CHAPTER 13

BUILDING A FREELANCE COACHING BUSINESS

Let’s begin by talking about social media. My friend and colleague Dr Liz Gooster has written us a great summary: see the box below.

^* For Liz’s website and blog, see www.lizgooster.com; she is on Twitter as @lizgooster and Instagram as goosterontheloose.

Is that it then? A dynamic, authentic presence on social media, and job done?

Sadly not – as you have guessed, there’s more to developing a coaching business than just Liz’s sound advice. In fact, much more. So, what was that thing we were talking about in Chapter 5? Ah yes – the GROW Model!

This chapter seeks to help you build your business as a freelance coach. But it’s a jungle out there: conflicting advice, facts and rumours, some indispensable tips and guidelines, but some things you could trip over and others that bite. So we use the trusty GROW Model to hack a pathway through it all.

The rest of this chapter therefore contains, as you could doubtless chant by now, four sections:

1. 1Goal: what is yours?
2. 2Reality: what are the facts?
3. 3Options: what could you do? (There’s lots here!)
4. 4Will: how do you feel after absorbing all this, and when you recover, what will you do?!

Right, pith helmets adjusted, machete to hand? Off we go.

1. The goal

Your goals in fact. Before we plunge into marketing and selling (two very different things as we shall see below), let’s do this properly and start with your goal.

In a way, this sends you back to reconsider much of the rest of the book. Chapter 2 described many different ways others do it: which of these appeals to you, which fits your personal circumstances best, and your personality?

And maybe it even means revisiting Chapter 1: is your interest and your gift in mentoring or coaching, life or business coaching, directive or non-directive, business, personal or leadership coaching?

This might prepare your thinking for when we go into detail below, asking which market sector or niche makes sense for you.

To be very practical about it, it may be best to start with the opportunities closest at hand. To vary the jungle metaphor, when talking to people about building their business, I often say it’s like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine through the jungle: you start with the vine nearest you. So if you are in financial services you might know several people there who need coaching. Do a good job with them, and you could end up not just with their colleagues in the same sector, but with their friend the architect, and her contact the track manager at Silverstone, and so on . . . One coach I knew had been working in insurance, and presumed he would start there. He did indeed begin by contacting fellow insurance executives: but over the months contacts referred him on to contacts, and his first pieces of actual coaching work were with the manager of a scuba-diving operation in southern Spain, and someone expanding their Pilates studio businesses. So you start with the vine close by and never know where the vine several swings along will take you! But you need to start somewhere.

You may also want to think about your goal in very concrete terms. Do you have or need explicit income or other targets for your first year, or first two to three years? One person I was working with went through a process something like: ‘I doubt I could see more than two clients a day from a pure psychic energy perspective. Given that typically means four hours a day and assuming a theoretical maximum of 220 working days, it gives 880 hours. Put in a target income (gross) of say 220,000 [sterling, euros, beads . . . ] then the theoretical hourly rate is 250. BUT you also need to factor in overheads such as office rent, bookkeeping, etc.’ and so he went on through his thinking.^*

^* You may not need an office to meet clients – most UK business coaches see clients in the client’s office, although usual practice varies elsewhere – but you do need somewhere to work yourself, and for secure storage of your records (which should be kept under lock and key, whether real or electronic). For those clients who want to meet outside their office, finding somewhere appropriate and discreet to meet them (a club, for example) is an early task.

Other people see their goal differently; one coach I know just set the principle of fairness: they charged their client what their client charged others. So if the client is an accountant charging out at £270 an hour, the coach would bill them £270 an hour. The objective was to get to that position and stay there. A variation on the same theme, but coming from a very different place, is wanting to be respected. So another coach’s reasoning was, if they charged low fees, they could get more work, but if they billed at a higher rate – and could carry it off – they would be taken more seriously. It’s what they called the ‘Harrods principle’: if it’s expensive, it must be good. (They also knew they had to avoid overshooting, which might engender disrespect, even disbelief!) And then once you get busy, you can keep the workflow manageable by raising your fees. (It works, and it’s better than getting run ragged, and risking slippage in the quality of your work. Alternatively this is when coaches who are building a name often start bringing in associates and growing a business around their particular approach.)

Others have very different kinds of goal: personal fulfilment, stepping back from the golden treadmill to create enough space in their life to find love, being able to support their children through an expensive education. And/or, these days, their parents in retirement.

It needs, as always, to begin with a goal. Or goals.

2. Reality

In this section, I first nail the two big myths that are out there, that (a) all is wonderful and (b) all is doom. Then I give you the facts from the research and my observation over decades on the three key questions I am asked daily:

• ●How much can I earn?
• ●How long does it take? And,
• ●What is the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t?

How much can I earn?

I am in contact with hundreds, maybe in a busy year for conferences even a thousand, coaches a year. On the topic of building their businesses, I hear two totally different stories. Some people speak (or email) disapprovingly: the market is tough, even impossible, most coaches don’t in fact make it, and anyone who says to the contrary (looking at me meaningfully) is a menace, raising false expectations that are doomed to disappointment. The others report cheerily they have had their best months/quarter/year ever, and contact me for help with finding more good coaches to handle their fast-growing business. (Perhaps there’s a silent majority in the middle just getting on with it and muddling through, but they remain silent.)

So who’s right? Objective data on coach earnings is hard to find. There is the annual Sherpa Coaching survey: see www.sherpacoaching.com. But such a US-based survey defines business coaching rather differently from the way it is used in Europe and elsewhere, and fees for executive coaching tend to be rather higher in Europe. But adjusting for that, it is still a useful indicator of the year-on-year health of the executive and business coaching market – and the Sherpa results continue to indicate that it is possible to earn a tolerable living. In fact, at the senior leadership end of the market, the 2019 survey showed fees continue their steady rise – despite (or perhaps because of) the political and economic situation.²

People who earned really large amounts in their previous lives need to be aware there is not, barring rare exceptions, the same scope for that in coaching, but most people transitioning to freelance careers are usually well aware of that. The usual trade-off is to earn less, but have more of one’s life back.

How long does it take?

The data on this is less clear, but from over 20 years observing coaches build their businesses, I notice it often takes at least 2 years post-qualification for people to get up to speed, i.e. charging full commercial rates. Business coaches tend to be an ethical bunch, and are often reluctant to charge anything like full fees immediately upon graduation, despite being officially qualified to do so at that point. They transition their fees up only as they become convinced from repeated client feedback and results that they are delivering real value. It frequently even takes an external challenge, e.g. colleagues, friends, former tutor, even clients, saying, ‘You really are undercharging for this, you know,’ before they finally move to proper market levels. (The ones who get to a full order book, at full fees, within three months post-graduation – and I have seen this too, though much less frequently – are usually those who had extensive sales training in their previous career, and have long since lost any original sheepishness about making sales.)

We noted in Chapter 4 that it’s important for reasons of professional development to keep up ongoing learning, support systems and supervision. This has psychological advantages too: seeing coaching for real at coaching ‘fishbowls’ (where leading coaches work live in front of a small audience, and discuss it afterwards), and talking to others at conferences or networking events, or on social media, helps ‘normalise’ the up-and-down process of learning the craft, building the business, and dealing with setbacks. Not all coaching sessions will have a breakthrough or great result – but watching and talking to others helps you be prepared, and know what to expect. Quite apart from professional learning, and hearing others’ stories, being plugged in also gives great opportunities to research the market!

What is the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t?

Some thrive, others don’t: the difference seems to boil down to two things: longevity and activity. The first makes sense; people who have been building their businesses for five or more years are naturally likely to be more successful than new entrants, if only because those who didn’t succeed have gone elsewhere. Those who remain have often reached the useful stage of critical mass, where satisfied clients refer other clients and business snowballs. Activity matters: the difference between real success, and bumping along, has less to do with innate coaching skill and more to do with straightforward hard business graft. Indeed, for some coaches, having it too easy at the beginning is something of a trap: gifted initial work by virtue of a previous role, or contacts, they dive into the coaching, doing little or no marketing. Then one by one their contacts/grateful clients retire or move elsewhere, and eventually the stream of business dries up. The rule of thumb is you need to bring in at least 10 per cent of new clients a year, just to replace ‘natural wastage’; some say even 20 or 30 per cent.

By contrast those who start with fewer advantages often work harder to compensate. A coach I knew had spent 22 years in the same firm. The thought of going out on her own after so long in a safe context was exciting, but terrifying. She said it was the fear that drove her: long before she left her role, she spent nights and weekends developing a plan, then took a deep breath and set to work, looking up contacts, defining and making her offer, following up, delivering good work and keeping in touch. She exceeded her targets in her first year and I will never forget the sheer pleasure on her face as she told me that, adding, ‘And Anne, I’ve had a ball!’

Others do it with good habits. Another successful coach has a very simple rule: every day, they do three marketing activities. It may be making a phone call, or revising a document, and often it just takes a few minutes, out on the road between meetings, but they do three things a day without fail. This simple method alone, combined with hard work delivering the business that comes in, and sustaining consistently high standards, has yielded a serious income.

So the difference between the coaches who thrive is not necessarily their coaching, but their marketing/selling activity.

Hence that’s what we focus on in the rest of this chapter. But before we move on to that, there is obviously a lot more than marketing to building a new business. Most of it you doubtless know, as someone already in business, but for a great refresher (and for those who don’t, a comprehensive primer) the indispensable FT Guide to Business Start Up covers everything: from the initial nervous dipping your toe in the water right through to stock market listing, it’s all in there, and it’s updated annually.³

3. Options

So what could you do to build a business?

How do people actually find their coaches? The market tells us that people find coaches through ‘personal references’ a vast majority of the time. They also use web searches, brokers and LinkedIn. A 2019 survey showed however that word of mouth is used 10 times more often than any other method – and there has been ‘very little change in this area in recent years’.⁴

There are two basic ways to break into this word of mouth world: either by planning to the hilt and executing that plan, adapting it as necessary, or, by a more iterative, exploratory mode. (Or perhaps, like most people, working hard on a plan, then in reality operating on a combination of that and serendipity!)

But before we get into that, there’s something very important to do first.

How’s your coaching?

The essential first step may not appear to be a marketing one, in the conventional sense at least. It is instead to get your coaching to the point of inner confidence. We always have more to learn, but there comes a point in one’s training or experience or development, where you can look a prospective client in the eye, and know in your heart that you can do a good job. You may not have all the fancy extras you will add later, but you know you can deliver good straightforward coaching.

Buyers can tell: they can ‘smell’ uncertainty and hesitancy. Nervousness is another matter, but they can spot the difference between someone who is initially nervous, but who once they get going lights up when talking about their coaching, from someone who just hasn’t got on top of the subject yet. So the first task is to build your coaching hours until you have that inner core of confidence. It needn’t take long: it’s months, rather than years, in a good coach training. (And if despite decent training, more practice and good feedback from clients, colleagues and your supervisor, confidence is still an issue, it might be worth revisiting Carol Kauffman’s ‘4 steps to confidence’ tool in Chapter 6.)

Right, having got that out of the way (or under way!), now we need to enter the bit of the jungle where it gets really dense. To guide us through this part, where there are tangles and vines and alarming low growls from the undergrowth, let’s pull out another key tool for orientation, the MBTI, discussed at length in Chapter 7.

That is to say, I have broken down all the potential tips and pieces of advice or options into two different sub-sections: perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, they are the ‘N’ one and the ‘S’ one.

So there are first, some big-picture general comments on the options for sales and marketing of your business. And then, the biggest box in this entire book, the ‘Marketing Checklist’ into which I have stuffed as many detailed points as could possibly be crammed into one chapter!

Options for building a freelance coaching business: general comments

Some general tips gleaned from more than two decades of experience watching and helping coaches build their business include:

• ●Do something: this is my ‘ABC/XYZ Rule’. If you undertake marketing activities A and B and C, then work comes in – but often, puzzlingly, from areas X and Y and Z, not apparently connected to the marketing you did at all. But if you don’t do A, B and C, it doesn’t happen. I have no scientific explanation for this (I think of it as ‘kicking up dust in the Universe’) but have observed it to be the case many, many times.
• ●Do more than you think: when I was starting out, I asked a wise older coach which of the several possibilities were the most effective – networking, running seminars, writing articles, etc. She smiled slightly and said I should do them all, and that you have to do more than you think. She’s right.
• ●Do the things that make most impact: coaching is a service delivered by people to people; hence the marketing methods that work are those that get you in front of the right buyers, so they can assess your suitability for their current business needs. Or, as an early client of mine once memorably put it, so they can ‘sniff your air’. So face-to-face contact is the objective. The best way to get there is networking, i.e. politely but effectively letting people know precisely what you can do for their organisation and/or themselves. (LinkedIn was born for this.) If you dislike or fear it, join the club, so do most people, but there is no escape.
• ●Apply the Golden Rule of Networking: if you read the last bullet point with a sinking heart, then may I offer my Golden Rule of Networking. It’s just one word: give. Think constantly – and ask aloud as often as you can – how can I help? Do I know someone who would be interested that this person can coach in Italian? Is there a terrific podcast they might enjoy on the subject they’ve just been talking about? Like everything else, this gets better with practice. It also only works when it’s mostly true generosity; people can detect insincere manipulation. Sainthood isn’t required – my own constant sharing of tools I’ve found useful, etc. is about 85 per cent altruism, 15 per cent awareness that something might come back one day. I know that, they know that – but the balance still seems to work. How does this count as networking? Because as the saying goes, ‘what goes around, comes around’. People remember you when possibilities crop up, and send them your way. Often not the same people – it’s the ABC–XYZ rule again.
• ●Make contact; pound the streets: as someone put it rather crudely, it’s a numbers game – the more connections you make, the more work you should expect to pick up. Coaches who keep at it, rain or shine, are the ones who are so busy they are turning business away. What exactly you do will vary; one great rainmaker for a coaching business I know genuinely delights in others’ company at lunch or dinner, and keeps in close and real contact that way. Others thoughtfully send clients links to articles relevant to them. Speak at conferences; write a blog. Do what feels natural for you, play to your strengths (see Chapter 7) – but it’s also true that one needs to refresh the approach every now and then by doing something different as well. (Sorry!)
• ●But also say ‘No’: the late Professor John Stopford of London Business School, CEO coach and one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy, said one of the most-forgotten keys to business success is what you say ‘no’ to. This has long-term impact, as good clients send good clients, and bad clients send bad clients. Listen to your instincts and decline a client when that little alarm bell is ringing; tough to do when starting out, but one learns.
• ●Headhunting not recruiting? In the next section, we discuss detailed full-scale marketing activity to build a coaching practice. But for some people, this is not what they should be doing at all. Exceptionally senior businesspeople, or those with outstanding contacts, or who have a great deal of other work already in their portfolio, should be thinking of their marketing not in terms of ‘recruiting’ clients but of ‘headhunting’ them.

Many of those I talk to fall into this category: they start talking about business development, but when I ask how much time they will actually have available each year, and hence how many clients they can realistically fit in, there is often a brief contemplative silence, or the raising of an eyebrow. If the answer is that they only need or want, say, five clients a year, then my next challenge is to ask them, by name or possibly by position, who precisely they want those individuals to be. Given ‘six degrees of separation’, if the optimal mix is, say, four CEOs in the pharmaceutical sector, two of whom they already know + one rising star in a charity where they would offer their time pro bono, the marketing planning is already done, and they just need to pick up their phone. They may or may not win coaching contracts with their exact initial targets, but the opportunity cost of their time is so great, and the likelihood of a deluge of unwanted interest so high if they went public, that they must proceed discreetly, like a headhunter.

Options for building a coaching business: the detailed checklist

OK, lace up your boots tightly, we’re about to plunge into the densest part of the forest!

According to PSF marketing expert Kevin Wheeler (www.wheelerassociates.co.uk), there are seven core components in successful services marketing:

1. 1Understanding the market;
2. 2Marketing planning;
3. 3Managing existing clients;
4. 4Winning new business;
5. 5Building the brand;
6. 6Internal marketing;
7. 7Measuring results.

The Marketing Checklist (see the following box) takes you through each of these, with specific regard to building a business coaching practice. Some of the points are briefly elaborated, but for more in-depth coverage there are further resources later in the chapter.

4. Will

Still there?! Told you it was a jungle, thank goodness you had that hat!

But you’ve made it through the densest part of the jungle, congratulations! Now we’re out in a clearing, and having considered many of the possible options, there is space to consider what you will do.

Resources

• ●It may be that having battered your way through all of the above, you decide there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. You might – absolutely rightly in my view – have decided to delve into it more carefully and find out more than this single chapter can provide. If so, some readable and highly relevant books I would encourage you to consider include, first, Jenny Rogers’ excellent Building a Coaching Business: comprehensive, humane, sensible and far-ranging.¹⁰
• ●For more, try Stephen Newton’s Success as a Coach, which is particularly strong on how to create value – which might be perceived differently by coach and client (which has implications for how you run meetings); and also on getting your systems right to support the business.¹¹
• ●For a refresher on professional services marketing – i.e. where the ‘product’ one is selling is intangible (as opposed to, say, biscuits) – see Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible.¹² One key point from it is what I call the ‘funnel’: of course you could do most types of coaching, but prospective clients don’t buy something vague, they buy to meet a specific immediate requirement. You need to narrow down your offer to get through that buying funnel. Once inside, you will probably get the chance to broaden out again – ‘Steve, you were really helpful with Mary Jones, do you think you could take on John Smith?’ – but to get through the funnel, you need to identify, and be the solution for, a real, pressing need they have right now.

A coach!

You could doubtless see this coming! Being coached for a session or two might be all it needs to reconnect you with what you do actually know – and also to dig out your ‘elevator pitch’ and your initial thoughts on, for example, the market sector(s) you wish to target, how you will be differentiated, and so on. Could you perhaps swap coaching sessions on this with a friend or colleague?

Harking back to Chapter 6 and the PERFECT model, when thinking about your plan you may also want to think about the following:

• ●Energy: how are you going to preserve yours?
  • –aerobic fitness?
  • –relaxation/stress management technique?
  • –mindfulness training, meditation, regular time playing with the kids, cycling, gardening?

  Growing a business can be exhausting, and you want to be not just coping, but flourishing.

• ●Intellectual freshness and edge:
  • –Are your professional memberships up to date?
  • –Training/retraining and keeping a record thereof (as will be needed for keeping up your accreditation, if you go that route).
  • –Supervision, again.
  • –Conferences/seminars/workshops (your profession this time!).
  • –Reading, podcasts, etc.
  • –Writing and sharing your own material, insights and perspectives.
  • –Fun.

And remembering Chapter 9, and the crucial importance of support from your context, and avoiding the FAE, the fallacy that you are doing this all on your own:

• ●Support: what support mechanisms have you put in place?
  • –professional supervision;
  • –shoulder to cry on, to help deal with the inevitable knockbacks;
  • –collegial support – like-minded souls, colleagues, to bounce ideas around, improve the quality of your work, have a fresh eye to look over key documents;
  • –mentor – business, your profession, both . . . ;
  • –and some of the other ideas from earlier chapters: a book club, alumni associations, professional groups, networking communities?

The very best of luck! I do hope that in your personal jungle, the vines are just for swinging from, and the lions turn out to be Aslan.

The end

I’m afraid we’ve come to the end of the book. Doing endings well is a key coaching skill, and I’m absolutely hopeless at it. I prefer not to have endings at all. Coaching client relationships I do demurely bring to a close when the business need dictates, but in this book we have been in a much bigger conversation, and one that, as you can see, I find utterly gripping: opening up the possibility of becoming a business coach, and once I’m in that conversation with people, I don’t want to let go! So if you have comments on how this book could be made better, reactions, observations, debate, dialogue, discussion, do please email me at [email protected].

In the meantime, may I wish you every success, and profound fulfilment, in whatever part of this wonderful new field you want to make your own.