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!

Stop Chasing Abundance; Start Choosing It!

•  Are you a new or nearly-new coach feeling daunted at the prospect of finding her first paying clients?
• Or a coach with some experience
  but no clear plan for attracting new business to you?  Especially not
  if it means any of that dirty M word, marketing!
• Are you concerned you will start losing your coaching skills if you don’t get some practice fast?

Now discover a way to become
confident, professional and attractive to the people you are meant to
serve.  Choose to be an Abundant Coach with one of our two new courses starting this month, September!

Find full details of the programmes here.

Here’s what Lynne, one of our current delegates, has to say about it:

I am much clearer about where I am headed, have new clients, plans for products and coaching programmes and an explosion of confidence. I finally know exactly what my coaching practice looks like and I have a second niche that is absolutely me.

There have been some wonderful aha moments. People on the programme are getting things done and sounding much more confident and purposeful The triads are great – they provide an opportunity to coach and be coached. I thought I would hate them but they’re not the scary thing I imagined.

Lynne Lee – www.christianlifecoaching.co.uk

So if you are sick of struggling with techie challenges or don’t understand where to start with marketing your coaching (and are losing confidence in your coaching skills to boot!), we would just love to have you join us. 

Full programme and joining details here now.

On 17th July at 12.45pm GMT, we will be joined by Chantal Cornelius for her presentation entitled:

"How Not to Do a Newsletter"!

She says:

Did you know it costs far more to sell to a new client than it does to sell to an existing one?  This means that you need to build strong relationships with your clients, which keep them coming back for more, buying from you again and again.

But how do you do this when you’re busy running your business?  How do you find the time to keep in touch with dozens, if not hundreds of contacts every month?

An email newsletter is a very cost effective way of doing this.  You don’t need to be a graphic designer or a world class copywriter to produce something that keeps your company name in front of the people who matter.

Chantal Cornelius has been building businesses through newsletters for
a number of years.  She runs Just Add Content, an email newsletter
system that has been described as a “highly praised UK service”.  In
this session she will share with you some ideas on how to get started:

• Planning what to send and how to send it

• Deciding what to write and how to make writing easier

• Who to send your newsletter to

Chantal is a regular speaker at business events and network meetings and helps her clients produce newsletters that create a professional and authentic image of their business.  See a selection of those newsletters by going to the JAC Client page here

To register for this call, you must be a member of New Coach Business Network.  Join now by submitting your email address below:

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• Are you a new or nearly-new coach feeling daunted at the prospect of finding
  her first paying clients?

• Or a coach with some experience but no clear plan for attracting new business
  to you?  Especially not if it means any of that dirty M word,
  marketing!

• Are you concerned you will start losing your coaching skills if you don’t
  get some practice fast?

Now discover a way to become more confident, professional and attractive to the people you are meant to serve.  Choose to be an Abundant Coach!

Wouldn’t
it be wonderful if you could fast-track your coaching success, stop CHASING it,
start CHOOSING it!

Well
Now You Can.  Visit The Abundant Coach for details.

• Are you a new or nearly-new coach feeling daunted at the prospect of getting her first paying clients?
• Or a coach with some experience but no clear plan for attracting new business to you?
• Would you like an affordable, realistic and structured approach to creating a sustainable business, whether full- or part-time?
• And to help in developing a 5 star programme that you might very well one day be running yourself?

Let me be brief because what I’m doing here quite simply is looking for names of people who are interested in hearing more about The Abundant Coach programme which I’m launching later this month.  It’s a brand new programme I’m offering at a crazy introductory price because we’ll be polishing it as we go along!   

For this reason it’s important to me that it gets offered first to
those people who’ve indicated a possible interest in participating.
You’re not committing yourself to anything here, simply making sure you
get first bite of the cherry – if you want to take it.

So
what is The Abundant Coach programme all about?  It’s a 14 week plan
for new and somewhat experienced coaches who want to build their
coaching practice and improve their coaching skills.   

As
relatively inexperienced coaches I know that many of you need guidance
and support to create a sustainable business (even a part-time one) but
you also worry that you don’t really have the confidence in your
coaching skills to work with proper clients (ones who pay you!).  Or
perhaps you are losing the confidence you had because you simply aren’t
getting enough practice…

The Abundant Coach programme comprises:

• Group mastermind calls to support every individual to achieve a business and coaching goal

• 1-1 coaching sessions to focus your actions, hurdle your obstacles and celebrate your triumphs
• Optional audio downloads providing technical support for online marketing strategies
• A dedicated discussion group to share learning and create a community of 5 star coaches
• Weekly coaching triads to build skills in the safest of environments
• Optional group calls to share and learn coaching techniques, models and exercises
• Tips and worksheets

The
Abundant Coach is launching later this month, will run for 14 weeks and
this first programme only will be offered at less than £20 per week.   
Though I promise to deliver fabulous value and a unique programme, it’s
only fair to promote it at a no-brainer price in order to ensure I can
attract the perfect people to the team.  People who have already
invested their hard-earned money in their coach training and now want
to start or strengthen their business without paying out another small
fortune.  Coaches who are ready to put in some work, some effort, some
time.  Try something new.  Stretch their comfort zones.  Laugh at their
mistakes and try again.  People who can think a little outside the box,
give great feedback and help make The Abundant Coach the coach business
training programme for new and not-so-new coaches.

That’s
enough for now!  If your interest is piqued, a little or a lot, drop me
an email direct to my inbox at abundantcoach@marionryan.com.  If you
want to tell me something about yourself, your coaching dreams and what
interests you about the programme, cool.  If you don’t, just send a
blank email.  Over the course of the next 7 days I’ll be writing to
those of  you who contact me, to tell you more about the programme and
to invite some special new coaches to join me for a work-hard,
play-hard few weeks ahead!

Thanks for reading.

Marion