I run the Nail Your Niche challenge three times a year. Before every challenge, I spend time thinking about the people who are going to show up, and what it took for them to register, because registering for something like this requires an admission, however private, that things aren’t working. That admission costs more than most people outside our might imagine.
Hidden Feelings
We set off to build our businesses with real motivation. We qualify, we build a website, we start showing up on LinkedIn, we go to networking events, we have what feel like good conversations, and we wait for the clients to follow. When they don’t, we go again. More posts, more events, more conversations, more effort. When that doesn’t work either, we do something entirely understandable and deeply unhelpful – we keep quiet about it.
The shame of a coaching business that isn’t working is a particularly private kind of shame, because it sits in such direct contradiction to everything we’ve invested in. The training took time, money and genuine commitment. We chose this deliberately, we told people we were doing it. Admitting that it isn’t working means admitting something that feels much larger than a business problem – it feels less like a business problem and more like a personal failing, and so we carry it alone, or we share it only with the colleagues we trained with, the people who are close enough to trust and far enough from our professional reputation to feel safe.
Feelings Of Anger
There’s often anger underneath the shame, and it tends to land on coach training providers. If we’d known how hard it was going to be to find clients, we might have prepared differently. If our training had covered even the basics of client acquisition, or if the basics offered had worked, we might not be in this position. The trust we place in the people who trained us is substantial, and when the business doesn’t work, that trust can start to feel like it was misplaced. That feeling is real and it makes sense.
At the same time, I’d gently push back on where it’s directed. Coach training is designed to produce great coaches, and it’s usually excellent at exactly that. Client acquisition is a separate professional competency, one that sits entirely outside the remit of coach training, and it would be unfair to expect training providers to cover something that isn’t their area. The gap is real and the responsibility for it doesn’t sit where the anger tends to go.
Normalising The Struggle
Sharing the struggle with coaching colleagues can help, because discovering that we’re not alone in it is genuinely reassuring, but what it doesn’t do is solve the problem. When everyone around us is in the same position, the situation starts to feel normal – and when something feels normal, the urgency to understand and fix it fades and so nothing changes. We conclude, collectively, that this is just how it is, that the market is saturated, that coaching is harder to sell than anyone tells you, and that most of us will never quite manage to build the practice we wanted to.
Let’ me be direct – that conclusion is wrong. The market for coaching is not saturated. There are more people who could benefit from professional coaching than the entire global coaching profession could serve. What is saturated is the pool of coaches who can’t make the value of what we do legible to non-coaches, which is a very different thing. The market doesn’t have too many coaches, it has too many coaches who haven’t yet learned how to make themselves findable to the people who need them.
What Is Client Acquisition?
The moment most coaches encounter this reframe, the first feeling is usually anger. Not because the reframe is wrong, but because if it’s right, it means we’ve been getting something wrong that we were fairly confident we understood. Client acquisition works nothing like most of us think it does. The networking, the posting, the good conversations – these things can all be part of a working client acquisition process, but only when they’re built on a foundation of genuine focus and precise positioning. Without that foundation, they produce exactly what most of us have been experiencing, which is a lot of effort without result.
The anger fades, for those of us who can put our egos to one side, and what replaces it is relief because a skills gap is a solvable problem. Learning something we don’t yet know is considerably more available to us than fixing a personal failing or breaking into a saturated market. It’s about recognising what’s missing and choosing to fix it. The shame, it turns out, isn’t the right response to the situation – not because the situation isn’t hard, but because the situation has a cause that has nothing to do with our worth as coaches or the quality of our work.
Unconscious Incompetence
We are, most of us, genuinely good at coaching. The skills are real, the impact on clients who do find us is real, and the vocation that brought us here is real. What we didn’t know, and what nobody in our training is equipped to tell us, is that delivering coaching and acquiring coaching clients are two entirely separate competencies, and being excellent at one tells us almost nothing about how to develop the other. That gap isn’t a flaw, it’s what happens when we assume one skill should automatically lead to another.
An Opportunity
If parts of this felt uncomfortably familiar, you’re not alone and more importantly, you’re not stuck. What you’re experiencing isn’t a reflection of your ability as a coach, it’s the result of trying to build a business without a clear way of finding and speaking to the people who need what you do.
That’s exactly what we focus on inside Nail Your Niche.
It’s a free, short challenge designed to help you get precise about who you’re trying to reach and how to make what you do make sense to them, so that your conversations start to lead somewhere instead of stalling out.
If you’re ready to stop carrying this quietly and start addressing it directly, you can register for the next challenge by clicking here.
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