Many of us who are building coaching businesses are working hard. We’re attending networking events, posting on LinkedIn, sharing content about what coaching can do for people, and engaging with professional communities on and offline. The problem is that most of this activity looks like business-building without actually being business-building, and the distinction matters.
Busy FEELS Productive But Isn’t
The most common version of this trap is the networking circuit. Many of us attend any and all networking events, which when we get there are often full of other coaches describing their services in broadly similar terms to ours. We talk about helping people build resilience, develop confidence and achieve their goals, but so does every other coach. The people in that room hear a succession of coaches saying roughly the same thing and leave no clearer on who they should speak to or why.
The LinkedIn version of this is equally recognisable. We post regularly, which feels like we’re being consistent, but our content describes the coaching process. We talk about what coaching is, what it can help with, what the research says about its effectiveness. We share posts from the ICF and other professional bodies that make the case for coaching. What we miss is that the ICF’s audience is coaches, not potential clients, so when we share their content we are talking to ourselves and to each other. Potential clients scroll past without a second thought, because nothing in what we’ve written or shared is relevant to them.
Focus Turns Activity Into Traction
The shift from busy to effective comes from knowing exactly who we’re trying to reach. When we have a well-defined focus, a specific type of person with a specific type of problem, we stop guessing about where to put our time and attention. We know which networking events our potential clients attend (and which they don’t). We know which professional bodies they belong to, which publications they read and which conferences they go to. That knowledge turns what I call spray and pray marketing, the blunderbuss approach of showing up everywhere and hoping for the best, into something targeted and intentional. We spend less time, less money and less energy, and we generate more genuine interest as a result.
The content we create changes too. Instead of writing about coaching as a process, we write about the specific situation our potential clients are in, describing their challenges in their own language and demonstrating that we understand their world. That kind of content activates something in the right reader – their Reticular Activating System is triggered because they instantly identify themselves in what we write. They stop, they read, and they think – this person understands my situation. That is the beginning of a pipeline.
Building A Business Takes Time
One of the most damaging beliefs in the coaching profession is that client acquisition is quick. Many of us arrive in business expecting to find our first few clients quite quickly, generate referrals from there, and be fully booked within six months. This belief is widespread and understandable, but it leads coaches nowhere and causes them to give up because nothing they do is working.
The reality is more straightforward and less dramatic than the promises many in this industry make. As a rule of thumb, it takes around a year of consistent, focused effort to recoup the cost of investing in your business development, around two years to replace a full-time income, and around five years to build a business large enough to bring in associates if that’s what you want. Some coaches do this more quickly, because that is how averages work, but I am not prepared to tell anyone otherwise just to make the proposition sound more appealing.
What sustains coaches through that period is the knowledge that the activity they’re doing is the right activity. Before committing to a focus and an ideal client, there is validation work to do. This doesn’t involve asking people when they’d most likely hire a coach, which is largely futile given how few non-coaches understand what we do, but establishing that the person you’ve chosen to work with has a problem that is real, pressing and significant enough that they would pay, or sacrifice something of genuine value, to resolve it. That validation gives you a foundation to build from, and it means that the consistent effort you put in over the months that follow is building something real rather than just keeping you occupied.
Being self-employed, working from wherever you choose, generating your own income and building something that’s entirely yours and none of that comes easily or quickly, but the freedom it produces is unlike anything an employed role can offer. The coaches who get there are the ones who stop being busy and start being deliberate.
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