Setting up a new business is not for the faint-hearted. That’s not news, of course – that’s partly why many fledgling businesses never get off the ground. But let me walk you through just some of the decisions I’ve had to make to even get started.

Finding a name for the business wasn’t difficult, thankfully. My therapy business is Embrace Healing, my Etsy shop is Embrace Crafts, and my signature logo is a purple heart with spreading hands opening in a welcome embrace. That choice was simple, though it wouldn’t be so easy for many businesses.

Choosing a web domain name was slightly harder. I could have gone for a .co.uk suffix, or .com, or even .coaching, though that would cost more. All of these were available, with and without a hyphen or a dot between Embrace and Coaching. Thankfully, the one I settled on, Embrace-Coaching.org, was also available, so I signed up and paid for a 2-year subscription.

That’s when it got harder! On the technical front, I needed to decide on a service that would allow me the flexibility to flow with any changes to the business, while also delivering all the functionality I needed to offer my courses to multiple cohorts, and my 1:1 coaching sessions. I needed copy for the front page, an About Me, a Contact Form, sign-up pages, and many other options that will become clear as we move ahead.

Finding the right package took some research, I can tell you! YouTube videos offer a wealth of advice and suggestions, but they all have different ideas, and finding the exact one that would do everything I wanted it to, without breaking the bank, was a long job. We finally settled on one, and as I write this, my wonderful partner, Rick, is setting up some of the back-end functions that will support me and my clients to have a seamless experience. Honestly, I couldn’t leave him if I tried – I’d never achieve all this on my own!

It took me a while, even before I started the website, to settle on a coaching programme I wanted to create. Like my writing, I needed to spend time thinking about it, trying out options and seeing where they took me. I finally had a flash of inspiration and started writing the slides. More on that in a future post.

My initial idea was to call it Embrace the Change. I like to use the word Embrace where I can, to keep my company name in the forefront of readers’ minds when they see posts from and about me. But when we searched online for that phrase, it had already been done to death. After a lot of cudgeling my brain and asking AI for ideas, I’ve settled (for now at least!) on Coping to Confidence. A search for that doesn’t even bring up a book with that title, so I think I’ve finally found something that says what I want to convey, without being too cliched.

It’s still going to be a long road to the starting line of running my first cohort, and there’s a lot of work to do. But I’m happy to say that I’m making progress. Onwards and upwards, as they say (whoops – cliche alert!), and on with the next round of decisions.