You’ve chosen your niche. You can articulate the problem you solve, you understand the people you want to help, and you’re ready to get visible. There’s just one problem with this picture, and it’s the reason so many coaches struggle to find consistent clients even when they’re genuinely skilled at what they do.
I’m willing to bet that although you think you have a niche, what you actually have is a problem you’d like to work with and those are not the same thing.
What You’ve Missed
I did a quick search of coaches on LinkedIn and specifically at what they say in their headline (that bit of text underneath our names). In a 10 second search I found the following:
- I work with people who are overwhelmed
- I help people navigate transitions
- I offer space to think
- I help leaders build emotional intelligence
These sound like niches, and if you’ve written something similar, I understand that it felt specific when you typed it. The thing is, you’ve identified a WHAT and it’s not enough on its own. You also need a WHO.
The WHAT is the problem that a potential client might be struggling with. The WHO is the searchable, findable community of people who experience that problem in a specific context. When you say you help people with anxiety, you’ve described something that almost everyone experiences in some form at some point, and you’ve given yourself no way to find them. When you say you help leaders build emotional intelligence, you’ve described a skill that matters across every industry and at every level, but you’re invisible to everyone who may need you.
This is where commercial viability enters the picture, and it’s where most coaches balk. We assume that if we solve a real problem, people with that problem will find us. This belief is both understandable and completely wrong.
Searchability
Without a searchable WHO, we can’t deliberately curate an audience. We can’t identify where these people gather, what they read, which associations they belong to, or how to find them consistently. We can’t network with them intentionally because we don’t have a clear professional identity to network around. We post content about anxiety or overwhelm or emotional intelligence into a general feed, hoping it reaches someone, somewhere, but we have no strategy for building a community around us and without that mindfully created audience, we can’t build commercial viability.
Let me just talk about LinkedIn for a moment.
What we write on LinkedIn isn’t broadcast to everyone. The algorithm shows our content to a fraction of our connections and followers, and which fraction depends on what that algorithm thinks will drive engagement. Most coaches dramatically overestimate how many people see their posts. Our content reaches the people who engage with us, the people the algorithm thinks might engage, and a few others the system is testing for relevance. That’s it. No one else sees our content it unless they specifically search for us or visit our profile.
As our connections aren’t normally curated around a specific professional group, the algorithm has nothing to work with. It doesn’t know who your potential clients are, so it can’t reliably show your content to them. This means that you’re posting into a void, not because the problem isn’t real, but because you haven’t given the algorithm or yourself any logical way to find the right people.
Commercial Viability Requires Specificity
Commercial viability isn’t about whether a problem is real or whether coaching can help to resolve it brilliantly. It’s about whether we can find the people who have that problem, whether we can build an audience from among them and whether we can articulate how the problem is showing up for them in their context. A genuine, solvable problem that we can’t find people to address isn’t commercially viable, it’s a passion project with no business model.
Let me give you an example of the kind of specificity I’m talking about. When we work with newly promoted associates in City law firms to help them navigate their first leadership responsibilities (for example) we know exactly where to find these people. We can search LinkedIn by law firm and seniority. We can identify the training providers who work with them, the publications they read, the conferences they attend. We know their professional identity, and that professional identity is how they’re searchable. The problem they’re facing might be confidence or stress or imposter syndrome, but when we’re commercially viable, we’re not marketing to the symptom. We’re marketing to the profession, and we’re positioning ourselves as someone who understands that specific professional context. (An aside here, don’t position yourself as someone who understands that specific professional context if you don’t!)
This distinction matters enormously because it changes how we build visibility. Instead of hoping people find us, we’re building an audience of people who look like our potential clients. We’re finding them in the places where they gather professionally. We can speak to them in their language, not in coach language. We can address their professional challenges, not their emotional symptoms.
This Is a Learnable Skill
Let me give you a fact – the vast majority of coaches who struggle with client acquisition aren’t poor coaches. It’s not that they’ve chosen the wrong problem to solve either, it’s that they haven’t learned the skill of translating coaching expertise into commercial positioning. Coaching skill and commercial viability skill are completely separate competencies, and we are not taught how to do the latter in coach training. We learned how to coach people, we didn’t learn how to find clients, and we didn’t learn how to position ourselves so they can find us.
This is where belief comes in. You probably believe either that you don’t need a niche because good coaching works with anyone, or that the WHAT you’ve defined is a niche and both of those beliefs will keep you stuck. The WHAT is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. The WHO is what makes your positioning commercially viable, and identifying it requires you to think like a business owner, not just like a coach.
If you’re recognising yourself in this, my book, The Intersection, exists to help you challenge these beliefs and work through the reframing required to move from “I solve a good problem” to “I work with a findable community where that problem is pressing enough that people will pay to address it.” The book doesn’t tell you what to do. It asks you questions that help you think differently about what commercial viability actually means and what it requires from you. You can find it here – this is the link for UK Amazon.
Once you understand this distinction, implementing it is where The Coaching Revolution comes in. We help coaches to translate the thinking into action, find their real-life WHO, and build an audience of them so their commercial viability stops being theoretical and starts being real.
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