The Best Business Tools for Health Coaches & Wellness Entrepreneurs

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Building and running a health coaching business (especially as a #solopreneur) is a lot of work!

Like many business owners, you likely wear many hats on any given day: health coach, social media manager, wellness blogger, business strategist, financial analyst, customer service representative… the list goes on, right?! 😅

With limited time and resources for our extensive to-do lists, it’s important to strategically manage business operations to maximize our efficiency—and, ultimately, run a successful health coaching business.

This business efficiency is particularly important for health and wellness coaches, fitness coaches, personal trainers and other wellness professionals. As service providers offering 1:1 services, time is incredibly valuable—the more time spent on administrative tasks, the less time available to spend coaching (i.e. making income and impact!).

Fortunately, the health coaching workflow has a specific set of operational tasks that accompany each new client, so we can streamline these tasks and avoid reinventing the wheel each go around.

In my own businesses (Four Wellness Co. & Five Design Co., if you’re not familiar!), I’ve seen significant benefit from embracing technologies that allow me to automate systems and set them up to work for me while I’m working on other things. (In fact, that’s really the only way I’ve had time to work on growing the businesses!)

This post is a compilation of my favorite business products and services that I’ve personally used to manage and streamline my wellness business operations, in order to free up time to improve and grow the business overall.

Enjoy!

The best business tools for health coaches & wellness entrepreneurs:

Setting up your health coaching website

Squarespace is my favorite all-in-one website building platform, and the one I used to design our own sites.

(I’m a web designer, so yes, I built our website! 🤓)

Some of the many, many reasons I love Squarespace and think it’s the best option for health coaches and wellness entrepreneurs:

• it’s (arguably) the easiest website platform to use and maintain

• it’s design-oriented and supports beautiful, image-heavy sites

• all templates are mobile responsive (so your site will look great across all devices and screen sizes)

• it has built-in SEO features to help grow your site’s reach

• it offers lots of useful third-party integrations to run your business

• your web hosting and other website-related accounts and billing are all conveniently connected in one place, making admin a breeze

Use code PARTNER10 for 10% off the first year of your Squarespace subscription.

All Squarespace websites come with a free 14-day trial, so you can get started building your wellness website for free. 🙌

We use a tool called MemberSpace to membership-protect certain pages or content on our websites.

This third party service allows you to offer both free and paid membership-based products, such as online courses, ebooks or downloadable materials, resource libraries, membership programs and more.

We use MemberSpace for our Wellness Library, our archives of healthy living guides and resources, and our upcoming Health Coach Business School, an online course and resource library for health coaches looking to grow your health coaching practice.

MemberSpace offers a free 14-day trial so you can get started building your membership program for free. Pro tip: If you need longer to build your program, reach out to their wonderful support team and they’ll extend your trial.

Acuity Scheduling is a web-based scheduling tool that can be embedded on your website for your customers to easily purchase and schedule sessions with you.

It’s customizable to your brand style, so fits seamlessly within your branded website (Squarespace or otherwise—though it’s owned by Squarespace, so particularly easy to integrate with Squarespace websites).

Acuity supports a range of appointment types, including the ability to schedule 1:1 appointments, group classes, subscriptions and class packs. It’s also HIPAA-compliant, which means you can securely collect Protected Health Information (PHI) during appointment scheduling if needed.

Try any Acuity Scheduling plan free for 7 days.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Quality photography is a must in effectively communicating your brand experience and selling your products and services.

However, many health coaches (especially those just starting out) don’t have a professional photographer on hand to do a full photoshoot for your website and other marketing materials. The next best thing is Unsplash, a collection of free stock photography from photographers around the world—all available for your use under a creative commons license.

Unsplash is a quality source of free professional stock photography and it’s seamlessly integrated with Squarespace (you can search for and add Unsplash photography directly from the back-end of your Squarespace website!).

Unsplash is free to use, and can be accessed directly from the back-end of your Squarespace website.

Health coach marketing tools + resources

Flodesk is my new, very favorite email marketing platform!

It has a sleek, clean dashboard with beautiful email templates, easy to manage workflow automations, and clearly structured segments to organize your audience. It also includes unlimited subscribers and unlimited email sends.

It’s the tool we use in both of my businesses, and what I now recommend to new health coaches.

Try Flodesk free for 30 days, no credit card required.

And, get 50% off your Flodesk subscription (not just the first month or year, but forever!):

Before switching over to Flodesk, we used Mailchimp for many years.

It’s still a great email marketing platform for health coaches: it’s easy and intuitive to use (it’s built off a drag-and-drop template structure, like Squarespace); it allows beautifully designed email campaigns to match your branding; it integrates really nicely with Squarespace websites (so you can super easily collect email addresses from your website opt-ins); and it offers a free plan up to 2,000 subscribers (helpful for new coaches on a budget!).

Mailchimp offers a free plan with basic features, up to 2,000 subscribers.

Pinterest is one of the very best marketing tools for new wellness businesses. Though it’s often misinterpreted as a “social media” platform, it’s really more of a visual search engine. And, as such, it’s a wonderful way to connect with people searching for answers to problems you can help them solve.

Here’s more info about using Pinterest to grow traffic to your website (and, thus business services) via strategic content marketing.

It’s free to set up a Pinterest Business Account for your health coaching business.

We maximize our reach on Pinterest with a Pinterest scheduling tool called Tailwind.

I’ve mentioned this lots and lots in our health coach business resources, but Pinterest is my favorite cost-effective strategy for growing traffic to your wellness website, and Tailwind is my favorite tool to streamline and optimize that process.

(See more about setting up and using Tailwind for your health coaching business here.)

Try Tailwind’s Pinterest scheduler free for up to 100 pins (no time limit).

With all the Pinterest strategy mentioned above, you’ll need some snazzy pin designs, right? Fortunately, you don’t need to learn a complicated design software to create beautiful and click-worthy pins.

Canva is free design software for “non-designers.” With it, you can design branded Pinterest pins, as well as logos, social media imagery, PDF handouts, presentations and so much more.

Try Canva Pro free for 30 days. (They also have an always-free plan too.)

Rewardful is a web-based service that allows you to offer referral or affiliate programs to reward others who promote your programs or services.

This is particularly great for online membership programs, or for rewarding clients who refer other health coaching clients to you.

Try any Rewardful plan free for 14 days.

Health coaching platforms + resources

Practice Better is a one-stop-shop for health coaches and other wellness professionals to manage your practice. A few of the useful features, all under one roof, include: client management, scheduling, billing, secure messaging, forms + waivers, tasks + reminders, session notes + documents, and the ability to create wellness programs + online courses.

It also includes a handy app for managing these elements of your practice on-the-go.

After trying and testing several popular health practice management platforms, this one is my favorite! They also have affordable pricing and a super responsive support team to help set up your online practice. See our full overview of Practice Better and how to use it for your health coaching or wellness business.

The Practice Better Sprout Plan is free forever, up to 3 clients.

If you don’t go with a wellness-specific platform like Practice Better, Bonsai is a great all-in-one productivity solution for automating the administrative side of the client process: everything from sending proposals and contracts to time tracking, invoicing and payments, all the way to taxes and accounting.

Streamlining all of these steps of the coaching process, and linking them under “one roof,” dramatically cuts down the time manually re-creating each step of the process for each new client, following up on payments, etc.

The built-in reporting features are also helpful to get a snapshot of business performance and track progress toward goals. And, the branded email communication gives a professional first impression to new or potential clients.

Try any Bonsai plan free for 14 days.

Health coach productivity + organization tools

Google Docs and Google Sheets are some of our most-used business tools. They’re free, simple and easy-to-use, and your files are all available in the cloud from any device. For health coaches just starting out, this is a great free option to keep your business documents organized and safe in one location.

We personally use Google Workspace, the integrated, cloud-based business version of all Google products (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.). Though it’s a paid product, it offers a range of useful functionality for teams, including the ability to manage multiple user accounts and email addresses under your domain name.

Gmail for business is integrated with Squarespace, making it super easy to set up from the back-end of your Squarespace website and link new email addresses to your domain name.

Try Google Workspace free for 14 days.

New Squarespace websites (on the Business or Commerce plans) come with a free year of Google Workspace integration.

Airtable is a powerful content-based spreadsheet. It’s a database that can be used to organize allll sorts of information, such as planning content calendars, marketing plans and launch timelines, as well as storing and organizing client information, lists and ideas.

Because of its flexibility in organizing and managing many different types of data, we use it for a wide range of business information and planning.

Airtable is a free service with paid upgrades. (We use the upgrades for color coding our content calendar!)

Zapier is an amazingly helpful tool for connecting and automating other business tools used in your business.

This helps to streamline workflow operations and keep your business running smoothly and efficiently—saving health coaches (especially solopreneurs) valuable time!

Zapier offers a free plan, and you can try features of any paid plan free for 14 days.

Perfect your health coaching website

Grab my free checklist for optimizing your wellness website!

It’s got all the big picture must-haves (& all the important little details!) to make your health coach website shine. ✨