I find this a difficult subject to write about, because some people read what follows as an attack on the profession. It isn’t. It’s a description of a problem the profession has, and a problem we don’t talk about doesn’t get solved, so pretending it isn’t there has never seemed like a sensible option to me.
The problem is money. Not the fees we charge, but the money we’ve already spent and what it has returned.
What We Spend
Coach training runs from a couple of thousand pounds to twenty-five thousand, depending on where you train and what qualification you’re training for. On top of that sits mentor coaching, which may or may not be included in the package you bought. Then the exam fee, then professional body membership, and for EMCC coaches, supervision. I expect ICF to add a supervision requirement at some point too.
Done at the least expensive level, we’re still into several thousand pounds. For most of us it’s considerably more, and it’s spread over a couple of years, which makes it easier not to add up.
What That Money Buys
It buys delivery skills – usually great delivery skills. I want to be clear that this isn’t a criticism of coach training organisations, because teaching people to coach is their job and they do it really well.
Coaching businesses very rarely fail because the coach is a poor coach. They almost always fail because the money doesn’t work.
Some training organisations do give a ‘nod’ towards what gets called business development. In most cases that turns out to be admin: how to keep client notes, how to handle invoicing, what goes in a contract. That’s all incredibly useful but it’s all about what happens once a client exists. Almost none of it covers where that client is going to come from.
Some go further.
I saw a bolt-on module that was sold for around £1.2k, which is a series of videos and workbooks. I’ve seen a business mastermind. I have also seen a section of a community platform holding about forty videos on finding a niche and everything around it. I’ve seen these because coaches bring them to me and ask whether they’re any good, sometimes worried in advance that they aren’t. Sometimes it’s coaches who’ve worked with us, saying this has just landed and their cohort is about to treat it as the right thing to do and they feel worried about it.
They’re right to worry. Forty short videos teaching that your niche might be anxious professionals or overwhelmed leaders isn’t anywhere near specific enough to build a coaching business on. What happens as a result of this kind of training is that coaches follow the advice for as long as they can sustain it, has nobody to ask when it stalls, gets frustrated because the clients aren’t materialising and concludes that marketing doesn’t work. What they’ve really concluded is that what they’ve been taught doesn’t work, which is a different thing.
I wish training organisations would stay in their lane, teach people to be excellent coaches, and then signpost to accredited organisations that teach client acquisition for coaches as a specialist subject. We’re one, and we aren’t the only one.
Where the Signposting Goes
The signposting is its own problem. One training provider I. know of that charges a premium for their courses, was pointing its graduates towards six sessions of sales mentoring at £3k plus a listing in a coaching directory. I know because several of the coaches concerned later came and worked with us.
The reason sales mentoring isn’t the support we need is that selling assumes there is somebody to sell to. If you picture the whole process, from a person who has never heard of you and doesn’t know what coaching is, through to that person completing a coaching programme with you, the sale is a single moment roughly halfway along. Everything before it is marketing, and marketing is the part that consistently produces people to have the sales conversation with.
Our profession holds marketing in remarkably low regard. I saw a post from an academic saying, in effect, that if coaches spent half as much time and money on perfecting their coaching as they do on ‘silly marketing’, we’d all be better off. That post sat alongside promotion for their latest edited book and their next webinar. Marketing their own work is fine. Sneering at coaches trying to find clients through marketing is hypocrisy.
Every business needs a reliable way of finding customers who can and will pay a professional rate. Coaching is not the exception, and no return on the money we spend learning to coach and becoming credentialed will happen without it.
The Hours
This next part is what I think of as the dark underbelly of coaching. To reach ACC with the ICF you need a hundred logged coaching hours, of which twenty-five can be pro bono and seventy-five must be paid.
If that were the end of it, most of us would struggle to get there, so the definition of paid has been stretched to accommodate reality. Paid can mean an exchange of value, and I’m told by coaches, and by professional bodies, that the client buying the coffee can satisfy it. Somebody who has spent thousands of pounds getting to this point is being told that coaching for a cup of coffee counts as paid coaching.
A coach at an introductory webinar for a professional body asked whether it would count if her client donated a professional sum to charity instead of paying her. The answer was no, because the money would have to pass through her hands and then on to the charity. So a coffee qualifies, but a £125 to a charity doesn’t. That seems odd to me.
What About Associate Coaching?
There’s an associate company selling coaching cheaply, at one point marketed as costing less than a pizza. The company has a healthy turnover, yet its coaches deliver coaching pro bono, because our professional bodies will allow coaches to count those hours as paid.
There is even a waiting list to work there.
I’d ask one question about that arrangement. There may well be supervision provided, and a community, and some confidence built along the way, and all of that is worth having. Why can’t the coaches have all of it and be paid as well, when the coaching they deliver is being sold?
The waiting list tells you something on its own. Finding clients is so difficult that coaches will queue for the chance to give their work away.
More Hours, More Chance
Underneath all of this sits a belief that’s very widely held and rarely examined: that hours are the route to clients, so the more coaching we do, the more likely we are to find someone who pays us the kind of rate that we talked about when we were training.
Reciprocal coaching is the clearest example. You coach a coach, they coach you, and for every two hours delivered and received you log one as paid. In theory, a coach could reach the highest level of credential having only ever coached other coaches. Coaching a coach is a different job from coaching somebody who has no idea what the process is, because coaches know where you’re going and can meet you halfway, while everyone else needs considerably more skill from us.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider what reciprocal coaching removes. Because both people already know what coaching is, both already want it. That means that the client does not have to be found, they don’t need to be persuaded that the problem they have is one coaching could help with, and they don’t need to be convinced that the fee being charged is worth it. The entire client acquisition problem has been taken out, and the hour still counts.
Coaching for a Coffee?
The same is true of coaching for a coffee, coaching pro bono, and coaching somebody else’s clients as an associate. The number goes up. Confidence goes up too, and it deserves to, because these are real coaching hours with real people, but all of it is happening on the delivery side of the business.
Nothing about any of that coaching work builds a way of finding clients, so there’s no point at which it turns into a practice full of paying clients. It can’t, because that isn’t the skill being practised. Associate clients never become yours either, since not stealing them will doubtless be in the contract you signed.
What Happens Next
At some stage, most of us work out that this isn’t going the way we expected. We didn’t expect clients would be queuing outside the training room, but we did think there was a clear route to paying work.
Some coaches are internal and employed to coach as part of their employed role. Those jobs are few and the competition for them is fierce.
Others go to the platforms. There was a time when qualifying and joining BetterUp, Lyra, Ezra or CoachHub etc produced a reasonable living. Competition has changed that. The ICF’s 2025 Global Coaching Study puts coach practitioners worldwide at 122,974, up 54% since 2019, and the platforms no longer have to pay a professional rate to fill their rosters. A coach we work with, once she counts the admin around each client, is earning about £25 per hour. That isn’t the figure any of us discussed while we were training, is it?
Some consultancies that offer coaching alongside their other work do pay well. Those roles are also rare and fiercely competitive.
So we take another qualification, on the basis that another tool in the box means we have even more value to offer to our potential clients. The truth is that it’s very hard to offer value to clients you don’t have.
What I’d Like Instead
I’d like the profession to be straightforward about the fact that coach training teaches delivery skills, and that building a business from those skills requires a second, complimentary set of skills. I’d particularly like client acquisition to stop being bolted on as an added extra, being treated as an after thought. It’s literally half of the skills that someone hoping to build a coaching business needs, so it isn’t optional.
Something to consider is that the people running coach training organisations are not marketing coaching practices, they’re marketing coach training which means their marketing experience is in selling to people who want to become coaches. That’s a different job from selling coaching to people who don’t know what it is, but think they do and they’re wrong.
Even our professional bodies market to us rather than for us. When the ICF posts about the difference between coaching and mentoring, hundreds of coaches share that post, thinking it’s what potential clients need to see. Potential clients don’t care about the distinction between coaching and mentoring because it describes processes – and no one is particularly interested in the processes of other professions. What potential clients do need to understand is what coaching could do for them specifically, and being able to articulate that value in a way that’s meaningful to them is what marketing is.
This is why every mentor at The Coaching Revolution is an associate rather than an employee. To mentor with us you have to have been through one of our programmes, and you have to be actively marketing your own business while you are a mentor. Everyone teaching on our programmes is teaching from lived experience and the difference between learning from someone who teaches from lived experience and theory rather than just theory is vast.
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 every year. It’s four days of thinking rather than four days blocked out of your diary. One concept lands each day, covering who your people are, where they are, money, and the problem coaching will help them resolve. In the late afternoons, I run a live session answering the questions that have built up, with some of our mentors answering in the chat alongside me, all of us speaking from lived experience of not just marketing our businesses, but also from having taught thousands of coaches how to do the same.
One coach who came told me the challenge gave her far more insight into what she was supposed to be doing than the £3k she’d spent on a sales mentor had.
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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