I talk to lots of coaches every week. Dozens of them. What’s become very interesting and more than a little entertaining is the number of them who have said to me ‘I am Stella!’
Who Is Stella?
Stella Hewittson is 42 years old and she is a coach. She has a background in HR and took a professional coaching qualification while she was employed in HR. Since her children started school, she has tried – and failed – to create a financially viable coaching business.
She has a beautiful website, lovely branding, a presence on several social media platforms and she posts regularly. Her branding, font and ‘tone’ are aligned across all the places you can find her. Her website talks about her qualifications and all the different kinds of coaching she can offer.
She does have a few coaching clients, but they’ve all been people she knows and have paid mates-rates. She is reaching the end of her tether with this whole business thing – she just cannot figure out what she’s doing wrong.
Last year, Stella took an additional qualification so that she had even more value to be able to offer to her clients, and even that didn’t make any difference to her client acquisition rate. (Although to be fair, it’s hard to add value to clients you don’t actually have!)
Probably the most important thing that you need to know about Stella is that she’s completely and utterly fictional!
Why Does Stella Exist?
Stella exists because in order to market The Coaching Revolution effectively, I needed to have a focus for that marketing. I could say that we work with ‘any coaches who want to monetise their expertise’ but actually, that’s not true.
- We don’t work with unqualified coaches – unless they are either taking a qualification, or commit to taking ours.
- We don’t work with people who believe that their experience makes them a coach, or those who ‘realise that I’ve been coaching for years’ unless they are prepared to take a qualification. (For the record, without exception those people have said to me ‘Wow! I thought what I was doing was coaching, but it wasn’t!”)
What Stella does for me is to give me a focus to articulate what I know she’s struggling with. She is in effect an amalgamation of the coaches I know and/or have spoken to and the difficulties that they encounter.
She Makes My Life Easier
Having Stella as my ideal client avatar makes everything I do marketing wise, both easier and more focused. Easier, because I simply talk to her in my marketing, more focused because I can forget about anyone else and their needs/beliefs/expectations.
Does having Stella mean that I exclude people with my marketing message? Yes it does. Does that matter? Yes it does in a really positive way – back to the I don’t want to work with everyone point.
When I first created Stella in September 2017, it was my intention to have her as my ideal client for the first six months. She is still my ideal client nearly 4 years later because – and this is the crux of the matter – she still works for me. The marketing I do that is aimed at Stella brings me clients of all types. They usually have little in common with Stella except that they share her 3am problem; they can’t find clients who want to pay a professional rate for their coaching services.
I have had male coaches from all over the world arrive in my diary after having read my book who open a conversation with me by saying ‘I am Stella’!
Stella Rocks!
Let me tell you why she rocks. She has the following things in common with every client that The Coaching Revolution has ever had (not all clients had all things, but all clients had some things):
- She loves coaching
- She wants to do it for a living
- She hasn’t a clue about how to market a professional services business – but she didn’t realise that until she tried for ages without success
- She’s intelligent and loves learning
- She has taken extra qualifications in her search for more clients – only to find that they make no difference in her client acquisition
Are you Stella?
Should we talk? This is my diary.
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