I’m in Istanbul at the moment and yesterday, I bought a Kindle book to read on the plane.
It’s a new ‘build your coaching business’ book by a well-known person within the ‘helping coaches to find clients’ space. I was expecting great things, and looking forward to reading it – after all, every day’s a school day, right?
I was disappointed.
It’s a book about the WHAT, but not the HOW.
What I mean is that it tells you WHAT you need to do, but doesn’t tell you HOW to do it – there’s nothing actionable in the book and by the end of it, I felt gaslighted again on your behalf. (If you’re wondering why I say ‘again’, I wrote an article about this a while ago you can find it here: https://thecoachingrevolution.com/2023/11/20/client-acquisition-are-coaches-being-gaslighted/)
I find books like this disappointing. Disappointing because coaches buy these books hoping to learn something actionable, and they’re left confused.
Let’s face it, if you ask a coach what they need to do to build a business – and they have even the first clue – they’ll say something like this:
- Find a niche
- Create a client in that niche (we call it an ideal client avatar)
- Write a marketing message
- Get visible
Now that’s all great, but it’s a list of concepts. It doesn’t tell you what to do. I know from years’ of experience that coaches can say those words but really, really struggle to action any of those steps.
Coaches Struggle With Marketing Concepts
Here’s the thing.
Coaches struggle with marketing concepts and to be fair, why shouldn’t they?
We’re not taught this stuff at school, and even those with marketing degrees and entire careers in marketing have been Coaching Revolution clients because understanding how marketing works, and being able to apply it to our own businesses is different.
This book is light touch on the ‘oh, you need to do this, and this and this’ without being specific on the how. By the how, I mean – what do I have to do to make this work for me and my business?
The What And The How Of Marketing For Coaches
When I wrote my book, I wanted to give coaches as much of the how as possible.
I want coaches to be able to read my book and then actually implement what they’ve learned. My book contains a couple of workbooks – and a link to download a PDF version of them if you want to. You can find my book here if you’re in the UK. You can find it on your own Amazon if you’re not in the UK.
We all know that if a reading a book was enough, the 82% of coaches who fail, wouldn’t fail would they? If reading a book was enough to change our lives, we’d all be living lives of peace, tranquillity and success – and yet…
But – and it’s a big but – coaches are gaslit so often when it comes to building a coaching business that I want my book to cut through the BS. I want it to be a long, hard look at why coaches are failing and what they can do instead.
The Hard Truth About Building A Coaching Business
The hard truth is that it’s hard to build a coaching business.
Of course it’s hard! If it was easy, every coach would have a successful coaching business, wouldn’t they?
But it’s worth it!
It is so worth it. Every single coach we’ve ever worked with, who stuck it out and didn’t decide it was too hard to continue, will tell you it’s worth it.
I’m not avoiding talking about those other coaches by the way – there are some we work with who decide that they’re not in it for the long game, and that’s their choice and it’s ok.
It is hard, to build a coaching business and it can feel very hard. Our community exists to support us through the hard to the other side – and there is always another side – but it takes time. Some coaches generate enquiries immediately, for others it takes longer.
Building a business is a long-game. If we were building bricks and mortar businesses, we’d have had huge upfront expenses and ongoing rent/rates/salaries/stock etc expenses as well as the expense it took to gain the skills and knowledge required to deliver our product/service in the first place. It can take 5 years to get into the black with this kind of business.
Building a coaching business involves none of the monthly overhead that building a bricks and mortar business involves. It involves very little monthly overhead at all. At The Coaching Revolution we teach low-cost and no-cost marketing techniques because we want you to keep your monthly outgoings to a minimum.
When coaches ask me how long it takes to build a viable coaching business, one that can replace their full-time income, I tell them that it’s a two-year plan. For some, it will be less than that. However I’m not in the business of everything I say being a best-case scenario. When I give intangibles, I stick to the most conservative opinion.
How Much Do You Want This Business?
The truth is, it comes down to this – how much do you want this coaching business?
Enough to work hard for two years?
Enough to spend the money on an ICF-accredited ‘marketing for coaches’ programme so that you really know and understand what you need to do to make it work – and have the support to get there?
If so, we should probably talk. The link to our diary is here.