I’ve had a couple of conversations this last week with really frustrated coaches. They’re frustrated, because they’ve spent £$£$£$ on qualifications and now they’re ready to recoup some of that expense, not invest.
Qualifications
Coaching qualifications are expensive. There are many different – and equally good – routes to a coaching qualification, but none is cheap.
Then, there are multiple ‘add-on’ qualifications that coaches can choose to take. Things like NLP, personality profiling tools, facilitation qualifications etc are available (and sound quite good, right?).
The route to being thoroughly qualified – qualified enough to feel like you know what you’re talking about – can be incredibly expensive.
Qualifications Aren’t Enough
Here’s the rub; qualifications aren’t enough.
Qualifications, no matter how many of them you may have, equal 50% of the skills you need to run a successful coaching business. If you have one, solid coaching qualification, you have 50% of the skills. If you’ve added multiple other qualifications to your quiver, you still only have 50% of the skills you need to run a coaching business. It makes no difference how many additional qualifications you pile in there, you still have only 50% of the skills you need.
The Missing 50%
The other 50% of the skills you need are business development skills.
We know from experience that coach training institutions don’t teach business development skills. To be fair, it’s not their job. Their job is to help you become the very best version of a coach that you can be.
Occasionally, a training provider will have a nod at business development in one of their modules, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of what you actually need to know.
The Coaching Revolution
At The Coaching Revolution, we teach business development skills to coaches. That’s our core business. It’s what we do best. We don’t work with other types of entrepreneur, only coaches.
We work with people who have already got their coaching qualification, to provide training in the missing 50% of their skills, the business development part..
The International Coach Federation (ICF) have a shocking global statistic that says that 82% of coaching businesses fail in their first two years. What that means is that those four out of five coaches who fail, fail because they don’t know how to build a business. What they do know, is how to coach, but that isn’t enough!
Business Development Training Isn’t Free
The coaches who said that they need to earn, not invest, have misunderstood where they are in the process of developing a business.
Where they are is here; they have the delivery side of their fledgling business sorted. They don’t have a process in place which will create the opportunities for them to do that delivery. To get that, they need to invest.
Being brutally honest, the world is full of great coaches. If I put a post on LinkedIn and say that I need coaches to deliver coaching for me. I would be inundated with responses. I know from the ICF statistics, that 4:5 of those respondents don’t have enough coaching work.
There are lots of free business development training resources available. If they worked, the 82% statistic wouldn’t stand, would it? The ICF has the gravitas that we can take them seriously and they say that 82% fail.
What We Teach Is Valuable!
What we teach is incredibly valuable. It is equally as valuable to a coach as their qualification. Without the skills that we teach, the coach can’t thrive in their new business. Learning these skills is worth the investment.
At the core of what we sell, are mentoring sessions. These are delivered 1:1 by a mentor who has a successful coaching business. One of the 18% that didn’t fail.
Your mentor and you will have 11 hours to hone your skills and make sure you don’t trip up. Your mentor, and our mentor/mentee community will support you in your business building activities. We will champion you every step of the way.
What price would you put on having a successful coaching business? One that will grow going forward and will enable you to earn your living as a coach?
Want to talk? This is my diary.
(On a similar note, our mentor Alisa Barcan, wrote a blog post for us about whether your coaching qualification is an asset or a liability.)