There’s a view that circulates in coaching circles, delivered with great sincerity by experienced coaches who genuinely want to help those coming up behind them, and it this – that to be a great coach, you need to fully embody the identity of coach. To live it, breathe it, let it define how you show up in the world. It sounds profound, and the coaches who say it mean well. They also, almost without exception, have full practices and may have had them for years. They are not feeling the consequences of this advice, but many of us who are building our practices are.
Coach Is A Verb
A more useful way of thinking about our coaching practices is this – coach is a verb. It’s something we do, not something we are. It is an incredibly powerful, sophisticated, transformative tool that we deploy in service of our clients, and we should treat it accordingly. However, when we wrap our entire professional identity around it, we make it almost impossible to market ourselves effectively, because effective marketing requires us to talk about the people we help and the problems we solve, not about the instrument we use to do it.
Identity-Led Marketing
When coaching becomes our identity rather than our tool, our marketing tends to reflect that. We write about navigating transitions, building resilience, unlocking potential. We talk about the coaching process itself, about the power of questions, about holding space. All of that may be true, but it is coach-speak. What I mean by coach-speak is that it’s our jargon and the only people who respond to our jargon are other coaches.
The people who need our help are not searching for “someone to help me navigate a transition.” They are lying awake at 3am worrying about a very specific problem, and if our marketing doesn’t speak directly to that problem, they will not find us. Remember, the vast majority of people have no idea what we do, which means they don’t know when working with us could help them, so they are not seeking us out.
A Bigger Shift
The shift we need to make isn’t a shift in how we talk about coaching, it’s a much larger shift in how we see ourselves professionally, and that shift is the one from employee to business owner. For those of us who’ve come from corporate careers, this transition is almost always bigger than we expect. We’ve often run large budgets, led teams, delivered results at scale, and it’s easy to assume that translates into knowing how to run a business. It doesn’t, because running someone else’s business from a position of employment is a fundamentally different thing from building and sustaining your own. Laxman Narasimhan spent 19 years at McKinsey advising companies before becoming CEO of Starbucks in 2023, and was removed after just 17 months(1), with the company having lost over $32 billion in market value during his tenure(2). Advising on strategy and executing one are not the same skill and this principle applies to us.
Not Their Fault, Not Their Job
Most of us don’t realise we need to make this mindset shift. That’s not a character flaw, it’s a consequence of the way coaching is taught. Coach training organisations exist to train excellent coaches, and they do it incredibly well. It’s not their responsibility to also teach us client acquisition, and I say this without criticism. The problem is that some are beginning to notice the gap and are attempting to fill it themselves, which is where things start to go wrong.
Good Intentions Lead To Big Problems
Some training organisations now offer business development sessions, either as a module in their programme(s) or as a bolt-on. The bolt-ons often consist of a series of short video series, or expensive masterminds as an addition to their core programmes. The advice in these tends to be generic, because teaching coaches to find clients is a specialism in its own right, and producing a few hours of content on the side doesn’t make it one. When we follow that advice and it doesn’t work, most of us don’t conclude that the advice was inadequate, we conclude that we are. We need to be incredibly self aware to realise that we have a skills gap. Many of us are not that self aware and so we start to feel that it’s something that is wrong with us. That thought makes us vulnerable, and there are people in this space who make their living from exactly that vulnerability, charging significant sums for silver-bullet solutions that deliver very little.
It’s Not You
Many of the coaches who come to The Coaching Revolution have been through this cycle. They trained well, they took whatever business advice was on offer from sources they trusted, they tried things that didn’t work, they paid for programmes that promised transformation and didn’t deliver it, and they arrived with us. They were still quietly convinced that the problem was them, but they wanted their coaching business to work and so were prepared to try one last thing. The problem isn’t us, it’s that we are given poor client acquisition advice, often by people who didn’t realise that was what they were doing.
A Learnable Skill
Client acquisition for coaches is a learnable skill. It has a methodology, a structure, and a body of knowledge that can be properly taught, properly practised, and properly accredited. What it isn’t is a short add-on to a coaching qualification, or a series of generic business tips from someone whose zone of genius lies elsewhere. The coaches who build sustainable practices are not those who embodied the identity most completely. They are the ones who picked up the tool, got excellent at using it, and then got equally excellent at letting the right people know it existed.
If you’d like to learn more about how client acquisition for coaches works, let’s talk.
Footnotes:
(1) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-new-ceo-faces-a-venti-sized-turnaround-challenge/
(2) https://studioscribis.com/2025/11/07/the-ceo-that-cost-starbucks-32-billion/
Recent Comments