We qualified as coaches. Most of us are good at it, we love the work, but the clients just aren’t coming and we can’t work out what we’re doing wrong.
Meanwhile, some of our training cohort seem to be doing absolutely fine. They landed clients within weeks of qualifying, they’re posting about new contracts on LinkedIn, and they make it all look effortless. We’re left sitting there wondering what on earth we’re doing wrong, why it’s so hard for us when it seems so easy for them.
Here’s the truth that nobody wants to talk about – you’re probably not doing anything wrong at all. It’s just that most of us are starting from a completely different place, and the people giving us advice don’t realise that matters.
What Is Monetisable Credibility?
Most of us have never heard this term, and when I mention it coaches look completely blank. Once I explain what it means however, I watch everything click into place – suddenly all those months of frustration start to make sense.
Monetisable credibility is the influence, authority, and network some of us built before we became coaches. It’s what allows about circa one-fifth of newly qualified coaches to pick up the phone and speak to people who already understand what coaching is, who have plenty of disposable income to spend on it, and who may even be in positions where they can commission organisational coaching contracts worth tens of thousands of pounds. These coaches typically spent ten years or more in senior corporate roles, building extensive networks in their sector and becoming well-known in their industry. When they qualified as coaches, they didn’t need to find strangers and convince them that coaching had value, they simply offered coaching to the people who already knew them, trusted them, and had the budget to pay for it.
It works brilliantly, and of course it does – but it holds a problem for most of us. If we don’t have that kind of background, this approach won’t work for us no matter how hard we try.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
If we’re in the 80% who don’t have monetisable credibility, we’ve almost certainly been following advice that assumes we do. We’ve been told to have meaningful conversations with people in our network, to let people know we’re coaches now, to offer discovery calls and trust that word of mouth will gradually build our business. We try it because it sounds reasonable and everyone keeps saying it’s the way to do things. There’s even a very famous book that we may have read that confirms that good conversations are all we need. And so we have conversations, we mention our coaching, and nothing happens.
We try harder. We have more conversations, we’re more intentional about it, we follow the advice more carefully, and still nothing. Eventually we start to think we must be terrible at this, that maybe we’re just not cut out for running a business, that perhaps the universe is trying to tell us something. But we’re not terrible at it – we’re just using an approach that was designed for someone with a completely different starting point, and we don’t know that.
The Calibre Question
When I talk about coaches with monetisable credibility having access to a different “calibre” of contact, I’m not being judgemental about people’s worth or value. I’m being factual about their circumstances and resources. Those of us without monetisable credibility typically don’t have ready access to senior decision-makers who commission six-figure coaching contracts for their organisations. We don’t have contacts with £10,000 sitting around for personal development. We don’t move in circles where everyone already understands what coaching is and sees it as a normal, valuable service.
That’s not a personal failing, it’s just reality. The problem is that those in the coach training profession assume we all have access to these contacts, that everyone starts from the same place. But we don’t.
Why This Makes People Angry
When those of us without monetisable credibility finally hear this explanation, we feel two very distinct emotions, often simultaneously. There’s relief because we finally understand why we’ve been struggling so much – it wasn’t our fault, we weren’t doing it wrong, we were just following advice designed for someone else’s situation. But there’s also real frustration, sometimes bordering on anger, because we’ve been misled. We’ve spent months, sometimes years, trying desperately to make an approach work that was never going to work for us, and the people advising us didn’t realise there was an alternative approach.
Interestingly, coaches who do have monetisable credibility sometimes react quite badly when I talk about this concept. They seem to think I’m suggesting they didn’t work hard to build their businesses, or that their success was somehow handed to them on a plate. I’m absolutely not suggesting that – they worked hard, they put in the hours, they earned their success. But they did start from a different place with different resources available to them, and failing to acknowledge this doesn’t help those of us who are struggling.
There’s More Than One Way
What we really need to understand is that there’s more than one way to build a successful coaching business. If we have monetisable credibility, then yes, having conversations with our existing network of well-connected, well-resourced contacts is genuinely a solid strategy that can work well. But if we don’t have that kind of network – and most of us don’t – then we need a different approach entirely. We need to learn client acquisition skills that don’t rely on knowing the right people or having spent the last decade building relationships with senior decision-makers.
This isn’t a consolation prize or a second-best option for those of us who couldn’t make the “proper” method work. It’s simply a different skill set, and frankly it’s the one most of us actually need to learn. The good news is that client acquisition skills can be learned, they work reliably when we apply them properly, and once we have them we’re not dependent on who we used to know or what we used to do before we became coaches.
Stop Feeling Bad
If you’ve been struggling to find clients, please stop telling yourself that you’re bad at this because you’re not. You’re not bad at finding clients – you’ve been using the wrong method for your particular situation, and that’s a completely different thing. I believe that our profession as a whole has a responsibility to acknowledge that most newly qualified coaches don’t have monetisable credibility, and we need to stop pretending that one approach works for everyone regardless of their circumstances. Until that happens though, it’s up to us to recognise where we’re starting from and choose our strategy accordingly.
You absolutely can learn to find clients and build the coaching business you want. But first we need to stop trying to have meaningful conversations with a network of senior, well-resourced contacts that we simply don’t have access to. There’s no shame in that – we just need a different approach, one that’s designed for the reality of our situation rather than someone else’s.
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