How to Build a Coaching Business: The 4 Foundations

Contributors:

Most coaches started out as athletes themselves, deciding to turn their love of sport and fitness into a career. But turning a career in coaching into a business is something else entirely and it can feel overwhelming. 

FITR recently hosted a webinar, Built to Coach: From Athlete to Business. Gus Vaz Tostes, Co-Founder of the globally successful Hybrid Racer, joined FITR to discuss what it really takes to build a coaching business from the ground up. From the identity shift an athlete has in order to take the leap to coach, to the 4 foundations every coaching business should be run on and a simple guide to putting them into practice.

The Identity Shift

There’s an obvious identity shift that happens as you move from hobbyist to athlete to coach and eventually business owner. A certain state of mind that’s characteristic of each. Your love of sport and fitness becomes more serious, maybe competitive, then you think you could use that passion and experience to help others.

The jump from coach to business owner is where most people struggle. Being a good coach means showing up for clients and delivering results. Being a business owner means building something that can deliver those results consistently, at scale, without everything depending on you doing it manually. 

It’s easy at this stage to give into imposter syndrome and compare yourself to all the other great coaches on the market, but it's worth remembering that there's room for everyone in this space.

"There is always a space for you, because there's always someone just below you climbing that same mountain that you can help." - Gus, Built to Coach Webinar

Defining Your Offering

Okay, so you’ve decided you can do this, you’re in the right headspace to build a business. Before you can put the foundations into place, you need to know what you’re actually building: Your coaching offering. 

Gus set out a useful way to think about, a “sweet spot” crossover of:

• What you like doing (your passion)
• What you do well (your skillset)
• What you can deliver well (your impact)

You can have something you love and do well, but if you can't translate it into a compelling experience, clients won't buy it. And you can definitely deliver something you're not passionate about, but that's not why you got into coaching. Finding that overlap, and being honest about it, is the foundation beneath the 4 foundations.

Be specific about who you're coaching too. Trying to appeal to everyone usually means connecting with no one.

The 4 Foundations of a Coaching Business

1. Delivery

Delivery is your product. Your programming, your structure, how it reaches clients and how it feels once it does. 

Great programming balances: what the client enjoys and what will actually produce results. As you scale past a handful of clients, your delivery also has to hold up at volume. A fully manual, 1-to-1 relationship with every single client isn't realistic at 100+.

How to build it on FITR:

• Choose the Program Type that fits how you want to deliver: Group Rolling Calendar, 1-2-1, Session 1, Day 1 or Fixed-Length.
  
  • Not sure what would work best? FITR has a quick program quiz you can take that will point you in the right direction.
• Tracks lets you build variations into a single program, catering for different ability levels or equipment needs without building separate programming for each.
• Program in Personal Records, Macros & Nutrition, and the upcoming Habits feature to add personalised depth at scale. Clients can input their own stats and get bespoke outputs automatically.
• Have you thought about offering Packages? Bundle together programs into a single higher-value offering.

2. Payments

Without a reliable, predictable income, there's no business to build on. Payments covers everything from how clients pay you, subscriptions, one-offs, renewals, refunds, to how that income flows consistently enough for you to invest back into your coaching, your tools, and your growth. 

A core piece in that puzzle is effectively pricing yourself. Coaches consistently undercharge because they price for an hour session rather than for everything that went into being ready to deliver it. Your education, training, hours spent researching, finding just the right movement. Your price should capture it all and you should feel confident charging it. 

How to build it on FITR:

• FITR connects with Stripe to handle all of your business automation needs, subscriptions, renewals, and missed payments automatically.
• Offer monthly, quarterly, or annual options within a single programme to reduce churn and reward commitment.
• Coupon codes let you run offers and campaigns without publicly discounting your pricing.

3. Communication

Communication is every touchpoint between you and your clients: the messages, the check-ins and the community. It's how clients feel truly coached and it's one of the biggest drivers of retention.

But how do you effectively communicate? Educate your clients on what they're doing and why, because when they understand the process, they follow it properly and get better results. Create excitement and desire around your programming, build anticipation for new blocks, celebrate what members are achieving, give people a reason to show up tomorrow. Show social proof, sharing real results reassures existing clients they're on the right track and brings new ones in. And meet people where they already are. If your clients are in the app every day following their programming, that's your most reliable communication channel, not email, not WhatsApp.

How to build it on FITR:

• Communication is built into FITR. From a dedicated inbox for 1-to-1 messaging with every client, all in one place, to community chats.
• Use and comment on Challenges & Leaderboard results to celebrate client wins and make people feel seen.
• Zapier connects FITR to thousands of your other apps so you can easily automate key moments: onboarding emails, notifications when new content drops, and milestone celebrations.

4. Tracking

This part is the data that proves your coaching works. Clients renew when they know their goal and can see their results. Without that tangible proof, clients will measure progress in the mirror alone, missing everything that comes before visible changes: strength gains, improved movement and better mental clarity. 

You need to start with a goal for your client. Once you know where a client is starting from, you can show them how far they've come, and that visible progression is what keeps them trusting the process through plateaus. From there, regular check-ins keep the data flowing, goals evolve, and you stay ahead of any dips in motivation or engagement. 

"Numbers don't lie. If you can keep showing them that they're improving, they will trust the process, even when it's hard." - Gus, Built to Coach Webinar

How to build it on FITR:

• Personal Records feed directly into programming, so each client's sessions are built around their own data and update as they improve.
• Track progress such as Workout History and Body Metrics to give clients a visible record of how far they've come.
• Program in Habits and let clients log daily behaviours alongside their training, giving you a fuller picture of what's driving their results.

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Gus grew up in a small village in Brazil and moved to London at 23 without speaking the language or knowing anyone. He went on to build WIT Training into a successful functional fitness gym, became one of the global emcees for HYROX, and launched Hybrid Racer on FITR just over a year ago.

The idea behind Hybrid Racer was simple: the HYROX market was growing fast but nobody had built a proper science-led training program for it. Gus saw the gap, partnered with renowned aerobic capacity coach Chris Hinshaw, and built the methodology around delivering real results at scale. He kept the offering deliberately focused at first, a subscription and a 12-week race prep.

He built his community on FITR, using the platform's community channels, messaging and marketing tools to stay visible, build buzz, and keep his athletes engaged. Because as Gus puts it: "If you are not seen, you are not remembered." And that visibility is what creates the feedback loop that tells you it's working: "When people start to actually get results and give you good feedback, you know you're getting something right. It's just a matter of consistency."

He concluded the Built to Coach webinar with this: 

"Be nice to people, be humble, and be the hardest worker in the room. Those 3 things, there's nowhere in the world where you cannot thrive."

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