘fully booked’.

 

Fully booked simply means that all of your spaces have been filled. It is likely that you’ve come across a hotel that is fully booked (aka there are no rooms available) and a plane that is fully booked (aka there are are no seats available).

 

As a coach or consultant, it is slightly different. You aren’t limited by a physical number of rooms or seats. However, the principle still applies. There is a point when you can’t take on any more clients.

 

Sometimes when I talk to business owners about being fully booked, they are hesitant. They think to be fully booked they need to be working 24/7. Now whilst technically, you can work for every hour you are awake that isn’t what I’m suggesting at all. Actually, as a service-based business owner, you get to decide exactly how many clients you can work with at once. Then when you hit that number of clients you are fully booked.

 

Working out what fully booked looks like in your coaching or consulting business

 

As a coach or consultant, there is more to running your business than just working with clients. Therefore, you need to allocate time for that. In addition to sessions with clients, you might need time for emails, marketing, finances, admin and, of course, working on your business. (If you aren’t familiar with the concept of working on your business you can find out what working on your business means in 9 ways to work on your business not in your business ).

 

Therefore, to work out what fully booked looks like in your business you need to do 3 things.

 

Step 1. Work out how many hours you can dedicate to working with clients on a weekly or monthly basis

Step 2. Calculate how many clients that means you can work with

Step 3. Ensure that if you worked with the maximum number of clients you calculated in step 2 you are able to reach your financial target

 

 

An example of what fully booked could look like in a coaching business

Amy is a financial coach for female entrepreneurs. She works 4 days a week in her business for 6 hours a day. This means her total working hours are 24 hours per week.

She splits her time as follows:

12 hours for client calls
6 hours for client prep/follow up
2 hours for email
2 hours for marketing
2 hours for finances and other admin

Her clients sign up for 8 weeks of coaching and will receive a 50-minute call on a weekly basis.

This means she can take 12 clients at a time.

Her 8-week coaching package costs £1,000.

12 clients = £12,000

Based on the package lasting 8 weeks she can take on a new client to fulfil the space of an existing client every 2 months. So for ease imagine she takes on clients all at the same time

January = £12,0000
March = £12,0000
May = £12,000
July = £12,000
September = £12,000
November = £12,000

Across the year Amy can work with 72 clients.

If she filled all those spaces, she’d generate £72,000 in revenue.

Her financial target for the year is £65,000 so this model works. In fact, she could work with 11 clients at a time and still generate £66,000 (still meeting her financial target.

 

This is just an example, but what I want to emphasis is you get to decide what fully booked looks like in your business. All you need to do is ensure that based on the hours you want to work your pricing will still allow you to fit your financial targets.

If you do the calculations and your version of fully booked doesn’t allow you to reach your financial goal, then you have three options. Firstly, you can take on more clients. Secondly, you can raise your prices. Thirdly, you can change your financial goal. Only you can decide what is right for your business, but do not have your business set up in a way that being fully booked doesn’t allow you to reach your financial goals.

 

Have you finished that section and thought my pricing isn’t right and I don’t know what to do? If so, book a call with me. I absolutely love numbers and am passionate about helping small business owners set the right prices to ensure they can achieve their financial goals and have a successful business (based on your version of success).

Book a free discovery call with me today.

 

 

At this point, you should be clear on what fully booked looks like for your business. Now it is time to find out how to stay fully booked.

 

How to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant

1. Never stop marketing your business

One of the biggest mistakes I see coaches and consultants making is getting fully booked and then not marketing their business anymore. They are actively marketing their business when they have availability but as soon as they reach capacity, they stop marketing their business. You shouldn’t only be marketing your business when you have spaces for new clients. If you want to stay fully booked then you need to be consistently marketing your business, even when you are fully booked.

 

Now one of the reasons why business owners stop marketing themselves when they are fully booked is because they don’t have the time. Earlier I went through the concept of fully booked and in the example, I showed how Amy (the financial coach) had set aside time weekly for marketing. You need to make sure that even when you are fully booked you have time to market your business. It might be that you are marketing your business less when you are fully booked, but you shouldn’t stop altogether.

 

If you aren’t able to market your business because of time you have two options:

1. Go back to work out what fully booked actually means (leaving you time to do marketing)
2. Outsource your marketing

If you decide that you would rather work with clients than on your marketing (most coaches or consultants would rather do more client work) then it makes sense to outsource your marketing. Also, I’d hope that if you are fully booked then you should be in a place financially to outsource your marketing. However, if your plan is to outsource your marketing when you are fully booked, I would recommend that you start to outsource before you are fully booked. Outsourcing your marketing takes a bit of time. You’ll need to find the right person, whether it be a VA (virtual assistant), social media manager or another type of marketing professional. Once you’ve found the right person there will need an onboarding to ensure they can successfully market your business.

 

 

2. Have a waitlist

A great way to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant is to have a waitlist. A waitlist allows people who are interested in working with you to be added to a list knowing they’ll be informed as soon as you have availability to take on new clients.

 

The power of a waitlist is it can help to ensure  there are no gaps between clients. For example, if you know that you can take new clients on from 1^st March you could inform your waitlist in February that you’ll have spaces from 1^st March. This gives you a month to get your upcoming client spaces filled before they even open up.

 

If you are interested in creating a waitlist for your business, you can find out how to create and manage a waitlist here.

 

 

3. Don’t be afraid to have clients book for months in advance

I’m a big fan of having a waitlist for your business, but another way to ensure you don’t have gaps between clients and that you stay fully booked is by booking clients in for months in advance. If someone approaches you to work with you, and you want to work with them, you can be honest and say “I’m currently booked up until XX but I’m happy to book you in from XX”. Some people will be more than willing to pay now to ensure they have secured their ability to work with you in the future.

 

If the thought of making people pay months in advance for your service doesn’t sit well with you another option is to ask for a deposit for them to secure their spot in the future.

 

Not everyone will be willing to pay upfront, but some will. Asking upfront may mean your calendar is booked in for months ahead of time (and how amazing would that feel). Even if they say no you can point them to your waitlist and say that when you get spaces in the future, they’ll be notified first. Although that might never happen if you are using these techniques.

 

4. Create services that will generate recurring business from the same client or extend the length of time a client works with you.

Some coaching and consulting businesses are structured in a way that makes it easier than others to stay fully booked. When I first started my business, I was offering Strategy Days. Clients would work with me for a day and I’d create their marketing strategy with them. It was great for action takers and business owners who wanted to move their business forward quickly, but it meant that I was constantly having to look for new clients. However, now I run 12-week 1:1 programmes. Not only does this mean I can work more in-depth with clients, and offer encouragement and accountability, but it also means I need a sign lot fewer clients to be fully booked.

 

If you are currently charging by the hour, ½ day or day it might be time to look into whether you could be offering services that last for a longer period of time and therefore reduce how many new clients you need to sign.

 

Another great way to stay fully booked is to offer services that are recurring. Recurring revenue is talked about a lot (and that is why lots of people run membership sites), but there are other ways to generate recurring revenue. For years many businesses have done very well by working on a retainer. Normally a retainer means a client pays you every month and has you on standby to work with them. Now a retainer style might not work for you, but there are clever other ways that you can offer services that mean the same client can keep paying you on a monthly basis.

 

5. Ask for referrals

I’ve already emphasised that if you want to stay fully booked then you need to be consistently marketing your business. However, another great way of ensuring you have new clients to work with when you have the availability is by asking for referrals. Your current clients have first-hand experience of working with you and will most likely be your biggest advocate.

 

If you are coming to the end of working with a client and you know there is no way the client will be resigning you can ask

“As you know we are coming to the end of our time together and this means I can take on a new client. Do you know anyone else who [insert the problem that you solve] that would benefit from working with me?

 

In most cases, people will either be happy to refer someone else or say they don’t know anyone. Some business owners feel cringy asking for referrals but if you’ve delivered a great service most people are happy to refer you to others and if they don’t want to, they can say no.

 

If you want to really encourage referrals then you could also consider offering incentives. You can choose what the incentive is and if someone refers an individual who becomes a client you give them the incentive as a thank you.

 

There you have it! You now know how to stay fully booked as a coach or consultant.

 

Becoming fully booked is a major business milestone. However, you don’t want it to be a one-off occurrence and then a distant memory. By using the tips I’ve shared you’ll be able to stay fully booked and have a consistent flow of clients coming your way.

 

In the comments, I would love to know what tip you are going to use in your coaching or consulting business to help you stay fully booked.

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Is your business fully booked?
Are you looking for ways to continue to grow your business without burning you out?
If so, my 1:1 – SCALE UP programme might be perfect for you.

It is designed for coaches, consultants and service-based business owners who are currently running a successful business purely (or predominately) via 1-to-1 service and are now looking to scale via high-ticket services, group programmes and / or digital products.

If that sounds like you then you can find out more about 1:1 – SCALE UP here.

Don’t think 1:1 SCALE UP is right for you, but still want to work with me? Drop me a message here or if you would prefer to discuss your situation (I love a good chat) then you can book a call here