As a coach, you help your clients on their way to success – but sometimes you need help, too!
This is what an Online Business Manager or OBM for short does – helping your small business toward success.
If you’re like my clients, you have BIG goals and visions for your online coaching business or digital agency.
However, you might get overwhelmed by the numerous things that happen to keep your business running.
Better to use your time in your zone of genius and in revenue-generating tasks like coaching.
Your OBM helps you in many ways, such as setting realistic goals for your business, scheduling and assigning tasks to your VAs and contractors, and making sure that all projects are on track.
OBMs ensure that you get things done smoothly while working closely with you in your CEO role.
Your Online Business Manager provides SO MANY services for your biz to make sure operative tasks are carried out efficiently.
Tracking and managing your clients and projects is one of our core competencies.
But when it comes to expanding and scaling your coaching business, your Online Business Manager helps you with marketing, acquiring new clients and business optimization.
Let’s dive in deeper into each area of your business and how your OBM works…
Table of Contents
Client & Project Management
As an online coach, I understand your to-do list seems never ending and overwhelming.
You’ve got a LOT of ideas and projects you want to accomplish, like:
- Launching new coaching programs
- Creating more digital products to build out your offer suite
- Getting on more and more podcasts to expand your reach
These are just a few examples of what your OBM helps you with to achieve and improve your business goals.
We specialize in problem solving for small business owners, and optimizing and simplifying your business processes.
Online Business Managers Make Sure That Large Projects Are Manageable
As a coach, sometimes your client work takes priority over your own business and your projects get pushed to the wayside.
Or you KNOW what you want to achieve in a big project, but all the details and small steps are way too much for you.
That’s why you gotta work with an Online Business Manager.
We LOVE details…due dates…logistics and everything else!
We break down your big projects into smaller, doable steps to make sure everything fits with your main vision.
So if you’re launching a new coaching program, we would map it all out in Asana or Notion with milestones, due dates and assignees so you tackle it bit by bit.
We as OBMs also create and simplify systems and workflows for your projects.
Because yes… systems can be so overwhelming. We’ve all been there with overly complex funnels and automations that make you question what the purpose was in the first place.
Let’s not, shall we? 😉
We’re all about simplicity and ease here.
Using CRM Systems
CRM might sound like tech jargon, but trust me, it’s a real game-changer that has SUCH a huge ROI when implemented correctly.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Dubsado, Honeybook or Airtable are the unsung heroes of your business.
A CRM system acts as your central hub organizing all your contacts, leads, and clients. For example, you can see who has applied to work with you, who needs following up with, and who needs a contract sent.
An Online Business Manager’s client onboarding programs are tailored to your business needs. They provide seamless interactions with your clients from sign-up to first session. An OBM manages your CRM to keep track of your client interactions to free up time and energy for your coaching business.
Admin Support
OBMs consolidate your administrative tasks around scheduling, paperwork and do the prep work so you can deliver your best.
Note:
We usually work with your Virtual Assistant(s) on this – or supply our own if you need it!
Let’s see some examples of how we help you with running your business:
- Handling incoming emails
- Monitoring your schedules and calendars
- Ensuring that you sendall your contracts and proposals promptly (or better yet – automated!)
- Processing invoices and bank statements
- Conducting extensive research on a topic you’re working on
- Giving you a helping hand in editing your email newsletters.
- Managing your subscriptions and memberships
- Organizing podcast guests
- Social media planning and scheduling
- Ensuring the smooth running of daily operations.
- Creating flexible subscription options and automate billing with integrated payment processing on platforms like MemberVault or MemberPress
- Managing member communications at scale while maintaining personalization through email tools like MailerLite or ConvertKit
Operations Management
A core area your Online Business Manager oversees is operations management.
This means coordinating and optimizing all the intricate behind-the-scenes moving parts that bring your coaching offers and programs to life.
Having a dedicated expert managing operational strategy alleviates huge burdens for you to do it all and bring about business success.
An OBM acts as that coordinator extraordinaire across:
- Reviewing metrics and analytics to catch any emerging issues quickly in your coaching business
- Continuously improving client onboarding funnels for maximum conversion
- Regular audits of programs and offers to align with evolving client needs
- Overseeing finance tracking and budget management
- Coordinating calendars and workflows across team members
- Optimizing internal systems and external tools into one streamlined tech stack
With these critical operations firing on all cylinders instead of managed in a chaotic catch-as-catch-can way, founders can redirect their energy.
Time to focus purely on serving clients and developing transformative content!
Team Support
Very few coaches can scale their reach and revenue without eventually needing team support.
But finding, training and managing a high-performing team is a mammoth undertaking.
We OBMs excel in this arena.
As the team quarterback, we own and handle virtually all key functions related to your online coaching business team:
- Defining roles and responsibilities needed to complement your strengths
- Sourcing potential candidates and vetting skills, experience and culture fit
- Interviewing and hiring best-fit team members based on defined criteria
- Onboarding new hires and cross-training within the first 90 days
- Providing ongoing performance feedback and professional development
- Optimizing workflows between team members and systems
- Mediating issues or conflicts that arise to resolve collaboratively
- Evaluating trends and advising where additional roles may be beneficial
Leaning on an OBM as your virtual team manager enables sticking to your unique genius work in your coaching business.
…While also having specialized guidance to build an all-star crew over time.
Tech & Website Support
Every digital business uses various software and automation tools. (Psst – reply below with your faves!)
Yet clunky tech severely impacts programs and revenue.
An OBM provides dedicated support as that resident website and technical expert for coaching businesses.
Key functions where an OBM guides intelligent tech decisions tailored to your offers includes:
- Auditing current software and tools against business needs & goals
- Researching latest platform options as services scale over time
- Evaluating features and integration capabilities across the full tech stack
- Overseeing website design, updates, maintenance needs
- Ensuring compliance with changing regulations
- Identifying security protocols to protect client data
- Implementing new tools and training team on usage
- Streamlining workflows between online software programs
Rather than costly ongoing guesswork, OBMs deeply analyze and then oversee technology as the engine to power programs, impact and income goals.
Marketing & Design
Let’s get real…it’s super rare to find one person who’s somehow an incredible coach with a life-changing message AND a stellar presenter crafting captivating copy, funnels, and crafted images!
Having a dedicated pro to strategize then actualize the full execution of upleveled marketing and design is freaking game changing!
And there’s sooooo much that falls into this.
Like the expert who:
- Collaboratively crafts your website, newsletter, offer pages, and other key assets to magnetically represent (and MONETIZE) your gifts
- Keeps branding aesthetically on point across platforms
- Makes content pop with visuals that captivate your dream audience
- Sets up marketing automations and ad campaigns to drive ideal opportunities into your world 24/7
- Translates your BIG visions into doable roadmaps laddering up to them with each promotion
- Keeps the magic converting once peeps arrive via strategically engineered funnels
- Analyzes the data and trends to inform “what’s next”
When you have the rare combo of marketing strategist, copy maven, and design pro at your fingertips?
Whole new level of visibility, connection, and income without burning yourself out wearing 100 hats badly!
Conclusion: Why Do You Need an Online Business Manager?
If learning all an Online Business Manager actually brings to the table has you nodding HARD right now, let’s dive deeper!
Truth is, most coaches need a heck of a lot more support than just an assistant checking random task boxes.
We need someone overseeing the wide range of strategy and execution across ops, marketing, tech, etc or it just becomes dizzying and leaky fast.
OBMs make the difference between floundering frustrated and scaling our gifts and income with joy.
The right partnership turns drowning alone into strategic innovation made manifest.
It’s nearly impossible finding ONE human who can master all those intricacies on their own then ALSO show up brightly for clients consistently.
Cue the burnout!
And that’s not why you wanted to start a business in the first place.
Having an OBM quarterback everything behind the scenes lets you purely focus on your zone of genius – actually helping transformative clients!
This equals next level impact for more people plus sanity for you. Win win!
Feeling inspired after reading this post? If you’re a brilliant visionary who struggles with managing all the behind-the-scenes operations of your business, let’s chat!
Because we bring order, automation, and seasoned management to your backend, streamlining everything and implementing systems tailored to your unique needs, so you can finally kiss operational chaos goodbye!
FAQ
Typically, Virtual Assistants mainly help entrepreneurs with operative and administrative tasks. The duties of Online Business Managers go beyond this: they organize, create and give advice.
Online Business Managers offer a whole list of services tailored to the needs of business owners. Examples include: managing the entrepreneur’s clients and projects, making use of CRM systems, offering administrative support, organizing and managing a team, technical support and creating a marketing strategy.
