Most of us coach for free at some point, and we do it in pursuit of confidence, credibility, and a belief in our own ability as a coach. Those are reasonable things to want. What tends to happen is that we end up with less of all three than we started with. Let me explain.
If you’re reading this thinking you’ve never coached for free, that your clients have always paid you properly, then well done. I’d also bet my back teeth, that you had a little black book of people who knew, liked, and trusted you before you ever trained as a coach. That’s a privilege earned over a long career, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that coaches with this monetisable credibility don’t work hard. They do work hard, but they start from a completely different point from the eight out of ten of us who don’t have that little black book!
The Difference Between Paid Coaching and “Paid” Coaching
We leave coach training clutching our certificate with a song in our heart and absolutely delighted. Most of us didn’t know we had a thing, and now we have a thing, and it’s a skill that genuinely allows us to change how somebody’s life evolves.
Then we start trying to find clients.
The ICF route to ACC is 100 logged hours, 25 of them pro bono and 75 paid. Other professional bodies work in a similar way. The word “paid” is where the trouble starts because it covers two completely different things.
There’s paid coaching, which sounds like what it is: somebody pays you a professional fee because they want the outcome you’re offering.
Then there’s “paid” coaching, which is an exchange of value of arrangement. When I asked a senior figure within the ICF community what an exchange of value actually meant, the example given was that the client pays for the coffee. It also covers a few pounds for a session, mates rates and reciprocal coaching, which is peer coaching. You coach another coach, they coach you, and you each log one hour of the two hours it takes.
Both count identically towards the 100-hour total for ACC. But only one of them tells you anything about whether or not you can build a sustainable business. It’s the second kind, the “paid” coaching, that does the damage because it looks and feels like progress when it really isn’t.
When Free Coaching Is Hard To Give Away
Underneath a lot of this, it is a belief that people need to experience coaching before they can understand the value in it. Coach somebody for an hour, the thinking goes, and they’ll be able to see what it does. I understand why that feels easy to believe, and I also know it doesn’t work as well as we hope it will.
Imagine a coach who’s finished coach training and done the 25 hours pro bono, perhaps for a charity, perhaps for friends and colleagues. Now she needs 75 more hours.
What she finds is that it can become remarkably difficult to persuade anyone to sit down for an hour and be coached, even when it costs them nothing. I’ve had this conversation many times. No coach expected finding paying clients to be a walk in the park, but what surprised them is they ended up in a situation where they were struggling to give coaching away, and they did not anticipate that.
Let me explain why we end up in that situation. As a profession, as an entire profession, we find it very hard to articulate the value of what we do in a way that non-coaches can assimilate. That difficulty doesn’t disappear just because we’re giving it away for free.
Let’s Give Away A Whole Coaching Programme!
A version of this comes up often enough that I recognise it before the coach has finished the sentence. The plan they came up with is to give away an entire coaching programme start to finish. The thinking is that the client gets the full experience and reaches their goal, and the coach gets to practise the whole arc. The result is a happy client who reached their goal and a glowing testimonial for the coach. Everybody wins.
It doesn’t normally go that way because coaching is about change, and change is difficult. That difficulty is the reason that coaching exists in the way that it does, with the accountability built in. If change was easy, we’d all be able to do it on our own and coaching wouldn’t be the wonderful thing that it is.
When it gets hard for a client who you’re coaching for free. They don’t normally tell you that it’s getting hard. They go quiet in a particular way. Appointments get cancelled or moved, the client arrives not having taken the actions that they said they’d take, they become harder to reach, and eventually some of them completely disappear.
What that does to a coach is considerable. They sit and think, “I can’t even give this away.” From the client’s side, nothing dramatic happened at all. It simply got hard, and it dropped down the list of their priorities. The client doesn’t understand the impact their actions have had on the coach.
A client who has paid a professional fee, on the other hand, has a bit more skin in the game. It isn’t only about the money, of course it isn’t, but wanting value for what they’ve spent gives people a bit of stickability that free clients often don’t have.
Hour After Hour Of Delivering Value
So, we go back to delivering discovery calls, hoping the experience will demonstrate the value of what we do and result in someone who wants to pay us. I talk to hundreds of coaches a month, and the story is remarkably consistent right across the world. Sometimes those free hours do turn into a client, but often the client they turn into is paying mates rates, which can be anything from very little but up to perhaps £50 a session.
Constantly finding new people to give discovery calls to so that a proportion of them convert into low-fee arrangements is not a route to a sustainable business. It’s a very tiring treadmill
The conclusion coaches reach at this point is that money’s the problem. The fee’s too high, and nobody wants to pay it. I do understand entirely why that’s the conclusion they reach, but they’re reaching it having not tested the right thing. They’ve run an experiment in “paid” coaching and drawn a conclusion about paid coaching. People absolutely will pay for coaching when they understand what’s in it for them.
What All Those Free Coaching Hours Build
Real coaching hours with real clients (paid, “paid” or unpaid) do build something. They build confidence in our delivery. They build coaching skills – fluency, clarity, and judgement about when to hold space etc. Those skills are really worth having, but they all sit on the delivery side of our businesses.
None of that coaching builds the skill that creates the opportunities to do the delivery, which is the other half of the skills every business needs.
We are so poor at client acquisition as a whole profession that there’s an associate company in the UK that charges its clients for coaching while its coaches deliver pro bono because our professional bodies count those hours as paid. Just think about that for a moment. There’s even a waiting list to work there for free. My question about this arrangement is that, if the value that the coaches receive from delivering pro bono for this organisation is supervision and community, that’s great, but why can’t the coaches have those and be paid for work that’s being sold?
Genuine Pro Bono Is Different
I want to separate all of this from real pro bono coaching. Coaching for a charity, etc., delivering to people who could never afford to pay, is a fine thing to do.
Inside a commercially viable coaching practise, pro bono work becomes what it should be, which is altruistic. A gift of time and skill from somebody who is secure in the knowledge that their coaching is valuable and that people pay for it. Coaching is a wonderful way to give something back.
Pro bono coaching does not build the client-finding muscles, and it isn’t meant to.
100 Hours Later
So we get to 100 hours, we get the ACC badge, and we look around, and the clients still aren’t there. The next version of the story starts, which is that PCC is the one that businesses want.
I remember a conversation with one coach in particular because she got quite angry with me. She was coaching for free or for a few pounds a session to reach ACC because she told me, “That’s the credential that businesses want.” When I asked her, “Which businesses?” she told me, “All businesses.” I asked her, “What made you think that?” and there was a long silence.
She didn’t know why she thought it. What she was looking for was validation, something to hold up, a badge that said, “Here I am, I’m qualified now. You can engage me.”
But organisations don’t work that way. They want to know what they get for the money, and in their case that means a return on investment. Why would any organisation pay you to coach its people without understanding what it’s buying? Which brings us back to articulating the value of coaching in a way non-coaches can assimilate.
The Real Cost
Free coaching costs far more than the hours spent coaching.
The first cost is time: not sessions, which often can feel wonderful, but the hours spent hunting for people who’ll let you coach them for nothing or for the price of the coffee. That search is exhausting, and it’s not a search that we ever imagined ourselves having to do
The second cost is confidence. We can take on free work to build confidence, but when even free work is hard to find and free clients drift away, what we get is the opposite of confidence. The thing this free coaching is supposed to give us is the thing it takes away.
The third cost is the year. All of that time and effort go into the delivery side, and at the end of it, the client acquisition problem is exactly where it was when we started.
Coaches are highly intelligent people. Not one of us thought we’d open the classroom door and find our clients in a queue waiting to be coached. What we didn’t expect was that finding clients who would pay us the kind of rates we discussed when we were training, would be close to impossible.
Dreadful Advice
Part of the reason that client acquisition remains impossible is the astonishingly bad quality of the advice on offer about how to find them. I belong to a lot of coaching groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and when somebody posts asking how to find clients, the answers are astonishing.
Be authentic. How do we be authentic? What does that mean?
Have good conversations. With whom do we have these conversations? Where do we have these conversations, and how does a good conversation become a fee?
There’s nothing pragmatic or actionable in most of the advice that’s offered, and pragmatic and actionable is exactly what we need. We need someone to say, “Do this first, then do this, then do this.” We need to develop something in a form that can be repeated so that it produces clients who pay a professional fee more than once, so that it becomes a process.
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 don’t you join my next Nail Your Niche Challenge?
It runs a few times each year, and it isn’t a full four days out of your diary. It’s a light touch, heavy on thinking, and the thinking is properly challenging, which most of us rather enjoy, don’t we? A concept video lands at 7:00 am UK each morning with a task attached. At 5:00 pm UK, I go live with some of the Coaching Revolution mentors to answer every question that’s come up. If you complete all four tasks, you’ll be entered into a draw for five sessions of supervision.
One coach who took part expressed surprise that nobody had ever explained client acquisition so clearly before. Why hadn’t they?
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you three lots of 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me. That provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how client acquisition for coaches actually works.
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