What Do You Do In A Day?
What do you spend your working day doing? If you take out the time you spend coaching clients, what do you actually do from when you ‘clock in’ at the start of your working day, until you close the office door?
I was reading an article by the marvellous Brian Tracy and it was really interesting. It was about new business owners, ones with a business of less than 2 years old, and what they do during the typical working day.
When questioned about the importance of sales and marketing to their business, all business owners said that it was the most important thing that they do, that it’s the lifeblood of their business.
What Is Important?
When asked to quantify how much of their time they spend on sales and marketing, the vast majority said ‘most of my time’. This was then taken a step further and a good, old-fashioned time and motion study was done. The study was on a very large scale and aimed to see exactly how much time was actually spent on sales and marketing by small business owners.
The results were astonishing.
What We Really Do!
Give it your best guess – how much time do you think was really spent on sales and marketing? 90%? 75%? Maybe just 50%?
The answer was a jaw-dropping 11%! Just 11% of the small business owners’ time was spent on creating new business.
The rest of the time was spent on website development, social media, marketing material, mastermind groups, brainstorming, coffee with fellow small business owners, travelling, creating products, enhancing services, developing customer feedback surveys – in fact just about anything at all, other than actually selling.
Good At Looking Busy!
Small business owners, it would seem, are absolutely marvellous at giving the appearance of being in business. Be that as it may, if you are a small business owner and you are not creating business (and by that I mean actively engaging people as paying clients, because that’s what creating business is) you are not in business.
What you are doing is staying busy.
Worse, you are playing at being in business.
Do You Have A Business, Or A Hobby?
Let me be brutal. If you are a coach and you don’t have paying coaching clients, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby. Even worse, many coaches discover that not only is their business a hobby, but it’s an expensive one at that. I’m sorry to be so black and white, but it’s the truth.
When I give presentations on how to develop your coaching business, I always say ‘if you don’t have clients, you don’t have a business’. Invariably, a few people will come up to me afterwards and say to me ‘Sarah, you know what you said about not having clients…..’. What that means in reality is that these coaches hadn’t realised the fact that without clients, they don’t actually have a business.
Hard Truth
It’s hard truth time. Do you have a business or a hobby? If you have a hobby, would you like to turn it into a business? If so, The Coaching Revolution can help. This is my diary – why don’t you book a time for us to talk, with no obligation on either side?
Remember; a mentor + the right steps + time = a coaching business.
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