Business snapshot
Establish the operating context.
Collect concise facts for orientation, not an exhaustive audit.
- Business type, offer, audience, and stage.
- Role, team size, and decision authority.
- Revenue range or operating model when useful.
Describe your coaching practice and first-session workflow. Makeform builds a focused business coaching intake form for client goals, obstacles, context, and expectations.
Route new client responses to Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, adapt it, or send it to the builder. Every example is editable.
Audience
Founders preparing for an initial coaching session
Format
Focused intake with goals, metrics, and roadblocks
Prompt size
297 chars
Example form structure
Focused intake with goals, metrics, and roadblocks
Company stage, team, and offer
What are your three biggest challenges?
What measurable result do you want in 90 days?
Which decision are you avoiding?
Preferred session availability
Suggested routing tags
New prospects
Ready to schedule
Needs follow-up
Ask clients to name one measurable result for the next 90 days; it gives the first conversation a concrete starting point.
Step 1
Invite
send the intake before the first session
Step 2
Discover
collect goals, context, and obstacles
Step 3
Prepare
review themes and choose opening questions
Step 4
Coach
start with a shared, specific priority
Before the first session
Gather the business picture in advance, then arrive ready to clarify priorities and agree on a first step.
Connect the client's offer, audience, team, stage, constraints, and stated goal.
Ranking questions separate an urgent symptom from a sales, leadership, operations, or focus problem.
Use how the client describes success and frustration to frame the opening conversation.
Adapt it to your offer
Start with the closest coaching format, then change the language, depth, and required questions to match how you actually work.
Surface product decisions, team constraints, founder energy, and the next milestone.
Capture acquisition channels, capacity, baseline measures, outcomes, and previous experiments.
Gather role context, stakeholder expectations, recurring feedback, difficult conversations, and behaviors the client wants to practice.
Combine goals with scheduling, participation, peer contribution, and accessibility questions.
Build your intake
Describe your coaching method, refine the questions, and share one consistent intake before each first session.
State who you coach, the engagement format, and what you need before session one.
Remove unused questions, replace jargon, and make essential context required.
Use conditional paths for founder, executive, owner, or returning-client questions.
Send the link after booking and note two or three themes to explore.
Choose the right format
Choose basic contact collection or enough context to shape the first coaching conversation.
Field guide
Use these six sections to learn enough to prepare without asking the client to write an entire business plan before you meet.
Business snapshot
Collect concise facts for orientation, not an exhaustive audit.
Desired outcomes
Pair a larger ambition with a time-bound near-term result.
Challenges
Ask what is stuck, why it matters, and what they tried.
Current baseline
Collect only measures connected to the engagement.
Working relationship
Ask what support, challenge, reflection, and accountability helped before.
First-session focus
Let the client surface a decision or detail missed by structured questions.
Related tools
Connect intake with discovery, onboarding, scheduling, reflection, and review forms that support the engagement around each session.
Start from the existing general coaching intake tool for life, career, or mixed coaching practices.
Open toolCollect qualification details and a prospect's reason for booking before an introductory call.
Open toolGather practical setup details after a prospect becomes an active coaching client.
Open toolLet clients request a coaching time and share the topic they want to cover.
Open toolPrompt clients to reflect on completed work and set a specific next goal.
Open toolMap a workflow, its bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities when operations become the coaching focus.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for coaches preparing to meet a new founder, owner, manager, or program participant.
It is a pre-coaching questionnaire about the client's business, goals, obstacles, working preferences, and desired outcomes. It lets session one focus on priorities instead of basic fact gathering.
Ask why they want coaching now, what the business sells, what feels stuck, what they tried, their 90-day result, and what would make session one valuable. Add context only when it supports your offer.
Keep it finishable in one sitting. Use structured fields for facts and open responses for goals, challenges, decisions, and expectations.
Only if it changes how you coach the goal. Explain why, use a range when exact figures are unnecessary, and allow context. Team structure or capacity may matter more.
Yes. Keep shared goal and preference questions, then show audience-specific follow-ups with conditional paths.
Send it after booking with a deadline before session one. Review it early enough to note themes and follow-up questions.
Yes. Makeform is unlimited free for generating, editing, publishing, and collecting responses. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge; it does not unlock extra submissions or make continued use possible.
Confirm the answers, reflect back patterns, and ask which priority matters most. Treat the form as preparation; conversation adds nuance and shapes the first action.
Make the first session count.