There’s a belief in our profession that goes something like this – once I reach a certain milestone, clients will start coming. The milestone might be 75 coaching hours, or ACC, or PCC, but the belief is the same. We invest our time, money and energy into reaching that point, and we expect something to change when we get there.
It doesn’t.
How We Build Hours Without Building a Business
Pro bono coaching is revered in our profession. It’s seen as noble, generous, a sign that we care about more than just money. This reverence creates a culture where coaching for free isn’t just acceptable, it’s admired, and this causes problems that many of us don’t see until it’s too late.
When we’re working towards a credential, we need hours. The obvious way to get them is to coach people, and the easiest people to find to coach are other coaches. I belong to several Facebook groups where coaches working towards credentials are constantly asking for reciprocal coaching partners so they can both log another hour. It works, in the sense that the hours accumulate and the credential gets closer, but it doesn’t build a practice, because at no point in this process do we learn how to find a paying client.
We can add pro bono hours through various schemes, and we can work as associate for organisations that pay nothing (but they charge the clients a fee) because those hours count as “paid” for credentialing purposes. None of these routes is bad in itself, but together they create a path to credentialing that bypasses client acquisition skills entirely.
It’s possible, in theory, to reach the highest levels of qualification without ever having had a paying client of our own. Our systems allow it, they even encourage it.
Coaching Coaches Isn’t the Same
There’s another problem with building hours solely by coaching other coaches – it doesn’t really prepare us for coaching real clients.
When we coach someone who understands the coaching process, everything is more straightforward. They know that a session starts with contracting and they understand what that’s for and what to say. A non-coach can be much less focused during contracting because they don’t know why it matters. A coach being coached understands that each session will result in agreeing some actions, so they’re lining them up in their head, even if only subconsciously. A non-coach doesn’t have that framework and may need more support to get there.
Whenever I make this point, someone will tell me they find coaches the most challenging clients. Perhaps that’s true for them, but even if it is, it doesn’t change the fundamental problem. Coaches still understand the process, still know what to expect, and still speak our language. The challenge they present is not the same as working with someone who doesn’t know what to expect from a coaching conversation, who might ask for advice, and who needs guiding through the process rather than already understanding how it works.
Reciprocal coaching with other coaches isn’t an accurate representation of what coaching non-coaches is like, so once we’re trained, what are we doing it for other than to tick a box?
A False Promise
The real damage is the belief that the credential is the gateway to earning. We believe it, and so do our families. When a coach’s partner or spouse asks “when will you start earning?”, the answer is often “when I get my ACC” or “when I hit 100 hours” or “when I finish my training”. Everyone waits for that moment, expecting that something will shift.
The milestone arrives but nothing shifts. The clients don’t appear, because they were never going to appear just because we passed a threshold. Client acquisition is a skill, and if we haven’t learned it, no credential can compensate for that gap.
What Happens Next
Coaches who reach this point are disappointed, and disappointment turns into doubt. They wonder if they’re not good enough, or if the market is saturated, or if coaching just doesn’t work as a career. Some try harder, accumulating more hours and more credentials, believing that the next milestone will be the one that changes things, but it won’t, because it can’t.
Eventually, most of us disappear. We can’t sustain a business with no income – who could? The profession loses coaches not because they couldn’t coach, but because the system led us to believe that credentials would bring clients, and when that doesn’t happen, there is no path forward.
This is the real cost of our reverence for pro bono coaching and our credential-focused culture. We’re producing qualified coaches who have no idea how to build a business, and then we’re surprised when they fail.
A Different Approach
Client acquisition is a skill that needs to be learned, just like coaching itself. It doesn’t come automatically with hours or credentials, and it doesn’t develop through reciprocal coaching or pro bono work. It requires dedicated study and practice. In a perfect world, this would happen once you’ve finished your coach training and while you’re accumulating hours towards your credential. In reality, coaches come to us when they’re sick to death of what they’re doing not working, but don’t know how to change that.
If this sounds familiar, if you’ve been accumulating hours and waiting for the credential to change things, it might be time for a conversation about what’s actually required to build a coaching practice.
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