How To Start Your Own Business After College Instead Of Finding A Job

Jobs are overrated, especially if you've gotten used to the flexible lifestyle of a college student. Who wants to show up for the morning commute every day, when you could be on a beach somewhere, laptop in hand, changing the lives of your clients while seeing the world in the process?

If you're fresh off your finals and you're looking to start your own business instead of finding a job after college, a coaching or consulting business is one of the quickest, easiest ways to go.

Coaching and consulting have low overhead, low barriers to entry, endless niches and low cost of fulfillment. The only thing required is that you have specialized knowledge in some arena, and you have the ability to solve a painful problem for someone.

That being said, there is a definitely a right way and a wrong way to get started. Save yourself years of frustration, and use a proven model to start your own business after college.

Step 1: Choose your market and your niche

Step one in starting a consulting business is figuring out who you can help. If this is your first foray in to consulting, start by listing the 10 biggest results you've gotten for yourself or others in any area of life.

Did you increase revenues by 20 percent at your summer internship? Grow a tutoring business to 20 clients? Help your brother pack on 10 lbs of muscle? Teach your classmate how to pick up chicks? Grow your school's investment club stock portfolio by 25 percent?

These are all very desirable outcomes that you could replicate for countless other people.

Figure out who you can get results for, and you have a starting point for your niche.

Step 2: Define your offer

Now that you know your market and your niche, define your offer. What painful problem is your prospective client experiencing right now? That's your "point A."

Start with the pain. If there is no pain, you have no business. If there is a lot of pain, you will have a lot of demand for a solution to that pain.

Next, what is your prospect's ideal situation? That's your "point B." Your offer is to take your client from point A to point B.

If you're a fitness coach, that may be to teach skinny college students to pack on 20 lbs of muscle in one semester or less. If you're a dating coach, that could be to find the girl of your dreams without going on 100 terrible Tinder dates first.

There are endless opportunities here. Look to your past to see what sort of results you've gotten, or what sort of results you think you can get for someone.

Step 3: Learn to sell

High ticket consulting and coaching (meaning, you charge $2k to $10k plus per client), is all about selling transformation instead of information. As a consultant, you're going to sell a result, not the process that you use to get that result.

Take the time to learn to sell, and you'll have a solid foundation for starting off strong in your business.

Step 4: Close your first couple of clients

Once you have a great offer, and you know how to sell, it's time to get your first couple of clients.

Reach out to people who you know are experiencing the problem you solve, and ask them to get on a phone call with you.

Once you get them on the phone, find out what their motivation for making a change is. Walk them through where they are now, and where they want to be. Find out why they haven't made the change on their own.

If they're stuck, make an offer to help... and boom! You just closed your first client by providing a solution to a painful problem.

Step 5: Get your clients results

It's important to be hands on and get amazing results for your first couple of clients. I recommend you use a group coaching model, where you use a combination of online content and weekly group coaching calls to get your clients results.

Build this content alongside your clients so you're not guessing what they want. Spend some one-on-one time with each client to figure out what obstacles they're encountering, and add this to your online training.

Get on a group call one to two times a week with all of your clients and help them overcome any obstacles. Create a Facebook group where everyone can start to interact and gain insight from one another.

Step 6: Generate leads and scale your business

You only need one to two clients per month to make the same amount of money as you would in an entry level job out of college, but what if you have your sights set a little higher, and you want to scale your business to $10k a month and above?

What if you want to show your parents you don't have to be an attorney or an investment banker to break the $100k a year or even the seven-figure year mark?

If you're thinking any of these things, it's time to scale your business. You need a reliable and predictable source of leads that will turn in to sales. In the marketing world, we call this your funnel.

I personally have my clients run Facebook ads to a webinar to offer for more help. At this point, you get the lead on the phone, take them through your sales process and close them as a client.

Before you know it, you're breaking the $10k, $20k or $30k per month mark, and you wonder how you ever even considered getting a job instead of starting your own business.