I watched a brilliant coach wait too long. We’d spoken, of course we had, that’s how she’d come to be on my radar in the first place. She was a brilliant, successful career woman who had found coaching at a critical juncture in her life, and in discovering coaching, she found her ‘thing’.
This coach attended a prestigious coach-training provider to learn how to coach and thoroughly enjoyed the programme. She loved everything about it, she told me, even the written assignments, which she hadn’t expected to derive such pleasure from. So taken was she that she gave up work to pursue her ambition of having her own coaching business.
Where Are My Clients?
When she qualified, she assumed the clients would come. She had the website, the logo, the headshots – she had it all sorted. What she didn’t have was paying clients. We talked at this point, but she felt that now was the time to earn, not invest. I’ve spent such a lot training to become a coach, she told me, I think I need to get some income before investing in more training.
It transpired that she’d told herself she’d figure it out after delivering a few more free sessions, then after reworking her packages and then after taking another course. Yes, she took another course in team coaching, because she told me she wanted to be able to offer even more value to her clients. Her training provider had said to her that this particular team coaching qualification was the one all businesses wanted and so it seemed the obvious thing in which to invest.
But – the brutal reality is that you can’t offer value to clients you don’t have.
Time Erodes Confidence
Months slipped by, and all the businesses that wanted team coaching were simply not there. What started as frustration turned into panic. Each week she lost confidence, her savings drained and by the time she realised that client acquisition is a skill to be learned (not something that magically falls into place), she was exhausted, broke and doubting whether she should coach at all.
Here’s what waiting cost her:
- Momentum. Marketing only works when a) it’s focused and b) it’s consistent.
- Professionalism. In marketing, consistency is professionalism. Consistency of focus, of message and of visibility.
- Credibility. Constantly changing what we offer makes potential clients feel that we don’t know what we’re doing. Dropping prices to try to secure the client also erodes credibility.
- Opportunity. The people she could have helped had no idea at all that she could – they remained as uninformed about what she did as they had in the beginning.
- Confidence. The longer she waited, the harder it became for her to believe she could turn things around.
The truth is that the cost of not learning how to get clients is far higher than the cost of learning it.
Is It You?
I wish I could say her story was rare, but it isn’t. I see it every week.
If you’ve been waiting for some income from coaching clients before you invest in learning comfortable, effective and ethical client acquisition, may I offer you a truth? I have never seen a coaching business suddenly take off after six months or more. More specifically, I’ve never seen a coach who is struggling to articulate the value of coaching in a way that’s understandable to those they want to work with suddenly get clear on how to do that without some input.
If I could be talking about you, perhaps we should talk? This is the diary – a conversation costs nothing.
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