That’s a controversial thing to say, isn’t it? However it’s true – there is never a shortage of qualified coaches who are keen to deliver coaching.
What that means is that some of the bigger coaching platforms can pay really poorly – think circa £50 per session – and coaches will work for it. One of these platforms allows coaches to coach for more than 10 hours a day on multiple days a week! How is that ethical – or healthy for the coach?!
If I needed to find coaches to deliver coaching for me on an associate basis by the end of next week, it wouldn’t be hard. I could put a post onto LinkedIn, or into one of the plethora of groups for coaches on LinkedIn and Facebook and I’d find all the coaches I need.
200 ICF ACCs? Not a problem!
100 PCCs? Not a problem either.
35 MCCs? Not hard – and if the pay is good, not hard at all.
If Good Coaches Aren’t Hard To Find, What Is?
What’s rare is coaches who can find their own clients. The number of qualified coaches globally has grown by 54% since 2019, taking us way past the 100,000 mark and that figure only accounts for ICF-credentialled coaches. The actual number of trained, qualified coaches out there is significantly higher. Every year, thousands more graduate from accredited training programmes and every single one of them is taught how to coach well. Almost none of them are taught how to build a business.
This is the bit that’s hard to hear – your coaching qualification, your hours, your credentials and your CPD are not what will set you apart, because they’re the baseline. They’re what gets you into the profession, not what gets you clients.
Most of us have no experience of client acquisition, but we do have experience of employment and there’s a useful parallel here. Think about the employee who works incredibly hard, does a brilliant job, but is invisible to the people who make promotion decisions. They haven’t realised that being very good at what they do isn’t enough. To get promoted, they also need visibility and influence – other people need to know they exist and what they’re capable of. In employment, a lack of visibility and influence simply means you don’t get promoted. You still get paid and you still have a job. In business, a lack of visibility and influence means you earn nothing and your business fails. The stakes are completely different, but most of us walk into self-employment with the same mindset and beliefs we had as employees – do good work, and somebody will notice.
When supply outstrips demand this dramatically, the people who control access to clients get to set the terms and those terms are getting worse, not better. Some platforms are now investing heavily in AI coaching, which means that the fees for human coaches are likely to drop further. One UK company sells coaching to paying clients while its coaches deliver coaching for free, and they get away with it because our professional bodies count those unpaid hours as “paid” for the purposes of credentialling. Let’s just think about that for a moment. The coaching profession has created a system in which it’s theoretically possible to reach the highest levels of credentialling without ever learning how to get a paying client. That’s not a flaw in the system, it is the system.
Where Does That Leave You?
If you’re relying on being a good coach to build your business, you’re competing with tens of thousands of other good coaches, many of whom will work for less money than you, in a market where the platforms and organisations that hold the client relationships have all the power. You can keep collecting credentials, hoping that the next qualification will be the one that tips the balance in your favour, but it won’t. I’ve seen coaches with three or four certifications and a wall full of coaching certificates who still can’t fill their practice, and I’ve seen coaches with just an ACC who have great coaching practices because they learned how to market themselves properly.
The difference between those two coaches has nothing to do with how good they are in a coaching conversation and it has everything to do with what they do outside it.
Client acquisition is a skill, in the same way that coaching is a skill. We wouldn’t expect to be competent coaches without training, practice and mentoring, and yet most of us expect to be able to attract clients with no training at all. We assume that if we’re good enough, word will spread. It won’t, or at least not fast enough or far enough to sustain a business. Word of mouth is a lovely bonus, but it’s not a strategy and it’s definitely not a strategy we can control.
A Rare Thing
What makes a coach rare, genuinely hard to find, is the combination of being good at coaching and being good at finding the people who need that coaching and are prepared to pay a professional rate for it. Being good at both is what separates coaches who have thriving practices from coaches who end up going back to their old careers within two years, quietly convinced that the market was too saturated or that they just weren’t cut out for self-employment. Neither of those things was true, it’s just that they simply didn’t have the second half of the skills they needed.
Good coaches are ten-a-penny. Good coaches who know how to market themselves are worth their weight in gold. The good news is that client acquisition isn’t a personality trait or some innate talent we either have or we don’t. It’s a learnable, teachable skill, and once we have it, no platform, no algorithm change and no flood of new graduates can take it away from us. Our ability to find our own clients is the one thing that makes us genuinely independent as a coach, and it’s the one thing almost nobody teaches us.
If you’re reading this thinking “but I shouldn’t have to market myself, my coaching speaks for itself” then I’d gently ask this – who is it speaking to? The sad truth is that if the people who need your coaching don’t know you exist, your coaching isn’t speaking to anyone at all.
If you recognise yourself, or your thinking, in what I’ve said, let’s talk soon. The Coaching Revolution can help.