Three times a year, I run a challenge called Nail Your Niche. I developed it for coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching. It’s an incredibly important part of what we do at The Coaching Revolution, because not only does is help coaches understand why they’re not having the success that they want with finding clients, it also allows me to spend time with coaches who are good at what they do, highly intelligent, yet struggling to build their businesses.
There is a line that comes up early in each challenge and it’s a hard truth. One of our January participants described it as powerful and validating in equal measure, which is a combination worth paying attention to. The line is this – if you don’t have paying clients, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.
I realise that stings a little and it’s supposed to. Not because there’s anything wrong with us for being in that position, but because most of us have been treating the two things (a business and a hobby) as interchangeable, and they aren’t.
The Knowledge Gap
Qualifying as a coach is a serious undertaking. The training is rigorous, the supervised practice hours are demanding, and the reflective work required to become genuinely skilled at this is substantial. We come out of it with real competence, a professional credential, and the reasonable expectation that we are now ready to work. What we are ready to do is coach. Building a business that generates consistent paid client work is an entirely different skill set, and almost nothing in our training touches it.
This isn’t a criticism of coach training, because it isn’t what coach training is for. Coach training is designed to help us become great coaches, and it’s usually excellent. The problem is that we tend to assume that coaching and client acquisition are connected in a way they simply aren’t, that being good at coaching will, over time, translate into a full practice. For some of us it does, usually because we already had extensive professional networks from a previous career that we can leverage, or because we happened to position ourselves in exactly the right place at the right moment. For most of us, it doesn’t happen that way, and we spend months – sometimes years – wondering what we’re doing wrong.
Hobby Or Business?
What separates a coaching hobby from a coaching business isn’t the quality of the coaching, it’s whether the business can sustain itself financially. That means having a reliable way to find the people who need your coaching, communicate with them in a way that makes sense to them, and convert those conversations into paid work. None of that happens automatically, and very little, if any, of it is covered in a coaching course.
I think the reason that line about hobbies lands so hard is that it names something many of us have been privately worried about without saying out loud. We’ve been doing the work, showing up, posting on LinkedIn, maybe even getting some clients here and there, but the income isn’t consistent enough to call it a real business, and we don’t quite know why. The coaching itself isn’t the problem, the client acquisition is.
What Does This Mean?
The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that client acquisition is a learnable skill. It isn’t a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It isn’t reserved for coaches who are naturally salesy or comfortable with self-promotion. It’s a set of competencies that can be taught, practised and refined, in the same way that coaching itself can be taught, practised and refined.
The starting point – and this is where the Nail Your Niche challenge begins – is getting specific about who you work with and what problem you help them solve. Not in vague, general terms, but with enough precision that the right person reads your profile or your post and thinks: this is for me. That level of specificity is what makes the difference between a presence that generates enquiries and one that generates nothing in particular. It’s also, for most of us, the piece we’ve been skipping, because it feels uncomfortable or premature or like we might be ruling people out.
We aren’t ruling people out. We’re making ourselves findable to the people who need us and who can afford to pay, and that’s where building a business rather than a hobby has to begin.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run the challenge several times a year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how client acquisition really works.
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