From Coach To Well-Paid Professional (Part 3)

There’s so much misunderstanding about what marketing is. I’m writing a series of articles to show you what good marketing looks like. I’ll highlight a coaching professional who is marketing well in each article.

This is the third in a series of articles I’m writing to dispel the myth that marketing is distasteful. I’m writing it for all the coaches who are frustrated about not being able to find clients and who are fearful of marketing because of a basic misunderstanding about what good marketing looks like.

Introducing Helen Clare

Helen Clare describes herself as ‘one of the lucky ones’ because she joined us to take her coaching qualification and learn to market (we used to offer a coaching diploma and we now focus solely on marketing for coaches).

It was February 2020 when Helen joined us – just before the first UK lockdown – and spent the first 12 months of her time with us learning how to coach. The reason I’m even mentioning how Helen spent her first year is to demonstrate how successful she’s been in just over two years.

Menopause Coach

Helen combined her experience as a science teacher with her coaching qualification and her in-build ‘biology geek’ (her words!) to create her coaching business, Menopause In Schools. She works with school leaders to help them to support their peri/menopausal staff so that they can all focus on the pupils they care about.

Helen knows that schools struggle with understanding how to be flexible to accommodate peri/menopausal women. For example, if a class needs teaching, there must be a teacher there to teach it, although not all mid-life female staff members are teachers.

Helen is also aware that a significant number of good, experienced staff members are peri/menopausal women who may be struggling with peri/menopause and feel that there’s no alternative but to leave the job that they love. The sad thing is that these teachers want to stay in the classroom, and the support staff want to stay in school.

As with most coaches, Helen has a portfolio business. She offers a variety of professional services to the schools she works with. Helen offers 1:1 and group coaching, workshops, whole-school talks, and training for individuals to enable them to meet the needs of their mid-life staff. She even assists with policy writing. In addition to being a coach, Helen is also a textile artist and a published poet (now that’s a portfolio business!).

Keeping It Simple

The key thing about marketing is to keep the message simple and consistent, and Helen is excellent at both. Her marketing speaks directly to school leaders about the problems they’re experiencing and talks about the solutions that exist to these problems. Helen doesn’t gate-keep the solutions to the problems. She shares ideas and suggestions of what’s worked for others in her marketing. Her website, Menopause In Schools is a lesson in effective simplicity.

I can hear you thinking that coaching isn’t about sharing our knowledge and/or experience and you’re right – but we’re not talking about coaching, we’re talking about marketing. Marketing is about demonstrating that you a) understand the struggle, b) understand that the struggle is real, and c) working with you is the answer to that struggle.

Helen travels the country to work with schools, and she can also work with them virtually. She gets on average, an enquiry a week from school leaders who have seen her marketing message and know that they need her help. Each leads to a discovery call (or ‘sales conversation’ as we call them).

“The thing is”, Helen says, “you don’t have to actively sell anything when you have what they know they want. I find myself saying yes, I can do that for you, and yes I can do that too”.

“The mentoring and the support of the whole Coaching Revolution family gave me the skills I needed to develop and market my business. And in the process of finding my niche I also discovered my passion – helping schools support their teachers through peri/menopause.”