Coach Supervisors – How Do You Handle This Question?

I’ve been talking with several coach supervisors recently. Many (most?) of them have a similar issue with a question that is asked regularly in supervision.

The question is this – how do I find coaching clients?

There seem to be a few issues about this question:

1. It’s asked often, particularly if you work with new(ish) coaches
2. Is it a topic for supervision at all?
3. If it isn’t, how do you handle that boundary without appearing to avoid the issue?
4. If it is, how do you answer it?

I’ve also spoken about this issue with several coaches who now have a solid client acquisition process and thriving coaching businesses. They tell me that when they were new coaches and they had group supervision, that this question was raised in almost every group session. When it was, they said, the supervisor simply didn’t know how to answer the question.

I appreciate the problem from both ends of the telescope – as it were. Let me explain the coach perspective before I move on to the supervisor perspective.

From A Coach Perspective

Coaches know that:

• They need clients in order to be able to coach and build their hours.
• They would prefer that those coaches paid them a professional rate, not a cup of coffee (for example).
• They know they can coach reciprocally, but they would prefer ‘real’ clients.
• They have no idea how to find clients.
• They have tried networking and no one seemed to be interested in coaching.
• They’ve delivered discovery sessions and picked up the occasional client, but not at a proper rate and nowhere near enough of them to be able to even consider giving up full-time work.
• They have eventually found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having difficulty finding people to deliver discovery sessions to.
• At this point, coaches become what I refer to as ‘vulnerable’ to the endless charlatans that exist in the ‘I can help you find coaching clients’ space.

The problem with vulnerability is that predators can sense it. That includes the charlatans I mention.

Coaches seem to lose all sense of perspective when they reach the point of vulnerability. I have known coaches spend eye-watering amounts of money on things that were frankly too good to be true.

I’ve known coaches spend money on:

🤞 ’20 warm leads a week in your diary’ for just £1k per month.

❌ Yes, there were 20 appointments in the diary each week, but these people had no idea why they were there, they’d never heard of coaching and they certainly weren’t interested in becoming a client.

💔 This coach chose to spend his money with the appointment setters rather than learn how to find his own clients. At the end of three months he told me that he’d realised the folly of allowing someone to feed him rather than learning to fish for himself.

🤞 An acolyte of the ‘lift up your eyes’ school of client acquisition.

❌ “There was literally nothing actionable in anything I learned”

💔 This coach spent £10k on client acquisition training. She ended up with a £10k hole in her pocket and zero clients, because there was nothing tangible taught. She felt foolish and it took her another two years before she felt brave enough to talk to me.

🤞 If you’re going to build a client acquisition process, why wouldn’t you build one for ‘high-ticket clients’?

❌ This coach was taught to hang around on LinkedIn and spot comments or posts that demonstrated an issue that coaching could help to resolve. Then, the coach was told to slide into the posters DMs and offer a coaching conversation.

50 = 5 = 1

Apparently, if you do this 50 times a week, 5 people will say yes and 1 will become a client. Yay – one high paying client a week! This proved very trying for the coach involved because a) the 45 who said no weren’t necessarily polite about it (no one likes uninvited DMs!) and b) when she struggled with this uncomfortable process, the weekly ‘group coaching’ session involved being made to feel foolish and being told it was all down to the coach’s poor mindset. 🤯

I could go on – I’ve heard tales of vast sums of money and completely unrealistic promises from so many coaches over the seven years that I’ve been running The Coaching Revolution.

From A Coach Supervisor Perspective

It seems that this question can raise discomfort for some supervisors. Is it appropriate in a supervision session? This isn’t for me to answer because it’s not my area of expertise. But I’ve had this conversation often enough to know that it causes challenges for some supervisors around where the boundaries of supervision lie.

If you’re a supervisor who does think this question is one for supervision there can still be discomfort for some. The ‘how do I find clients?’ question is particularly uncomfortable for the supervisors who come from the following backgrounds.

1. They had existing monetiseable credibility when they became a coach. What I mean when I say this is that had people within their network who were in a position to commission coaching within a corporate environment (by ‘corporate’ I mean any situation in which the organisation pays the fee, so can include public/third sector). They reached out to that network and found all the clients they could handle.
2. Their hours have been built entirely from associate work. To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing, but associate work can be difficult to come by these days.
3. They built their hours while they were internal coaches.
4. They built their coaching hours whilst working for a coach training organisation, coaching trainee coaches.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with building coaching hours in any of the above ways, but those ways aren’t necessarily repeatable by the coaches sitting in the supervision session. Suggesting that coaches email everyone in their network, because that’s what you did, isn’t very helpful if their network doesn’t contain the same kind of useful contacts.

Associate work…

Associate work can be so difficult to find that there’s a new company that sells coaching into organisations and engages associate coaches to deliver the coaching pro bono. And they have a waiting list of coaches hoping to deliver pro bono coaching for them! Again > 🤯

Some of the bigger platforms have turned down coaches with a PCC and told them to come back when they have more experience. I know of more than one coach who was engaged by a big platform, undertook the (not insignificant training) required and then was never offered a single hour of work. This significant increase in competition for associate work is not surprising when you realise that there has been a 54% increase in coaches becoming qualified between 2019 and 2022 (ICF Global Coaching Study, 2023 Executive Summary).

Not all coaches can be internal coaches, nor can they build hours with associate work from coach training companies.

This situation leaves a question:

What Can You Do?

So how do you give good support to these coaches without putting yourself into a difficult situation?

If you’d like some suggestions about what you can do to help coaches to avoid the charlatans and still find clients, whilst remaining ethical and within your professional boundaries, might I suggest that you join me for a webinar and Q&A on 21 November at 7pm (UK)? If you’re unable to join me live register anyway because all registrants will be sent a recording of the session.

You can register here: https://thecoachingrevolution.com/Supervisor-Webinar