How Big Does Your Coaching Business Actually Need to Be?
Recently, during an “All About Biz” call inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, one coach told us that her practice had grown from eight clients to eighteen—in the last year!
My response was basically: Wait. WHAT?!
Because not that long ago, she'd been trying to figure out how to get clients. She'd been doing outreach, building relationships with psychologists and other professionals who work with neurodivergent teens, and she'd pulled together an accountability group to put into practice what they were learning in our Attract a Steady Stream of Clients course inside Rock Your Biz.
And it was working!
For the first time, she'd actually turned away a prospective client! She shared the news with a group of delighted co-LAB-orators, who knew how hard she'd worked to reach this point.
What a difference a year makes! This was supposed to be just a short check-in, but I was so amazed I had to quiz her about her process so that others could benefit from it as well.
And then other coaches started sharing their experiences, too. Before long, we were comparing different approaches to a question that comes up sooner or later for almost everyone running an academic or executive function coaching business:
How do you know when your coaching practice is full?
Because as we discovered, being “full” means something very different to different coaches.
When Eighteen Clients Is Too Many
Right after we celebrated the first coach's growth, another Lab member described doing almost exactly the opposite.
She ended last year with sixteen or seventeen students and realized that was simply too many weekly appointments for her. So this year, she deliberately reduced her caseload to around ten or eleven students. That's the number that feels manageable to her, and that she can serve most joyfully.
She wasn't just thinking about how many students she could fit into her calendar.; she was also thinking about how she wanted to run her business, and what she wanted her quality of life to be like.
And for her, one system she feels strongly about is charging by the hour, rather than selling packages, which is what I teach in our Rock Your Biz program.
I'm a big fan of packages because my brain LOVES the idea of doing one administrative task per semester instead of remembering to bill people repeatedly. Plus, I’ve noticed families are willing to pay more when they recognize the wraparound services they're receiving and have the opportunity to pay for them as a package deal. So for me, packages gives me an opportunity to do less and earn more, which ultimately benefits the families, because I’m not having to squeeze in more clients and bill them more often.
But this coach prefers the hourly. She has a system for tracking her sessions and billing monthly that works well for her, and it allows her to be more agile with her schedule and her services, because she can switch things up at any point.
That's amazing, and it's the POINT of being in business for ourselves—we get to do it OUR WAY.
That's one of the things I appreciate about conversations like these with the LabFam (my pet name for our incredible community inside the Learning Lab). A seemingly simple question—how many clients should I have?—turns out to involve all kinds of other decisions:
How many sessions do I actually want to conduct each week?
How much time do I need for preparation, parent communication, and administrative tasks?
How much money do I need to earn?
What business systems will make all of that manageable?
These aren't questions with one correct answer. They're decisions each of us gets to make as we figure out how to run our businesses based on our unique capacity and values.
What If You Changed Your Prices Instead?
In the same call, yet another coach shared a different solution to her capacity question.
At one point a few years ago, she told us, she had too many students and was wiped out. She experimented with hiring other coaches to take on the extra student load, but eventually realized that managing a team wasn't the kind of business she wanted.
So she tried something else: she raised her prices. Significantly.
In fact, at one point she essentially thought, Fine. I'll raise my prices to something so ridiculous that nobody will pay it.
And then people paid it!
Her experience challenges an assumption that can sneak into coaching businesses: that earning more money necessarily means serving more students.
Sometimes it does. But increasing your rates can also change what's possible.
This coach has developed a premium, high-touch model that allows her to provide substantial support to the families she works with. And because some families pay her full rate, she can occasionally work with other families for free or at a reduced price.
That's a nice bonus! So many coaches come into the Anti-Boring Learning Lab wanting to make their services accessible to students whose families can't afford private coaching. We're constantly experimenting with ways to make that financially sustainable for coaches AND accessible to the students who need us most.
Of course, raising prices isn't automatically the right answer. Families have different financial resources, communities have different markets, and coaches offer different levels of service.
But pricing is one of the variables worth examining when you're trying to figure out what a sustainable caseload looks like.
If you need to earn more money, there are several different levers you can pull:
Serve more clients. If you have the capacity, filling additional spots might be exactly what you need.
Charge more. Could your current services support a higher price?
Change what you're offering. Would a different package or level of support make more sense for your clients and your business?
Reconsider how you're spending your time. Are there ways to make your services or administrative work more efficient without sacrificing quality?
Those are different business decisions, and they call for different strategies.
There’s more than one way to make the math work.
Ready to get more intentional about the business you’re building? Our free Ready to Rock Your Biz guide helps you think through the numbers, decisions, and next steps that make sense for your coaching practice.
Get Ready to Rock Your Biz →Sometimes Bigger Really IS the Answer
Then another coach shared what happened when her practice grew from two or three students to seventeen.
She was driving around meeting students in libraries and homes, hauling her materials everywhere and feeling, in her own words, like a “bag lady.”
She needed a different way to work.
First, she rented a small room in a coworking space. Eventually, she and a colleague took a bigger step: opening a brick-and-mortar location with three offices.
More space meant more overhead and financial responsibility, of course. But it also created opportunities to serve more students.
And serving more students was important to her.
She talked about how difficult it felt to maintain a waitlist when families were reaching out for help. By the time many parents contact an academic or executive function coach, their child may already be struggling. She wanted to find a way to say yes to more of those families.
Other coaches are thinking about expansion, too, although they're approaching it differently. Take Lab member Patrick Quinlan, whom I interviewed for this episode of the Academic Coaching Podcast. After more than fifteen years as a tutor, he's interested in building a team. But he's using our resources to strengthen his foundation in academic and executive function coaching first, so that he has something solid to build on.
While one coach was deliberately reducing her caseload, others are investing in additional capacity—or preparing themselves to do so.
Neither decision is inherently better. They reflect different priorities, different circumstances, and different business models.
And that's precisely why I think it's so useful for coaches to hear how other people are making these decisions.
So How Do You Know When You're Full?
After hearing these stories, I think there are at least three different questions worth asking.
First, are you financially full? Is your practice generating enough income to support your needs, cover your expenses, and compensate you for all the work involved—not just the hours you spend face-to-face with students?
Second, are you logistically full? How many students can you realistically serve while still having time for preparation, parent communication, recordkeeping, and everything else that makes a coaching practice run?
And third, are you personally full? How much time and energy do you want to devote to your business? What kind of schedule works for your life? How much administrative complexity do you want to manage? Do you enjoy working independently, or would you rather build a team?
Those three answers don't always line up neatly.
You might have plenty of time available but not enough clients to meet your financial needs. You might have more demand than you can accommodate but no desire to hire employees. Or you might discover that the business you thought you wanted isn't quite the business you enjoy running.
That's when it helps to have more than one strategy available. You can work on attracting clients, adjust your pricing, change your billing systems, reduce your caseload, expand your capacity, or redesign your services.
And you don't have to make all those decisions at once.
This Is What I Adore About Our Rock Your Bizzers
These weren't hypothetical examples from a business textbook. They were real coaches describing decisions they'd made, what had worked, and what they were still figuring out.
And that's a big part of what we're building inside Rock Your Biz, where we combine business training for academic and executive function coaches with opportunities to learn from other practitioners who are figuring out these same questions.
Rock Your Biz is an add-on to our basic Lab membership, because not everyone in the Lab is running a private practice. But if you ARE in private practice, and especially if you're growing or trying to make meaningful changes to your business, I think we're one of the most knowledgeable, supportive communities you could have in your corner.
The Rock Your Biz resources teach practical strategies for attracting clients, pricing services, organizing your business, and making your coaching practice sustainable. And just as importantly, coaches at different points in their business-building journeys get to compare notes with other people doing this work.
Knowing a business strategy is one thing. Figuring out how to adapt it to your particular practice, your clients, your financial needs, and your brain is another.
And sometimes the most useful thing you can hear is how another coach solved a problem differently than you would have.
So, how big does your coaching business actually need to be?
Big enough to meet your financial needs. Small enough—or structured well enough—that you can sustain the work. And flexible enough to change as your life, your clients, and your ambitions change.
Want to build a coaching business that works for YOU?
Our Rock Your Biz Add-On offers practical business training for academic and executive function coaches, plus a community of practitioners who are figuring out how to attract clients, set prices, and build sustainable practices together.
In Sum: Your Academic Coaching Business Questions, Answered
Phew! That was a lot of words! Want the same ideas in bite-sized pieces? Here's a Q&A summary for your skimming pleasure.
How many clients should an academic coach have?
There's no single ideal number. A coach working with ten students might have a completely full practice, while another can comfortably serve twenty. The important questions are how much income you need, how much time your services require, and what kind of schedule you want. Inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we help coaches think through those decisions rather than assuming everyone should aim for the same caseload.
How do I know if I'm charging enough for executive function coaching?
Start by looking at your business expenses, income goals, available working hours, and the amount of support you're providing. Don't forget preparation, communication, and administrative time! Rock Your Biz helps coaches examine pricing as part of their overall business model, rather than treating an hourly rate as an isolated decision.
Should I offer coaching packages or charge by the hour?
Both can work! Packages can make billing more predictable and reduce administrative work, while hourly billing can offer flexibility when clients' schedules or needs vary. Gretchen Wegner teaches business systems inside Rock Your Biz while encouraging coaches to adapt those systems to their own practices.
Do I need to hire other coaches to grow my business?
Not necessarily. Hiring can increase capacity, but it also introduces management responsibilities. Some coaches prefer to remain solo practitioners and adjust their pricing or services instead. In the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, coaches can learn from members who have experimented with different approaches.
What is Rock Your Biz?
Rock Your Biz is the business-training side of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. It's an optional add-on for members who run private coaching practices or want to develop one. It combines practical business-building resources with opportunities to learn from other coaches' experiences, so you can build a practice that supports your clients, your financial needs, and the way you want to work.