Get Smart!

I have met many coaches over the years. Some build a successful coaching practice, others simply qualify and never quite seem to get off the ground, yet others simply give up the ghost almost immediately because they don’t know where to start with building a business.

Let me say this: it’s not the fault of coaching as an industry or a career! I think it’s because, traditionally, people drawn to become coaches aren’t experienced business people or entrepreneurs. They have been drawn to coaching to help people and to use their people skills.

The business side is something many coaches shy away from. Well, that’s ok if you don’t want to earn money from coaching. But if you do, if you want a successful practice, then the business aspect of coaching is an essential part of what you must learn and put to work.

Thankfully, like almost anything else these skills can be learned. You don’t have to be born a natural entrepreneur or have genetically gifted business acumen if such a thing exists!

You do however need to commit yourself to learning and using business skills.

This article is by no means comprehensive about what is needed but these seven tips will give you a great starting point if you really want to be successful.

Read these tips then take a look at your own situation and ask yourself:

How can I implement this?
How can I do what I’m doing better?
What’s currently missing which is holding me back?
What is working that I need to focus on strengthening?

So, here are the 7 tips to get you started:

1. Have a plan

Too often, coaches forget to get the basics right. And the basics of any business are getting a plan that meets your needs.

I’m not talking here about a massive document with pages and pages of market research, SWOT analyses, pi charts and Ven diagrams!

I mean simply a plan of what you want your business to do for you and how it’s going to do it.

In business there are basically three things you need:

• A seller (that’s you!)
• A service (that’s what you do)
• A buyer (your client)

Make sure you know in detail each of these things and build your plan around them.

Ask yourself

• What do you want from the business? How many clients? How much income? How many hours?
• Who are you? (What are your strengths, your experience, what do you bring to the coaching table)
• Who is your client?
• What is your service? (What makes it special, why choose you?)
• What are your routes to market? (Explore every option and look at what could work for you)
• Create a strategy and use it

2. Develop your niche

This has become almost a cliché in coaching now. Most coaches have heard the idea of developing a nice but they still say they’ll coach anyone on anything.

The problem is that, assuming you don’t have a corporate style budget, if you try to market to everyone you are not marketing to anyone. It’s true – try it! Try marketing to a 50 year old lady who attends the Mind Body Spirit show with the same material you want to capture a small business owner with. It just won’t wash.

When you finally start to focus on a niche you set in motion of series of changes to what you can do that will take you a long, long way. You can, for instance, figure out where your niche clients hang out, find out what their current challenges are, what their aspirations are and so on. You have a firm foundation to build a service that people can buy into.

So how do you find your niche?

Well you can simply choose one that appeals to you and find out how to get yourself into a position to take full advantage of it. Or you can be smarter about it and look at what you already have:

A powerful niche needs three things:

• Credibility
• Contacts
• Expertise/knowledge

So take a look at what you already have.

• Where do you have expertise that will enable you to understand the issues your niche is facing and ‘speak their language’?
• What contacts do you have that could form a strong niche?
• What credibility do you have as a coach in that field?

Where any one of these three is missing, you can gain it. No credibility in the field? Try doing some free coaching to someone in that niche and get a testimonial. Lack of expertise? Find out what you need to know and get busy learning. Lack of contacts? Who can put you in touch? Where can you network? Who accesses a similar market by ezine, magazine, newsletter etc?

3. Invest in business knowledge and skills

To be a successful coach is to be a successful business person.

You have to market yourself, sell yourself, manage yourself. You need to run the business of ‘you’.

Yet too few coaches learn about business. When did you last read a book on marketing or sales skills?

Successful coaches realise that they need to understand these issues. So get busy learning. Invest in your business knowledge and skills.

Learn about:

• Planning and implementing business ideas
• Marketing skills (there are excellent, entertaining and endlessly useful books on this theme)
• Social media skills (get up to date with making social media work)
• Sales skills (learn how to close more and prospect more effectively)
• Communication skills (learn how to cut through the mass of stuff people have to read every day)
• Networking skills (learn how to make networking pay dividends)

Start talking to successful business owners, coaches and consultants. Learn what works.

4. Consistency of message

Your message must be consistent and clear for potential clients to know what you represent.

Make sure your literature is congruent with what you offer.

Is it high end? Corporate? Spiritual? Community? Whatever it is, your materials, your words, your message needs to speak to the audience.

It also needs to be consistent. There’s no benefit to having a scatter gun approach to marketing with bright pink glossy fliers on one side and muted grey leaflets on the other. That’s just a sign that the identity hasn’t been found yet.

Be clear and proud of your message.

5. Network (or as I heard it called, ‘motivated socialising’)

Once you know your niche and you have your message you can confidently seek out your potential clients.

And the fact is that, despite the growing world of social media and online marketing, the best way to gain coaching business is to meet people and find out about them.

So think about where your clients hang out. OK, so most people go to the pub but that’s not what I mean!

Where do entrepreneurs go? Where do new mums go? Where do social workers go? Find out where your market goes and be there.

Networking is about meeting people and making time to see them again. Don’t sell your service there and then. Focus on understanding the person you’re speaking to; what their problems are, what they’re interested in, what they want to achieve.

Then explain that this is precisely what you do – you get your clients where this new potential client wants to be. Be confident that you can do this. Then ask if you can meet to talk about it more. Get their card – giving yours is fine but you lose control of the process. They will almost certainly not call! Get their card!

Set targets for your networking. Decide to meet at least x amount of people. Simply saying I’ll meet as many as possible is not SMART (literally).

Seek to understand the other person before you seek to be understood and you’ll be on the right road to successful networking.

6. Consistent action

All of the planning and attractive marketing literature in the world will make not an iota of a difference if you don’t take consistent, directed and purposeful action.

This all comes down to your real commitment to make your practice come to fruition.

One thing so many people are guilty of is procrastination. Often this comes down to the fear that the action you want to take will not produce the result you want so it’s easier to hang on to the hope and not do anything rather than do something and face the reality.

So, let me ask you to give up hanging on to hope. Face reality and if the actions you take don’t work, change the actions.

The only way you’ll build your practice is to take action. Guaranteed!

Make your actions SMART. Make them specific, measurable, attractive, relevant and time bound.

Focus on the things that produce results – it’s easy to be BUSY. Anyone can be busy. The point is not to worry about being busy but to think about the result you want and the quickest way to get there. Focus on the outcome you want and you are far more likely to get there than if you focus on the process that you think will get there.

7. Don’t sell coaching – sell the sizzle not the steak

What are you selling as a coach?

Are you selling a powerful process of empowerment which doesn’t advise or judge and helps clients get where they want to be?

Errrrr….No!

You’re selling what the client wants to get. You’re selling the new relationship, the increased business profits, the lower debt etc.

Clients don’t care about the process you use – they care about the result that the process creates for them. The reason we, as coaches, use coaching is because we believe that as a process, it is one of the most powerful and effective ways to achieve those results. And that is what the client is buying.

OK, so that’s your 7 tips for building a successful coaching practice.

But here’s a bonus eighth!!

8. Gain self-belief

Start to really believe in yourself. You have all the resources it takes to be a successful coach and all you have to do is use them. There is nothing that sets you out for failure or success – just yourself. Your actions and your beliefs.

Don’t listen to negative news or people. You can’t affect the economy but you can affect how you respond to it.

Believe you can do it – look at where you have been successful previously and see what made that happen.

If you’re feeling uncertain, take small steps towards success. Small steps are cumulative and lead to a giant leap!

And that is that! Simple, eh?

I hope these tips have been useful for you. However, ultimately they are only as useful as you make them. That is in your hands. Go for it!