Thinking about Starting Your Own Career Counseling Practice?

Here are 5 Questions to Get You Started:

Many career development professionals dream about being their own boss, creating their own schedules, and having the flexibility to better care for their families and themselves. For many, the dream stops there. There’s too much uncertainty and job security seems crucial in this day and age.

However, we are starting to see collectively that job security is a myth and uncertainty is a given whether you have a full-time job or not! As a career or advising professional, you have skills and talents that so many people need right now. The need for expert guidance continues as employees all over the world reevaluate their lives and jobs.

Starting a financially rewarding and fulfilling private practice is possible, but how can you assess if you have what it takes? There are aspects of being an entrepreneur that everyone has to grapple with, but you can also build a business around your specific strengths and goals.

When I started my business, I was deliberate in what I wanted to do and who I wanted to work with. This helped me to get clients right away and to focus my marketing strategies. Based on my experience, I encourage you to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What kind of private practice do you want? What hours do you want to work and on which days? What kind of clients are you most excited about working with? What aspect of your current job would you want to keep doing? What would you want to leave behind?
2. What are your financial needs? Building a business takes time, it’s important to consider how to build up savings to get you through the beginning and what you need on a regular basis to maintain the type of life you want to live. This will inform the type of work you’ll do as well as what to charge.
3. What kind of life do you want to live? A business can easily eat up every spare moment of your time and energy, so it’s important to develop a holistic way of looking at your business as supporting your lifestyle, not dictating it.
4. Are you willing to learn new skills and challenge your way of thinking? When working for someone else, you don’t need to market your services, develop administrative processes, manage your finances, or create a daily structure in quite the same way that a business owner does. You’ll need to think about creating efficiencies and ways to convert potential clients into paying clients. You need to be willing and able to make these changes. Ideally, you want to be excited about them!
5. Are you willing to ask for, and often pay for, help? Any new endeavor is most successful when you have a community behind you and supporting you. Asking for help is a necessary skill for a business owner. Often, it is more efficient and cost-effective to pay a professional to support you in small and big ways. I had a go-it-alone and pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps mentality that kept my business from thriving as quickly as it could.

Question number five is a lynchpin. Fortunately, the career development field is incredibly supportive and collaborative. Help is available for the asking! In fact, as I was going through the tough times, I started creating the Empowered Entrepreneur Program so I could help people avoid the mistakes that I made and build on what I had learned through trial and error.

After 8 years, this program has been tested and fine-tuned, designed to help career professionals start their private practice on a firm foundation. 

A Sneak Peek into the Empowered Entrepreneur Program:

• Apply your coaching skills and strengths to help yourself create a successful private practice.
• Learn business fundamentals such as developing a vision, articulating the value of the services you provide to customers, pricing, and onboarding.
• Use career coaching tools created for private practitioners to organize your business and set your clients up for success.
• Develop a network with other career professionals dedicated to your success!

You do not have to do this alone! Click here to learn more about the Empowered Entrepreneur Program or schedule a call with one of our team members.