We walked out of our coaching qualification feeling ready. We’d learned the models, practiced the techniques, logged our hours, and passed our assessments. We were on our way to being credentialed coaches, and we thought we had everything we needed to start coaching.
We were wrong, but we didn’t know that – yet.
The Assumption We All Made
Most of us assumed that our coaching qualification had prepared us to be coaches in the fullest sense of the word. We thought that meant we could walk into the world, hang out our shingle, and start building a coaching practice. After all, we’d spent months, sometimes years, learning how to coach. We’d invested thousands of pounds and we’d done the work.
What nobody told us is that our qualification taught us how to deliver coaching, but it didn’t teach us how to find people who want to pay for it.
When We Think We’re Failing
When clients don’t materialise, we don’t immediately think “I need to learn client acquisition skills.” That’s not where our minds go at all. Instead, we think our coaching isn’t good enough. We assume that if we were better coaches, clients would come and so we do what seems logical – we try to become better coaches.
We take more qualifications. We add another credential to our names, convinced that an advanced diploma in neuroscience coaching or a certificate in positive psychology (or whatever) will make the difference. We drop our fees, thinking that maybe we’re just too expensive for people. We coach reciprocally with other struggling coaches, telling ourselves we’re getting valuable practice. We offer free sessions, hoping that once people experience our coaching, they’ll see the value and become paying clients.
None of it works, but we keep doing it because we’re convinced the problem is our coaching. We believe that more coaching hours = more credibility with our potential clients, but it doesn’t. We believe that more certificates means we can offer more value to our potential clients, but it’s very hard to offer value to clients we don’t have.
The Truth Most Coaches Never Discover
The heart-breaking part is that most coaches never realise that their coaching skills were not the problem. They spend months, sometimes years, investing in the wrong things. They keep adding qualifications, keep lowering their prices, keep offering free sessions. Eventually they conclude that the coaching profession is saturated, that there are too many coaches and not enough clients, that they’ve missed their chance and so they give up.
They return to their previous careers or find something else to do. They tell themselves it didn’t work out, that maybe coaching wasn’t for them after all. On average, four out of five coaches follow this path, and it’s a tragedy because they were probably good coaches, they just never learned how to run a coaching business.
The Coaches Who Figure It Out
The coaches who succeed are unusual. They’re the ones who somehow realise that the problem isn’t their coaching at all – it’s that they’re missing an entirely different skill set. They understand that a coaching business has two completely separate sides, and both are equally important.
Think of it like a set of scales. On one side sits coaching delivery – all the skills we learned in our coaching course(s). On the other side sits client acquisition – all the skills we didn’t learn on those courses. For our business to work, both sides need to be balanced. Most of us walked out of our training with one side of the scales absolutely loaded, and the other side completely empty. Then we wondered why things felt so unbalanced.
The Dangerous Assumption
Many (most?) coaches think they know how to find clients. We assume it’s obvious, that it’s just common sense, that we can figure it out as we go along. We think client acquisition is about being visible, sharing our story, posting on social media, networking, having conversations. We believe that if we just do these things consistently, clients will come.
The problem is that client acquisition isn’t common sense, and it absolutely cannot be improvised. It’s a complete skill set in its own right, with its own body of knowledge, its own frameworks, its own counterintuitive principles that need to be learned properly. It’s not something we can just figure out through trial and error, any more than we could have figured out how to coach properly without any training.
Would we have walked into a room and tried to coach someone with no training at all, just winging it based on what seemed like a good idea? Of course we wouldn’t and we would be scathing of anyone who did. We understood that coaching required proper training. But somehow we think client acquisition is different, that we can just make it up as we go along.
Two Skill Sets, Equal Importance
Our coaching qualification taught us one half of what we need to run a coaching business. It taught us how to be excellent at coaching delivery. We learned how to hold space, how to listen deeply, how to ask powerful questions, how to work with goals and values and beliefs. We learned our chosen coaching model inside out. We practiced until we were competent, then practiced more until we were good.
That’s exactly what we need to do with client acquisition. We need to learn it properly, practice it consistently, and become competent at it. We need to understand niches and ideal client avatars. We need to learn how to speak in our clients’ language rather than our own jargon (I call our jargon coach-speak). We need to understand marketing principles that feel completely counterintuitive at first. We need to learn how to build a pipeline that means that by the time someone lands in our diary, they know who we are, what we do and what it costs. We need to have sales conversations that are ethical and comfortable. We need to build systems that consistently bring new clients to us.
These skills don’t come naturally. They need to be learned, and that takes time and proper guidance.
It’s Not You
If you’re struggling to find clients, it’s not because you’re a bad coach. It’s not because your coaching isn’t good enough. It’s not because the profession is saturated or because you’ve missed your chance or because the universe is trying to tell you something.
It’s because you’re missing half the skill set you need to run a coaching business, and your qualification didn’t prepare you for that. You walked out of your training ready to coach, but not ready to find people who want to be coached by you. That’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility to do something about it.
Your qualification made you a great coach, now you need to learn how to become a business owner. The difference between being a coach and being a business owner is having clients.
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