A £40 Billion Business Lesson Every Coach Needs
Starbucks recently fired its CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, because its share price lost $40 billion during his tenure. His credentials were impeccable – he’d worked for one of the ‘Big Four’ management consultants who literally advise others how to run businesses. There was just one problem – he’d never actually run a business himself.
If a management consultant can’t translate their expertise into running a business, what makes coaches think we can?
The Dangerous Assumption of Expertise
For some of us, after decades of successful employment, we set off to build our businesses, believing we know what to do. We write interesting things on LinkedIn to get the ball rolling and we attend networking events. Many of us have been successful professionals, often in senior positions, and we are firmly of the belief How hard can this be?
Two years later, many are back in employment.
The problem isn’t lack of effort or even lack of talent – it’s that we don’t know what we don’t know. We think being an expert at delivery (which we invariably were in our careers) makes us experts at running businesses, but it doesn’t.
When Marketing Degrees Don’t Matter
At The Coaching Revolution, we’ve had clients with degrees and entire careers in marketing come to us saying they couldn’t work out how to transition from selling someone else’s product or service to selling their own. This should tell you everything you need to know about the gap between employed expertise and entrepreneurial knowledge.
In the West, our education systems are designed to create employees, not entrepreneurs. Yet many coaches think I’ve got this based on nothing more than ego and inflated confidence in their understanding of how business works. I really don’t mean to be rude when I say this is about ego – I’m known for being very straight-talking and this is simply me doing that. I’ve had conversations with knowledgeable, experienced individuals who left senior positions to start coaching businesses, thinking it would be different for them and that they wouldn’t fail. It wasn’t, and they really struggled.
The Focus Problem Nobody Sees Coming
We often believe that we understand networking from our corporate experience, having attended numerous professional events, made connections, and built relationships. However, there’s a fundamental difference we often miss when it comes to building a business and that is focus.
I have never met a coach who is focused enough without having learned why and how to get that focus. Literally, I’ve never spoken to a coach who has anything like the level of focus required to run a business from the get-go. For example, we fail to understand that marketing various services to a single market is more effective than having different audiences for each service. If, for instance, we want to offer leadership training, coaching, and consulting, it’s far more effective to provide all three to the same target audience than to split our efforts.
Many (if not most) of us view this level of focus as narrowing our options rather than being crystal clear about what we do and for whom. Because we don’t know what we don’t know, we continue spreading ourselves impossibly thin, wondering why nothing works.
The Ego Trap of Past Success
When we’re accustomed to being the expert and improvising, and that improvisation has worked in the past, we tend to believe it will work again. However, improvisation within our areas of skill and knowledge is one thing. Improvisation with client acquisition and business building is something else entirely.
Coaching Revolution clients – the majority of whom have had stellar careers – all express amazement at how much more there is to business building than they initially believed. One mentee said she couldn’t believe how something as simple as the way we structure sales calls made such a massive difference to her conversion rates I can’t even work out what I thought I was doing before! she said.
These aren’t people who lack intelligence or experience – they’re simply people who didn’t know what they didn’t know.
The Two-Year Statistic
Statistically, coaches struggle for two years before either getting help or giving up. Some return to employment when the six-figure income they imagined doesn’t materialise fast enough, or when redundancy money runs out. Others persist longer, burning through savings and inevitably deciding ruefully that the coaching market is saturated.
The market is absolutely not saturated, by the way. It’s just saturated with coaches who have zero knowledge of how effective client acquisition works.
The Shame That Shouldn’t Exist
There’s a feeling of shame around not knowing how to find clients, as if it should be an innate skill. It’s not. We cannot know what we have not learned, and there are many more moving parts to client acquisition and business building than most of us realise.
A coach recently told me he had two days a week to work on his coaching business. The problem is, he told me, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing with that time. That’s not a personal failing – it’s the natural result of never having been taught.
The Coaching Revolution Reality Check
The coaches in The Coaching Revolution are often testament to this pattern. We have coaches with stellar careers in all industries, sectors, and professions who have spent varying amounts of time messing about trying to make their coaching businesses work. Then, in under a year with us, they’re knocking it out of the park because they finally know what they’re doing.
The difference isn’t talent, intelligence, or even effort – it’s knowledge. Specifically, it’s knowledge of what you don’t know you need to know.
The Bottom Line
Our professional expertise, no matter how impressive, doesn’t translate into business-building knowledge. That’s not a character flaw or a personal weakness, it’s simply reality.
The coaches who succeed aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more talented than those who fail. They’re just the ones who accepted early enough that they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and did something about it.
An Opportunity
We are currently open for enrolment for our Collective (small group) programmes. We are enrolling coaches who want to coach either within organisations, within the UK public sector, or private clients and would like to learn solid client acquisition skills.
If you’d like the opportunity to discuss what you don’t know you don’t know, why not come and speak to us?