Grow your Coaching Business! Is 2008 the year you get serious about it?

Dear Fellow Coach

Don’t you just love being a coach?  Nothing beats the exhilaration of coming off a coaching call knowing you’ve helped a client make a real difference to their life.  And nothing’s more disappointing and frustrating than trying to find enough of them.

Where are they all hiding?  It’s tempting to go round peering under cabbage leaves in the hope of locating the rare lesser spotted coachee because helping the people you were meant to serve feels so damn good you can’t get enough of it!

If you’ve experienced the frustration, scarcity or anxiety around filling your coaching business, you are far from alone.  Many wonderful coaches have given up the work they love because they learnt how to coach – and loved it – but never learnt how to attract their ideal clients to them.

People talk about the secret of a profitable coaching business or the key to your coaching prosperity but this is baloney. 

Honest, there’s no secret.  There’s only stuff you don’t know yet and – more infuriating – stuff you know but don’t do yet.

So read on and let me tell you how you can grow your business…

As well as being a successful coach for many years I now run The Abundant Coach which is a group coaching programme for new or somewhat experienced coaches who are always in a state of struggle about how to find more clients.

Find more clients?  We make it sound like they’re stuck in a dark cupboard or at the back of the garage under a pile of old newspapers.  The truth is we need to know how to attract clients and because so many coaches struggle with this, they don’t get enough experience and that in turn affects their confidence.

I used to have a particular client with a huge hairy business goal.  She was amazing.  She swung into action between coaching sessions and came back each week with a list of accomplishments as long as your arm.  When she wasn’t building that successful business she was a trainee coach struggling to keep up her skills and she often said to me – I wish you’d create some sort of programme for people like me.  I need to learn how to get some clients but my confidence is so wobbly now I’m getting in my own way.

In the end up the only way to keep her quiet was to create the programme.  Yes, persistance was one of her great strengths.  And though I felt sure she was echoing what many other newer coaches were feeling, I decided to survey a group of them anyway.

I guess that’s my first tip.  You have to find out what your potential clients are struggling with and give them what they want, rather than what you want.

How you survey them is up to you.  Sit down with a little focus group and let them talk.  Get on the phone to a handful.  Set up a simple online survey using SurveyMonkey.  You can do this for absolutely free as long as you keep your survey to fewer than 10 questions and no more than 100 people answering.

In my experience you start seeing patterns and similarities very quickly.

A note of caution though.  Just because you can identify a problem they have isn’t enough.  You have to be sure of two things:

• That they want to solve their problem
• That they are prepared to pay to have that problem solved

I’ll be sharing my second tip with you in a couple of days.  Remember, there are no secrets.  Just stuff you don’t know yet and stuff you know but don’t do yet.  While you’re waiting for my next tip feel free to visit TheAbundantCoach.com and see what my programme is all about.  In fact, you might also spot some other essential elements in the matter of attracting more clients to your coaching business.  See if you can see what I’m talking about!