How Online Coaches and Consultants Can Use Freelancers to Increase their Business

As a business coach or consultant, you can use freelancers to free up your time.

I know what you’re probably thinking – what can a freelancer possibly know about helping businesses to grow? Coaching businesses definitely requires a unique skill set that you are not likely to find under the next rock you come across. There are, however, more than a few freelancers who are skilled at a variety of related tasks.

Use freelancers to Take Care of Business

When you offer your services to aspiring entrepreneurs as a coach or consultant, you spend a lot of time on your clients. You are essentially focused on them – you think about their businesses, their time management, their hurdles, their bottom line. It’s what you do. What happens here, though, is that you don’t have enough time to focus on your side of things.

Your clients’ businesses are growing fast thanks to you, but what about your coaching or consulting business? You have operations to run, too. You have accounting and finances to put in order. There’s marketing to do so that you can grow, too. Use freelancers to help you cover the back office while you focus on doing what you do best.

Here are 5 key positions in which you can use freelancers to take care of things on your end.

Administrative

This is probably the first thing that you want to get off your plate – all of the little stuff that goes on throughout each day. It’s just little things, but they can sure pile up! Just like the unobtrusive dust that finds its way into your keyboard, tasks sit there silently until one day you can’t move because it’s jammed everything up.

Use freelancers to help you get all of these small tasks out of the way as they come in. Just a few hours every day or even every week can do a lot to keep your operations running smoothly.

Scheduling

Use a freelancer to keep your date book clean and help you stay on schedule. You’re busy and so are your clients. Having someone who can organize appointments and move things around as needed can make a big difference. How much time do you spend setting up meetings and following up with clients? Imagine what you can do with that time when you use a freelancer to do it on your behalf.

Materials

Do you find yourself scrambling to get everything set up before a meeting with a client? There are a lot of bits of paper and emails and online resources to sort through. And that doesn’t even touch on the notes that you need to prepare on all the phone conversations that you now have to recall. Everything would go so much more smoothly if you had someone to organize your files for you so you can access everything that you need in one place.

You can even use a freelancer one level up to prepare notes and reports for you. Have calls transcribed and forms created to extract the salient points. Get a freelancer to collect statistics and correlate them in nice charts and graphs. You can pass on pretty much anything that you don’t absolutely need to do yourself.

Outreach

Reaching out to people involves a great deal of work. From seeking them out to making first contact to getting them interested, you can expect to spend a good number of hours. And this is just the initial stage of things. You won’t really see any kind of results that you can take to the bank at this point.

Use freelancers to handle all of this preparatory work so that you only have to jump in when you have a viable lead.

Research and Lead Generation

Getting online to search for and look through websites and social media profiles to pick up a few emails and phone numbers can take hours. With a few guidelines on your target clients, a freelancer can to do all this research for you. Considering how much time you would spend on it, a freelancer will save you a nice big chunk of opportunity cost.

Web Content

Many people will go to Google when they want to do some initial research about a product or service. You need to have the information that they are looking for if you want to catch their attention. Preparing this information is important to your lead generation efforts, but it’s a lot of work to put it together and to get it up on relevant sites.

Social Media

If you don’t yet have a professional presence on social media, you really should. Millions of people are on social media every day, and they’re not just there to socialize. Many people get their information about which services and products to use and buy from other users. They trust the opinions of these people who, like them, just want to find a good deal.

Reviews

People also generally rely on the reviews that they find online when they are looking into a provider such as yourself. You need to do more than just impress your clients – you need to make it easy for them to leave you a good review. Having someone to find the best review sites and prepare a business profile on them can help a lot. Once you are set up, all you have to do is tell the freelancer who to send the link to. Then just sit back and read the reports. Reviews are also a great way to get feedback on the areas that need improvement so you can knock the next ones out of the ballpark.

Meeting and Greeting

Use a freelancer to make first contact with your prospects. Whether it’s sending a generic email or connecting on socials, this step can easily be accomplished without a lot of involvement from you. You get your services offered, and you just wait for the freelancer to come back to you with a set of people and basic information to work your magic with.

You might want to do the actual relationship building yourself, but you can certainly use a freelancer to build the foundations for you. This way, you can focus your skills and energies on the areas that need your attention the most.

Bookkeeping

You may be a numbers person, but even so, getting all those figures to cooperate can be a drag. What you need to be doing is getting out there helping business owners manage systems and processes. You need to be on the phone working with them to get through various obstacles.

Use freelancers to handle your finances and keep your business accounting nice and neat. When you know that the numbers are being crunched, you can rest easy – and your accountant will thank you.

Marketing

Getting the word out about your services is one thing/ Putting your best face on for it every day is quite another. Potential clients will base their impressions of you on what they see. What they see is going to be mostly composed of what they can read or hear about you online. You could spend half a day three times a week writing content for your website or engaging in online social groups. Or, you could bullet point a few ideas and hire someone to transform that into great stuff. Then they can go out and share it with your market.

Use freelancers to help you build up your brand and maintain a good presence on different channels like your website and social media.

Advertising

You might already have built a name for yourself, but it doesn’t hurt to keep that going. There are so many channels these days that you can take advantage of. No single person can afford to spend the time that it would take to figure out which of these different channels will work best and to learn all about how to use them to get the maximum effect.

Use freelancers with expertise in advertising to do the analysis for you and run your campaigns. If it’s Facebook that you are most likely to benefit from, hire a Facebook Ads expert to manage targeted ads. If a wider scope will bring in more business, hire an Adwords expert to get you visibility on Google.

Your Bottom Line

When you use freelancers to manage the satellite areas of your coaching or consulting business, you have more free time to focus on your clients. When you are free to focus, you are able to provide a much higher level of service. With that, there’s no way that you won’t see substantial growth for yourself as your personal and brand reputation climb the ranks.

Set up a call with FreeUp to talk more about how FreeUp can help you find the right person for your needs.