Coaching Services Agreement

A recently certified coach has her first paying client - a former colleague who agreed to work with her. She wants to send an agreement but is worried about making the relationship feel transactional or overly formal.

Address the discomfort directly before opening the tool. 'A signed agreement doesn't make this transactional - it makes it clear. Your client will feel more confident in the relationship, not less, when they know exactly what they signed up for.' Then work through each bracketed section with her, paying particular attention to the confidentiality and termination clauses - those are the ones most likely to be left vague.

Watch for a pattern of softening the language in each section - changing 'sessions cancelled with less than 24 hours notice will be billed' to 'late cancellations are handled on a case-by-case basis.' Each softened clause is a future friction point. Name it: 'This becomes the conversation you have when a client cancels the morning of their third session.'

After completing the agreement, ask her to read the cancellation and termination sections aloud. Then: 'If your first client cancelled twice in the first month and asked for a refund, what does this agreement say?' The answer to that question tells her whether the agreement actually protects her or whether it just looks like one.

A coach with two years of practice has always worked on handshake terms - verbal agreements about rate, frequency, and scope. A recent client dispute over a missed session fee has prompted her to formalize.

Frame this as retroactive infrastructure. 'You have been carrying the risk that comes with informal arrangements. This agreement moves the terms from your memory into a document both parties have signed.' Walk through each section and have her reconstruct what her current verbal terms actually are - the exercise often surfaces that different clients have different arrangements.

Watch for the coach writing aspirational terms rather than her current practices - a cancellation policy she intends to enforce rather than the one she has actually been enforcing. There is nothing wrong with tightening terms going forward, but she needs to know which clients are operating under a different prior agreement and whether she plans to transition them.

Ask: 'Which current client would be most surprised by this agreement - and what would surprise them?' That client is the one to have a direct conversation with before implementing the new agreement across the practice. A coach who transitions to formal agreements without acknowledging the change to long-term clients often creates more friction than if she had just continued informally.

A coach who has worked only with individual clients has been approached by a mid-size company to coach three of their senior managers. The company wants a services agreement, not a standard individual coaching contract.

Name the structural difference before opening the tool: 'Individual coaching agreements define the relationship between you and the client. Organizational agreements define the relationship between you, the sponsor organization, and the client - and those can point in different directions.' Use the individual agreement template as a starting point for the categories to cover, but flag explicitly that scope, confidentiality, and reporting sections will need to be rewritten for the organizational context.

Watch the confidentiality section closely. In individual coaching, confidentiality runs to the client. In organizational coaching, the sponsor often expects some form of progress reporting. The agreement needs to make the confidentiality structure explicit - who gets what information, in what form, and under what conditions. Leaving this vague in an organizational agreement creates a situation that is difficult to recover from.

After drafting, ask her to read the confidentiality section from the perspective of each party: 'What does the company think they will hear from you? What does the client think stays private?' If those expectations aren't addressed in the agreement, they need to be addressed in the contracting session before any sessions begin.