ICHE Syndrome is fatal for coaching businesses and yet so many coaches suffer from it. They suffer from it for all the right reasons, those reasons being mostly that they have big hearts, that they’re other-people centred and that qualified coaches can coach anyone, right?
Two Sides To Your Business
Do you remember those old-fashioned weighing scales? The ones where you have to put things on both sides to make the scales balance?
I’d like you to imagine that one side of that scale is the delivery side of your business – that’s the coaching side – and on this side lies all your qualifications, practitioner certificates etc; your coaching skills. This is also the side where our hearts lie. The side that we feel passionately about.
The other side of the scale is the side that holds the skills that create the opportunities to do the delivery. Those are business development skills and particularly sales and marketing skills. These are not skills that coaches have in abundance. In fact they are often skills that the new coach is quite uncomfortable with.
Here’s the rub: Unless those two sides balance, your business will not flourish. You can spend more and more money on upskilling on the delivery side of your business and even if you spend a million pounds or dollars, it isn’t enough. You can have every qualification under the sun, and without skills on the other side of the scale it just won’t work.
The Imbalance
The ignored side, the creating the opportunities to do the delivery side of your scales needs some attention if you are to flourish. The attention it needs is the same attention and care you lavished on the side of the scales that you love. It needs you to learn the skills required to perform the tasks necessary to thrive with a high level of skill.
ICHE Syndrome
I Can Help Everyone Syndrome is suffered from by coaches who only pay attention to the delivery side of their business. When we’re talking about the delivery of coaching, then yes, you can indeed coach anyone (everyone).
However, when we look at the other side, the creating the opportunities side, it becomes apparent that even though we can, in theory coach everyone, we simply cannot market to everyone.
Our intuition tells us that to build our business, we should cast our nets wide and speak to anyone who might……. want coaching. Despite the fact that our intuition tells us this, it is absolutely wrong. The opposite is true. The more focused you are with your marketing, the more clients you will attract.
As small business owners, we have limited resources and those resources are time, energy and money. We need to spend them very wisely as all three are finite.
ICHE Syndrome steals businesses away from coaches and leaves them as one of the 82% of coaches whose businesses fail.
Get Some Help
Just as you wouldn’t dream of coaching without proper training and support, nor should you think of building your coaching business without training and support either.
It may be that we at The Coaching Revolution can help you and I’m always up for a chat with any coach about how we might work together. (This is my diary if you’d like me to call you.)
You can read marketing books and you can talk to other coaches about how to grow your business, of course you can. However, I go back to my point about your coaching. You wouldn’t have dreamed of learning how to coach from a couple of books and a chat with a pal, would you? So why would you trust a full 50% of your business skills to a self-taught approach.
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