A lot of the advice around client acquisition in the coaching world is about scaling. The problem is, you can’t scale something that doesn’t work.
That hasn’t stopped the advice from spreading though. It’s loud, it’s confident, and for most coaches who try to follow it, it produces nothing except the creeping conviction that marketing doesn’t work. That conclusion is understandable, and wrong. It’s the advice we acted upon that deserves the blame.
An Example
I spoke with a coach who had spent a significant sum on a course teaching her how to build a “sales funnel”. It had landing pages, an email list (currently with no subscribers), and a full nurture sequence designed to convert people into clients. Technically, it was impressive – it was a very clever piece of work. It was also missing one essential element, without which it could not possibly work – a focus.
When I asked the coach who the target audience was for this marvellous piece of technology, she told me high-ticket clients. When I pressed her to explain to me who these people are, she told me they are people who are cash-rich, but time-poor. She couldn’t give me any more detail than that. Basically, she had no idea who the funnel was for.
The next step in the marketing course she was taking was to start using paid ads to drive traffic to the landing pages. It may come as no surprise to you to understand that if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, paid ads are expensive and also futile. You cannot successfully amplify something that isn’t already working – and that’s what paid ads do, they amplify what’s there.
The Problem With Scaling Advice
Scaling is a legitimate goal. A coaching practice that generates consistent income can, in time, be grown – more clients, higher rates, group programmes, other revenue streams. None of that is inherently misleading. The problem is that scaling advice assumes you already have something to scale. It assumes a working client acquisition process is already in place, that clients are coming in reliably, and that the challenge is now one of growth rather than foundation. For the overwhelming majority of coaches trying to follow it, none of those things are true.
Telling a coach without a consistent stream of clients to focus on scaling is a bit like telling someone who hasn’t yet learned to drive to think about upgrading their car. The advice isn’t wrong in principle; it’s just being given to someone at entirely the wrong stage for it to be useful.
Our Conclusion When It Fails
When scaling strategies don’t produce results, coaches rarely conclude that the advice was pitched at the wrong stage. The more natural conclusion is that marketing doesn’t work – at least not for them, not in their niche, not with their particular background or approach or circumstances. This conclusion is seductive because it lets the advice off the hook and explains the failure in a way that feels coherent. It also leaves coaches with nowhere useful to go, because if marketing fundamentally doesn’t work, the only options are to keep trying the same things and hoping for a different result, or to give up.
Neither of those is the right response, because the premise is wrong. Marketing does work, for coaches as for everyone else, when it’s built on a foundation that can support it.
The Foundation
Before anything can be scaled, it has to work. A client acquisition process works when it reliably produces conversations with the right people, some of whom become paying clients, through a mechanism that can be repeated. That requires knowing, with real precision, who the right people are and what to say to them – which is a different problem entirely from growth, and one that scaling advice doesn’t touch.
This is the gap that most client acquisition advice skips over, because it isn’t exciting or aspirational enough to sell a programme around. Building a working niche, learning to describe a specific problem in the language of a specific group of people, developing the confidence to have conversations that lead somewhere – these things are less glamorous than a six-figure promise, and they take longer than ninety days. They are also the only things that produce a business with something real to scale, rather than a strategy built on foundations that don’t yet exist.
An Opportunity
If this has made you question some of the advice you’ve been trying to follow, that’s a good sign. Most coaches aren’t struggling because they’re doing too little, they’re trying to build on something that isn’t yet working.
That’s exactly what we focus on inside Nail Your Niche.
It’s a free, short challenge designed to help you get clear on who you’re trying to reach and what you need to say so that your client acquisition starts to work reliably enough to produce real conversations and real clients, not just activity that looks promising but goes nowhere.
If you’d rather have something that works before you try to grow it, you can register for the next challenge by clicking here.