The maths is simple. As associate coaches we coach a client for an hour, the client pays, say, £300. We receive £120, or £140 if we’re lucky, and the organisation takes the rest. Some of us have been doing this for years, we’re good at it, and at some point the calculation becomes impossible to ignore – if we found our own clients, we’d keep the whole fee.
So we decide to start building a private practice. Not necessarily walking away from associate work overnight, but beginning the shift. It’s a sound commercial decision, possibly the most rational business decision we’ve ever made. We have the skills, we have the experience, we have a track record of results with real clients. We’ve been doing the actual work for long enough to know we’re good at it. Building our own client base isn’t a leap of faith, it’s a long overdue correction.
The problems start when we try to find our own clients, because no matter what we try alongside the associate work that keeps paying the bills, nothing happens.
The Missing Skill
When we work as associate or internal coaches, clients arrive in our diaries. Someone else finds them, qualifies them, agrees the contract, and hands them to us. Our job is to deliver excellent coaching, which we do. The entire client acquisition process has been invisible to us, handled by a platform, an organisation, or a relationship we have no part in building.
This isn’t a gap in our knowledge that we should have spotted earlier, it’s a skill we have never needed before. In the same way that a brilliant surgeon employed by the NHS has never learned how to fill a private clinic, we haven’t learned how to fill our own practice. Delivery skills and client acquisition skills are two separate competencies, and having one doesn’t give us the other, regardless of how many years we’ve been coaching.
The discovery that these are separate skills comes as a surprise to many of us who want to start building alongside our existing work. We assumed, reasonably, that a decade of coaching experience would translate into an ability to attract our own clients. It doesn’t, because the experience we have is in coaching people, not in reaching people who don’t yet know they want coaching.
What Happens Next
What tends to happen is that we fall back on the things that feel like marketing. We update our LinkedIn profile, we tell our network we’re now taking private clients, we attend some events, we write a few posts about coaching. We do this in the gaps between our associate commitments, with the same professionalism and commitment we bring to our coaching, and we expect it to produce results, because effort and competence have always produced results for us before.
It doesn’t work, and the reason it doesn’t work is specific to our profession. No other professional service has to contend with the fact that most people don’t understand what coaching is, but they think they do and they’re wrong. A therapist building a private practice can rely on the fact that people know what therapy is and will search for it when they need it. We can’t. A consultant can describe their service and a potential client can immediately assess whether they need it. We can’t do that either, because the word “coaching” means something different to almost everyone who hears it, and it always means a ‘transfer of knowledge’ in the mind of the listener.
This means that everything we try, the LinkedIn posts, the networking, the conversations with our professional contacts, runs into the same invisible wall. We’re describing a service that the people we’re trying to reach don’t understand, using language that makes sense to us and to other coaches, but not to the people who would actually benefit from working with us.
The Frustrating Middle
The particularly frustrating part is that we’re not starting from zero. We have years of evidence that we’re good at this work. We have client outcomes we’re proud of and we may even have unsolicited feedback from clients telling us we changed their lives. What we don’t have is a way to turn any of that into a message that reaches our own clients and makes them want to get in touch.
Meanwhile, the associate work continues. The diary fills with other people’s clients at other people’s rates, and the private practice stays permanently at “I’m working on it.” Months pass and the gap between where we are and where we want to be doesn’t close, it just becomes more familiar. We start to wonder if the transition is realistic at all, when the real issue is that we’re trying to make it happen with a skill set we haven’t yet developed.
In this respect, experienced associate coaches and newly qualified coaches are in exactly the same position, because neither group realises that they to need client acquisition skills in addition to the coaching skills we already have. Newly qualified coaches assume that clients will follow from their training. Associates assume that years of successful delivery will translate into an ability to attract their own clients. Both assumptions are wrong, and in some ways the associate’s position is more frustrating, because the evidence of competence is so strong that the inability to convert it into a private practice feels inexplicable.
What fills the gap is a specific set of skills – knowing who you’re trying to reach, understanding what problem you’re solving for them, articulating that in language they use rather than language we use, and putting that message in front of them consistently in the right places. These are learnable skills, not personality traits, and they are completely separate from coaching ability. A coach with 20 years of associate experience and a coach with 20 weeks of post-qualification experience need to learn exactly the same things when it comes to finding their own clients.
The Coaching Revolution helps coaches learn that specific set of skills. Would you like to talk?