A former student asked me for some tips on selecting a coaching office.

1. Make sure your office is located where your clients are.

2. A place and location that is representative of your business.

3. A place where a lot of clients may be walking by, and notice your sign on the wall. Not just places where lots of people live, work or socialize. Think of starting a coaching office, in place that gets a lot of traffic from your clients. Commuters to and from work, and near places where your niche market is likely to spend time. Example if you specialize in weight loss coaching, being near a large gym would be a good idea.

4. Your office itself needs to be representative of your business.

5. The expense of your office space, needs to be inline with your business plan. After all, youneed to pay for it! You really should be able to earn the expense of your office back. For a good coach it is not abnormal to see clients approximately 20 hours a week, spend the rest of the time marketing, networking, meeting with potential clients, administration and preparing for sessions.  A rule of thumb I would go by is that your office shouldn’t really cost more than what you earn in 5 – 10 hours of coaching initially.  This is assuming a full client roster. And really this prevents you to get in to trouble with other expenses, and your client roster experiencing ups and downs. Though there may be 80 coaching hours in a month, you will have expenses in marketing materials, IT, advertising etc.

6. Be sure that your office is spacious enough, especially if you plan to do NLP timeline coaching, work with multiple clients at the same time, or need space to move around.

7. Consider getting a coaching office with a desk and chairs, as well as a seating area.

8. Make sure that your coaching office is free of interruptions and noise!

9. Make sure it is either a spacious office, or that it has a window! Especially for visual and kinesthetic clients this is very important.

10. Upon walking in to your office it not only has to look like it is representative of your business, it has to feel great! Your client must be ready to be coached.

11. It may sound trivial, but you want to make sure that the temperature in your office can be regulated.

12. If you start a coaching practice without clients or even a network, carefully weigh your decisions! Starting a coaching practice requires for you to be very creative, very active, very pro-active. It takes time to build a practice. If you are amazing at what you do, a practice will build fast through word of mouth. If you are not, then you need to allocate a chunk of money to slowly build your coaching practice.

Next week: “10 Tips for Coaching at a Clients Office or Home.”