Four out of five coaches’ businesses will fail, and it’s got nothing to do with their coaching ability. We can hold every qualification going, be absolutely brilliant in a coaching conversation, and transform lives when we get the chance. None of it matters if nobody knows we exist. The problem isn’t our coaching skills – it’s that we have no idea how to acquire clients, and the profession has done precious little to prepare us for this reality.
Qualifications Aren’t Enough
Our coaching qualification is only 50% of the skills we need to run a coaching business – it’s the delivery half. Every additional qualification we take, whether that’s NLP, executive coaching, team coaching, or whatever else catches our eye, just adds to the same side of our business ‘scales’. We can pile on credentials until we’re buried under them, but it won’t bring us a single client because doing this means that we’re only ever building one half of what we need.
The other 50% of the skillset is client acquisition, and this is the half our training never covered. It’s the half the profession seems to pretend doesn’t matter, the half they never mention in all those hours of supervised practice and case studies. Yet it’s also the half that, for most of us, determines whether we’ll ever actually get paid for our skills. Many coaches leave training with this unshakeable belief that being good at coaching will naturally lead to clients, but sadly, that’s simply not how it works. Our profession has done an excellent job of raising coaching standards and ensuring ethical practice, but when it comes to preparing us for the commercial reality of running a business, there’s a massive blind spot.
How NOT To Get Clients
When clients don’t materialise, we try what seems logical. We network like mad, have “good conversations” with everyone we meet and talk about coaching at every opportunity. We attend business events, join coaching circles, post on LinkedIn about the transformative power of coaching. We do everything that feels right, everything that should work according to what we’ve been told, but nothing happens.
So we assume the problem must be that we need more credibility. Perhaps another qualification will do it, or a specialist credential that makes us stand out. We try to add more value to the clients we don’t have, not realising that no amount of additional training will solve a client acquisition problem…
We might even sign up for coaching platforms, only to discover that the competition is absolutely fierce, the rates can be shockingly low (I know of coaches who are working for £25 per hour) and AI is coming for even those scraps. There is even a platform that expects coaches to work for free while it pockets the fees, and the profession allows this because those unpaid hours count as paid for credentialing purposes. We’re paying thousands for training and credentials, whilst simultaneously being encouraged to work for nothing. It’s completely backwards.
What’s Missing?
The coaches who become well-paid professionals understand something fundamental – client acquisition is a skill just like coaching, and just like coaching, it must be learned. The difference is that nobody taught it to us during our training.
These coaches have accepted three uncomfortable truths that most others resist.
- First, they accept they genuinely know nothing about finding coaching clients – not in a self-deprecating way, but as a statement of fact.
- Second, they recognise that networking and having good conversations are not marketing strategies, no matter how many times they’ve been told otherwise.
- Third, they accept that they must learn how client acquisition actually works, even though this wasn’t part of their coaching education.
Once we accept this reality and commit to learning what works, everything starts to shift. We stop doing what feels comfortable and start doing what actually works.
What Actually Works
Paid professionals don’t market coaching – we solve problems. We choose a specific audience with whom we already have some credibility and make sure it’s an audience that has a problem coaching can resolve. Then we stop writing bland, coaching-focused content that only interests other coaches. We stop banging on about our qualifications, our process, our passion for personal transformation and all that vague language that means nothing to anyone who isn’t a coach.
Instead, we talk directly about the problem our potential client is facing. We explain why working with us solves that particular problem, and we demonstrate through everything we share that we understand the client’s situation in incredible detail. Our content consistently answers two straightforward questions that potential clients want to know:
- Do you understand my problem?
- Can you help me resolve it?
In short, we answer the question what’s in it for me? That is what clients want to understand before they are willing to part with a professional fee. It’s only fair that we can give a straightforward answer to that question, because without it, people won’t want to pay us for our services.
Everything we write, post or share focuses relentlessly on the client’s problem and the outcome they want, not on the coaching process or methodology or credentials. By the time someone actually books a call with us, that person already knows who we are, what we do, that we do it for people like them, and what it costs. The discovery call doesn’t involve selling at all – it’s simply a sanity check where the potential client just wants to meet us properly and see if there’s a genuine fit.
The Commercial Reality
If we’re starting from scratch, building a coaching business typically takes around two years to replace a full-time income, and around five years to build something substantial where we might have associates delivering work for us. There’s no 90-day shortcut, no magic formula, no “high-ticket clients in your sleep” system that actually delivers on its promises. The people selling you that dream are making their money from you, not from the commercial success of their process.
I say ‘if we’re starting from scratch’ because there are some coaches who have monetiseable credibility, built before they became coaches. This means that they have an existing network of people who already know, like and trust them and are in a position to either buy coaching for themselves, or commission coaching for their corporate teams. Most of us are not in this position.
Here’s something else that might surprise you – 93% of coaches don’t run coaching-only businesses (according to the ICF 2023 Global Study). We offer consulting, training, facilitation or other services alongside our coaching work. The most effective approach is to create packages for our chosen audience that incorporate all our skills. Think of yourself as the business and your various skills as your delivery tools, not as separate offerings that need separate marketing strategies.
This probably isn’t the fantasy you were sold when you qualified. It’s harder work than most of us expected, requires skills we don’t have yet, and takes longer than anyone warned us about. It’s also honest, sustainable, and most importantly, it actually works when we commit to learning it properly.
The Choice
You’ve essentially got two options ahead of you. You can accept that client acquisition is a professional skill you must learn, invest the time and effort required to learn it properly, apply it consistently and gradually build a business that pays you fairly for your expertise. Or you can continue believing that good coaching should be enough on its own, keep networking without a strategy, keep having conversations that go nowhere, keep posting inspirational quotes that your friends politely like, and keep waiting for clients who, frankly, will never come.
The coaches who succeed aren’t more qualified than you, and they’re certainly not better coaches. They’ve just learned the other 50% of what it takes – the half that turns qualifications into income, credentials into clients, and coaching skills into an actual business. The question isn’t whether you can learn this, because you absolutely can. The question is simply whether you will.
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