Our profession training teaches us to bring a learner’s mind to every coaching conversation. We’re trained to be curious, to assume we don’t know, to resist the pull towards our own answers and we’re very good at it.
That learner’s mind tends to stop at the edge of the coaching conversation. When it comes to finding the clients to have those conversations with, we switch to a knower’s mind, and that’s the reason so many capable coaches struggle to find clients who pay a professional rate.
Who This Applies To
The ICF Global Reports in both 2023 and 2025 found that around 93% of us run a portfolio business, with several income streams rather than one. I tend to think of it as a basket of eggs: one egg might be associate work, another might be associate work for a different company, and the rest could be consulting, training, mentoring, or something with no connection to coaching at all. One of our mentors runs a coaching business called Menopause in Schools and also is also a textile artist who sells her work and also teaches textile art workshops.
For some coaches, the coaching ‘egg’ doesn’t need to earn much. If you’re retired, or another income stream covers the bills, then coaching a client or two at a rate that suits you both is a perfectly good arrangement.
This article is for the rest of us, who need coaching clients to pay a professional rate because coaching has to contribute to our living. Employed coaching roles are few and the competition for them is fierce. Associate rates from the big platforms have dropped considerably over the last few years. That leaves a private practice, selling to individuals or to organisations, and either way somebody has to find the clients.
Why We Think We Can Work It Out
Coaches are, in the main, clever people. Many of us arrive at coach training after a good career, and by then we’re used to being able to improvise and are very comfortable doing it.
We size up a situation, form a reasonable idea of what might work, and adjust as we go, and it usually turns out fine. That’s true of a new recipe, a broken thing at home, and most of the problems that land on our desk at work.
Improvisation works when we’re improvising inside our own knowledge and experience. Client acquisition sits outside it for almost all of us, which is why the same approach that has served us well for decades produces so little here. We work with coaches whose careers were in marketing, and they came to us precisely because they knew they needed to upskill to be able to market their own businesses – even though they’re seasoned marketers.
What We Think Marketing Is
Ask a coach and they’ll tell you marketing is common sense. Scratch a little deeper and the common sense turns out to be this: make sure everybody knows you’re available as a coach, explain how the coaching process works, and talk about your business regularly.
I belong to a lot of coaching groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, and the advice that appears under questions like “how do I find clients” is astonishing. The include things like be authentic (what does that mean?) or make good connections (again, how? With whom? Where? When?). There’s nothing actionable in either of those responses. What we need is to learn, step-by-step, what we need to do and be authentic simply isn’t useful.
Compare that with how we behave about the other side of our business. If someone asks how to coach, we would all suggest that they get qualified, that they learn how to coach. We’re scathing about anyone who just reads a book and starts calling themselves a coach. In fact as a profession, we spend a great deal of energy being angry that coaching is unregulated, but then we approach client acquisition as though it needs no training at all.
Coach Speak
When we’re new coaches, we might attend networking meetings with no strategy other than that the room contains humans and we coach humans. Standing there with four or five other coaches, we get our turn to introduce ourselves and we describe the process: I’ll help you reach your goals, I’ll help you get past limiting beliefs and mental barriers. The problem with that language is that it’s jargon, and jargon in every profession is designed to keep people out rather than bring them in. It also describes what we do rather than what they get, but people don’t buy what we do. People want to understand what’s in it for them before they’ll part with a fee for coaching.
When we tell people that what they’ll get is clarity, better decisions, or better choices, what the listener hears is an offer of a conversation. The problem with that is that they believe they can have a conversation with their sister, their partner or their best friend for nothing, so why should they pay us for the privilege? Our answer to that is usually that we have no vested interest in the outcome, which is true, but is nowhere near enough of a reason to pay a professional fee.
What the Knower’s Mind Does Next
When the improvising fails, the knower’s mind doesn’t conclude that we don’t know how to do this. It concludes that marketing doesn’t work.
We say that while wearing sunglasses we chose by brand, checking a watch we were persuaded to want, on a phone we queued for. Marketing works, it’s just that what we’ve been doing isn’t marketing.
A learner’s mind asks a different question: who is this working for, and what do they know that I don’t? There are two answers. One is the coaches with monetisable credibility, who arrived at training with a ‘little black book’ and a reputation earned over decades. Fewer than one in five of us has that. For the record, I’m not suggesting this kind of coach doesn’t work hard, only that they start from a different place, a place of privilege and like most privileges, it’s hard to see from the inside.
The other answer is the coaches who built from the ground up. Those coaches chose a group of people whose lives and language they understood, chose a problem they enjoy coaching around and they knew that group was struggling with, and pointed everything at the intersection of the two.
Marketing has a process in the same way coaching does. In coaching, we contract at the start of a session and check back at the end because those things are not optional. On the client acquisition side, a focus is the equivalent: the bare minimum, before anything else can work.
Information Isn’t Knowledge
When it comes to how to find clients, we’re very good at collecting information. Free webinars, sessions on business development, downloaded PDFs, books. All of it is information.
Knowledge is knowing which of those facts apply to us, which to ignore, and what to do with the ones that are left. Information piles up; knowledge changes what we actually do.
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’s a deep dive into how to choose a niche for your coaching business. A twenty minute concept video arrives in the challenge group at 7am UK each morning, and I go live at 5pm UK to answer questions. Everything is recorded, so nothing is lost if you can’t be there.
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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