You’ve qualified as a coach. You’ve done the work, passed the assessments, earned your credential. Now you need clients, and when you look around for help, you see business coaches everywhere. They have businesses, they coach people on business, so it seems obvious that they can help you build yours. You hire one, and at first it feels right because you’re working on your mindset and personal development, and choosing actions after each session that feel meaty. You feel productive, like you’re finally doing something about the client problem.
The issue is that what you’re doing probably isn’t going to work and it rarely leads to the outcome you’re paying for.
Can I say at this point that this isn’t me saying that all business coaches are lousy – there are definitely business coaches who are good guys, but from the number of coaches I’ve spoken to over the years who have had bad experiences, they are few and far between.
You Can’t Coach Across A Knowledge Gap
If your business coach is a qualified coach, they’re often trying to coach a business out of your head. They ask powerful questions, you have realisations and you leave sessions with ideas about what to try next. The problem is that we can’t coach across a knowledge gap. We can coach ideas out of someone’s head, but that doesn’t make those ideas commercially viable.
I’ve spoken to coaches who spent a lot of money with business coaches and ended up with (for example) thousands of printed leaflets describing what coaching is and how it can help you gain a deeper understanding of yourself. The idea was that these leaflets would be distributed about the local area to salons and clinics, because that’s where people sit with time to spare. The issue with this kind of thing is simple – no one cares about having a deeper understanding of themselves and they don’t want to pay for it. Another place that business coaches can fall down is on the concept of niching. I’ve spoken to coaches who chose to focus (for example)on mid-life women as a niche, but when I asked which mid-life women, they couldn’t tell me. Worse still, they didn’t know how to find them. They’d spent a lot of money and time on this exercise and gained nothing useful.
We don’t know, what we don’t know. Most of us have no idea what good client acquisition looks like. We don’t know that for a niche to be worth pursuing it must be specific and commercially viable. We don’t know that a good niche contains people who a) can afford to pay us, b) have a problem that coaching could resolve and c) are easy to find on and offline.
Spreadsheets Galore!
If a business coach isn’t a qualified coach, they may hand over spreadsheets and suggest niches that are nowhere near focused enough. They might have you printing those leaflets that describe the coaching process, creating a website that is essentially an online CV that no one will ever find because no one is searching for a coach in that way. The most uncomfortable actions I heard suggested was to make a list of everyone you know and then cold-call them and offer discovery sessions. It keeps you busy, but busy doesn’t mean effective.
Why You Stick With It
We stick with our business coach because the mindset work feels great, and the personal development feels productive. The actions we choose after each session give us something to do, which is reassuring when we’ve been feeling stuck. We hope it will work, and if we’ve paid in advance we want to get value for our money.
There’s no defining moment when we realise it isn’t working, just a gradual sense that it feels pointless. Nothing is happening, you haven’t got clients, and when the business coach doesn’t have a reassuring answer, you eventually slip away.
An alternative to this outcome is that your business coach suggests that you coach coaches, because we’re always up for more coaching and hey – they’re making a good living from it aren’t they?
We need to remember the sunk cost fallacy – the money we spent is gone, and sticking at this sometimes uncomfortable work won’t make it come back.
Pyramid Scheme?
You’re fed up, frustrated, disillusioned, and feeling like a loser. You’re several thousand pounds down with no clients, and now you believe that marketing doesn’t work. It’s awful really, because what you needed was never what you were sold.
The kind of business coach I’m talking about has a business because they coach coaches. It’s coaches all the way down, a pyramid scheme you didn’t spot because you were focused on your own problems. They make their living from people like you who need clients, not from the commercial success of their advice.
What Coaches Need
We don’t need more coaching or someone to ask us powerful questions about our business, we need knowledge. We need someone to hold our hand and teach us, step-by-step, what to do. Coaching Revolution coaches tell us the relief they felt was overwhelming when they finally had a process to follow for client acquisition, because client acquisition isn’t something you can coach out of someone’s head. It’s a skill set that must be taught.
If you’re reading this and recognising yourself in my words, don’t blame yourself. Having a business coach seems like such a sensible idea when we want a business. We don’t know what we don’t know and it’s difficult to know who you can trust in a world of Emperor’s New Clothes gurus.
Can I offer you a tip? If anyone is guaranteeing success in a short timeframe, don’t believe it. If they’re promising you can earn large sums of money in a short timeframe, don’t believe that either.
May I Offer Some Help?
If you’re at the point where you’re looking for some help with building a business, why don’t we have a talk to see how The Coaching Revolution could support you? Let’s talk soon.