The ABCs of Your Coaching Business

by Gordo Byrn

[Editor's note: This article also appears on the TrainingPeaks blog.]

Recently, a successful business owner shared an insight on time management. I’ll paraphrase his opinions to get the ball rolling:

We value ourselves more than we think. We are not all that valuable. We spend a lot of busy work doing just that -- busy work; non-productive.

My first manager had me focus on my time:

A-time is revenue producing. Meeting with clients.
B-time is prospecting, doing seminars, doing prospect interviews.
C-time is admin. Paperwork, analysis, planning.

C-time can be outsourced. B-time helps grow my business. A-time is the only time I always personally have to show up for.

But A-time only makes up about 20 percent of my work week. All the rest is non-revenue producing or business building time I would rather have somebody else do.

Have you considered the ABCs of your business? I have.

A-Time

Direct, personal interaction with teammates (athletes and coaching peers)
Teaching by example
Helping my stars (coaches, athletes, ambassadors)
Offering correction in a way that creates change

To define what should make up my A-time, I ask myself:

What do I do best?
Where do I get the greatest response to my experience?
Who benefits most from my experience?
What is the minimum financial return that I need to justify an activity?

B-Time

Promoting
Learning
Qualifying leads

With B-time, it’s tempting to tell yourself that you need to be an expert in all areas. However, that’s impossible and to be the best you can be you’ll need to develop specialist experience that’s unique enough for people to pay you to share what you know.

At Endurance Corner, our solution to building deep specialist knowledge has been to form a world-class team (of coaches, athletes and alumni). We use technology to connect ourselves via an online forum that enables us to share our knowledge. Collectively, we benefit from each of us contributing in an area where we have deep experience.

To illustrate, it would take me decades of B-time to become an expert in:

Kidney function
The athlete’s heart
Psychiatry
Orthopedics and chiropractic
Ironman and Ultraman
Technology and web design
Camps and clinics
Exercise physiology

By the way, the above is a list of the specialties of our columnists. While my friend avoids B-time, we’ve found our best marketing is to give away good information for free. This reaches and then educates new team members.

C-Time

Repetitive actions that create no value
Admin
Billing

Minimizing C-time requires change and we share a strong bias towards the status quo. Remember that the easiest way to increase your return on investment is to create systems. In a coaching business systems might include:

Workout libraries that can be used across athletes of all abilities
Templates for training plans that repeat often
Systems for annual planning
Billing solutions that automate bill collection, bank deposits and accounting data input
Accounts receivable systems that make late-payers visible early
Technology that reduces your clicks, leverages your ability to share knowledge and speeds your ability to personally tailor training plans (you can see example of this in the target=_blank>plans I’ve created on TrainingPeaks).
If you struggle with the items above then serve an apprenticeship with a company that has their systems dialed.

Effective time management is a skill that’s often overlooked and prevents us from doing what we do best. If you’re reading this site then, odds are, you’d like a little extra time to go training!

In March, take one positive step to improve your ABCs.

Gordo is the founder of Endurance Corner. You can find his personal blog here.