Have you found yourself wondering how many coaching clients you need? How many clients it will take for your business to be successful? I wish I could give you a number. It would be enormously useful if the answer were forty-six, and I could send you away to go and find forty-six people.
The honest answer is, of course, that it depends. It depends on who those clients are and what they’re willing to pay, on what you want to earn, on how much you want to work, and on what else you deliver alongside the coaching. All of which sounds like a dodge, so let me come at it from a different direction, because the number itself turns out to be smaller than most coaches imagine and that changes what you need to do to reach it.
The Wrong Half of the Business
I delivered a session for an ICF chapter recently, there were just six or seven of us, and it turned into a really good conversation. One of the coaches there said she’d found the session interesting because of how different it was compared to the kind of thing that gets covered when a chapter runs something on business development.
What usually gets covered is this: how many hours a week do you want to work, what do you therefore need to charge, how will you handle your client notes, what goes in your coaching agreement, how will you onboard people. She described, in effect, everything you’d want an assistant to know. There are, she said, no discussions at all about where the clients are going to come from.
A Coach vs a Person with a Qualification?
I’ve been talking about this gap in our professional discourse nine years and I meet as much resistance now as I did in 2017. Part of it comes from a feeling that being a coach is about embodiment and internal work. For the record, I think those things are important and I’m not dismissing them. But – and it’s a big but – they are not more important than having somebody to coach. You can be a fabulous coach, deeply reflective, entirely embodied in the work, but if there’s nobody for you to coach it’s does beg this question: am I a coach, or a person with a coaching qualification who has done a lot of internal work.
People who work with The Coaching Revolution describe me and the mentors as pragmatic and direct. I mentioned in yesterday’s livestream that around 95% of the feedback on the Nail Your Niche challenge is positive, and the 5% who don’t like it object to exactly that. They don’t want to be told that no clients means a hobby rather than a business, because it stings. They don’t want a direct answer to their questions unless it’s an answer they want to hear. That’s fair enough, and it’s much better that somebody discovers I’m not for them during a free challenge than after they’ve paid me.
Most of Us Aren’t Only Coaching
The ICF Global studies in 2023 and 2025 both found that around 93% of coaches run a portfolio business, meaning coaching is one of several services they provide. The other 7% are largely coaches with monetisable credibility, internal coaches and associates, although there are certainly people who simply coach.
For the rest of us there’s consulting, training, facilitation, HR work, or something else entirely alongside the coaching. For some the other elements of our portfolio businesses are utterly unrelated. For example one of our mentors is a coach and also a textile artist.
A conversation. I have reasonably regularly is one in which coaches tell me they already have two businesses: a consulting business and a training business, and now they want to start a third – a coaching business. That framing makes everything harder than it needs to be. May I suggest that you think about this differently? Instead of thinking about them separately, remember that actually, you are the business, and those are services you offer.
If you can offer all of them to the same kind of client, life gets considerably easier, because you’re marketing to one audience with one message rather than several audiences with several. Different messages aimed at different people confuse an audience, and confused people do nothing. They certainly don’t buy coaching.
The Arithmetic
Coaching is a premium product. We’re not piling them high and selling them cheap, and we’re not a department store that needs thousands of people through the door every day on the off chance one of them buys something.
Let me give you an example with easy numbers: Let’s say that you have a coaching package at £2k, and say you want to turn over £100k in a year. That means you need 50 clients. With an eye to the pragmatism I mentioned, I should say for the record that £100,000 from a standing start is highly unlikely in year one, and unlikely in year two. You can get certainly there, but it doesn’t happen quickly.
Contrary to what we’re taught in business development sessions, pricing isn’t based on what we want to earn, but rather on what our clients are willing to pay. Those are completely different, and understanding that difference is part of the work we do when we’re working out how to create opportunities to coach. (Tomorrow’s livestream is about how to price coaching.)
So let’s go back to those 50 clients a year. If we want to coach for the next ten years until we retire, that’s 500 clients across the whole decade, assuming we never raise your rates. If we want to coach for the next 20 years, we need 1000 clients.
That is not a large number of human beings.
Why the Small Number Is the Argument for Focus
Coaches resist focusing because it feels like closing doors that ought to be left open. If the opportunities behind those doors existed in any usable form, we would have them by now, so the question is what do those open doors produce? In my considerable experience, they produce frustration. What they don’t produce is clients who pay a professional rate.
The counterintuitive part is that it works the other way round. 50 clients a year doesn’t need a wide net, it needs the right people, and finding the right people is only possible if you know who they are.
What you’re looking for is an audience that meets three conditions:
- They have a problem coaching can resolve.
- They can afford to pay you.
- They are easy to find, online and offline. (This one gets overlooked and it’s not optional, because if you can’t find them, you can’t market to them.)
With those three in place, our client acquisition job is smaller than most businesses face. We need 50 people a year, not 50k.
We’re not excluding anybody by the way, we can coach anyone who wants to buy our services. What we’re doing is choosing where to point our energy and attention from a client acquisition perspective, which is a different thing.
When You Disagree, Notice It
We’re clever people, and we bring a ‘knower’s mind’ when it comes to marketing while bringing curiosity (or a learner’s mind) when it comes to our coaching May I suggest that if you read something I’ve written – here or anywhere else – and find yourself thinking that’s not right, or I don’t agree with that, treat the reaction as data rather than as a verdict. I say this because the truth is that when it comes to client acquisition, as a whole profession we’re not very good at it. Even coaches with decades of a successful career in marketing have worked with us to help them learn how to market their own businesses.
Marketing is counterintuitive. Casting the net wide is the logical move, because obviously we want as many people as possible to know we coach. The problem is that this approach doesn’t work because unless it’s focused, it isn’t really marketing at all. There’s no such thing as generic marketing. All effective marketing is focused.
The Price Objection
One coach put it to me that if coaching was sold at £50 a session instead of £150, far more people would buy and we’d be far busier, but that isn’t true.
People don’t decline coaching because it’s expensive. They decline it because they don’t understand what they’ll get for the money. That’s equally true at £2k, at £50, and at £5, because people don’t spend anything, however small, without knowing what it buys us.
Dropping the price to widen the audience is a mind monkey rather than a sensible business decision. Mind monkeys are what I call limiting beliefs and mental barriers, and they come in different sizes. Some are little cappuccino monkeys that tinker about at the edges and leave you unsure. Others are silverback gorillas that stand up and roar the moment you consider doing something and stop you where you are. It’s very hard to get past a silverback on your own and having someone knowledgeable to ask is important.
There’s No Money in That Sector
I hear this regularly. There’s no money in education, or in the charity sector, or the NHS or wherever it is the coach wants to work. Then they tell me about the training and consulting they already deliver in that sector and get paid a professional fee for.
There’s money. What there isn’t is money for something people don’t understand. Why would anyone pay for a thing when they can’t tell you what they’d get in return?
People will pay for coaching, providing you can articulate the value of it to them, and providing you’ve done the groundwork properly. Articulating the value does not mean describing the coaching process.
Part Time Needs the Same Work
Coaches tell me they only want to coach part time, so they only need to market part time. That isn’t how it works, and I know it sounds unfair.
Ten thousand pounds a year to top up a good pension and keep your hand in, and half a million a year with associates delivering the work, are two points on the same journey. The groundwork is identical: know who you’re talking to, understand the problem they have that coaching can resolve, and be able to explain both.
Marketing gets treated as a necessary evil in our profession. It’s necessary. It isn’t evil. Like anything new it feels clunky and awkward at the start, and once you know what you’re doing its creative and genuinely enjoyable, which is not what most coaches expect to hear.
It also has to stay in place, consistently, for as long as you want to have a coaching business.
So, How Many?
It depends what you want out of it. That’s the true answer, and it’s a smaller question than the one underneath it, which is where those clients are going to come from.
Working out your coaching agreement, your onboarding sequence and your note-taking system, while having no method of finding anybody to onboard, is rearranging the deck chairs. The ship is the client acquisition process, and most of us have never been shown how to build one.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times a year and it is purely for professional coaches. Four days, one small concept taught each day, then a live Q&A with me and some of The Coaching Revolution mentors to work through everything that comes up around that day’s topic. We look at who you might focus on, where those people are so you can find them, the money, and the problem they have and how to show you understand it.
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how marketing for coaches works.
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