Every competency framework we train against describes what happens inside the coaching conversation, and describes it well. None of them describes what it takes to run a coaching practice, because that wasn’t the job they were built to do. I think that if we stepped back and wrote the list of competencies a coaching business owner needs, finding clients would sit at the top of it, above everything we are currently assessed on. We are certified and re-certified on delivery. Nothing we are measured against determines survival.
How We Fail
Businesses that have been trading for years fail for all sorts of reasons – a large contract ends, cash flow tightens, a partnership breaks down – but that is not the failure most of us face.
Coaching businesses rarely collapse because the clients dried up, they usually quietly disappear because finding clients turned out to be much, much harder than we anticipated. The pattern is quiet and it looks much the same every time, starting with the qualification, then a CV-style website that doesn’t generate any interest, some posts on LinkedIn that other coaches like, a few pro bono clients who don’t turn into clients who pay a professional rate, and a year or two later a return to employment with our certificate framed on the wall.
The Missing Skill
That matters because it tells us which skill is missing. It isn’t retention and it isn’t delivery, because the coaches I meet are good coaches, often very good coaches. What we as a whole profession don’t learn is how to get in front of enough of the right people, often enough, describing a problem that they have (that working with us would help resolve) in language they recognise as their own. Everything else on the business competency list waits on that one thing happening first. Contracting, session management, supervision, invoicing and record keeping all sit idle until somebody says yes to becoming our client.
The Silence Has A Price
As client acquisition is named nowhere as a competency, we treat it as something other than a skill. We call it confidence, or personality, or luck, or being one of those people who are comfortable with selling. I think that framing does real damage, because it turns a learnable skill into a character trait, and that makes it unlearnable. A competency is taught, structured and sequenced, which means it can be done inexpertly in month one and competently by month six. We have already proved we can do exactly that, because we did it with coaching itself.
Why Our Trainers Are Not The Answer
Waiting for our training organisations to fill this gap misunderstands what they are for. They train coaches, they are good at training coaches, and the people teaching on those programmes are not necessarily coaches who are out finding their own clients. Client acquisition is a separate skill from coaching, and teaching it credibly needs people who are expert at it and who are doing it now, in their own practices, with their own income depending on it. I think it is entirely reasonable for a coach training organisation not to offer that. Everybody who teaches at The Coaching Revolution is both an alumnus and a practising coach actively marketing their own coaching business. I believe that’s what’s needed to teach client acquisition well.
The Exceptions
Some coaches never appear to need any of this, and I have met plenty of them. They arrive from a long corporate career with an address book full of people who already know, like and trust them, and the first clients turn up without deliberate effort. That works until the address book runs out, which it does, and the same gap opens a few years later than it did for the rest of us. Others coach as an internal coach or as an associate coach, so the client acquisition problem belongs to somebody else for as long as that arrangement holds.
Treating It As A Competency
The objection to all this is that competencies describe what happens between coach and client, and that running a business is an entirely separate matter. That’s true of the coaching conversation itself. Once we own the business, though, the skills that keep it alive are ours to learn too, and we haven’t learned them. Naming client acquisition as the first of them changes three things in practice:
- We learn it deliberately and in sequence, rather than collecting tips from wherever they land.
- We practise it and measure what comes back, in the same way we measured our progress as coaches.
- We stop reading early difficulty as evidence that we are unsuited to this, and read it instead as evidence that we are at the start of a skill.
And we choose who we learn it from on the basis of what they are doing in their own practices right now.
An Opportunity
If you want to make a start on that second list, the Nail Your Niche Challenge is where we begin it. It runs over four days, it’s online and it’s free.
We run it several times a year, and you’ll leave with a clear idea of where your focus should be and how to talk about coaching in a way that non-coaches can assimilate, which is the foundation the rest of client acquisition is built on. You can register here.
If you have worked on your niche before and it didn’t lead anywhere, come anyway? I’ve had so many coaches say “I’ve never heard niching described like this before, and now it makes sense!”, and you could be one of them.
Recent Comments