41 - How long does it REALLY take to grow a coaching business?

Hello. So today I want to talk about something that isn't spoken about that much and that is how long it should take you to grow your coaching business. Specifically, I'm talking about executive coaching businesses where you're selling into corporate clients, although you may have some individual clients as well. And firstly, I hope that you're hearing my should in how long should it take you to grow your business? As in inverted commas, with my tongue firmly planted in cheek. Because the truth is there is no one answer and there are a million variables, which is probably the most annoying answer, isn't it? It is. It depends. But don't worry, I am going to give you some guidelines. Now, to some degree, it is kind of meaningless to come up with an answer to this question of how long it takes to grow a coaching business. I will, but I don't want you, like, I'll give you some examples of times in terms of what I observe and what I think is realistic. But I don't want you to think that what I'm sharing as an average is, is what you should necessarily expect because the nature of an average means that some are longer and some are quicker. And also, like, it's a bit of a problematic concept because it totally depends on the outcome that you're seeking. So are we talking about the time it takes to replace your corporate income? Is it the time it takes to grow a good solid pipeline that shows that your business is viable and growing? And you know what, if your goal is to work part time? And for many coaches it is like, how do we assess the endpoint at which you say, yep, yep, I feel, I feel good that I've, that I've hit this point of growth. The truth is that you can only assess the endpoint relative to your own goals, which means that you should take all the times and all the information that I share today with a grain of salt and assess them relative to your own goals and your own timelines. Now, this might make me a bit of a bad business coach, to be honest, because I think we're supposed to say, you know, make a million in six months or, you know, grow your business in three months. And I'm not going to do that, but I do have some really important goals in the corporate coach accelerator and I'll talk about that in a moment. Now, firstly, it is important to have this conversation about time. And I like to normalize, you know, business growth times because it is often a very emotionally loaded process. And if we aren't looking at our feelings about it, it's very possible that those feelings, which are often negative, can be subconsciously derailing your progress. Because of course, growing a business is burdened with a lot of emotional baggage. Right. We often compare our progress to others, particularly in relation to things like how many clients we have versus that that other person we know is a coach that we see on LinkedIn. We compare our revenue. We compare how long it's taking us to hit various milestones. I know I've done that and I know I still do it. To be honest, I think that recognizing it, though, is a really important step. Step. Because we can start to explore how it's showing up and we can start to explore whether it's reality. And so in terms of how it shows up, like, for example, when I find myself comparing myself to others from a business perspective, I start to notice that rather than showing up as myself, it can sometimes make me show up how I assume people want me to be or like somebody else that I see as, you know, as aspirational. Or it can make me overthink what I say where. And I think I'm not adding as much value if I'm doing that, if I'm overthinking what I say. My intention, though, is always to be very much myself, warts and all, when talking to my clients and my potential clients. But really to truly show up as myself, I have to be connected to my belief that what I'm doing is incredibly valuable and helpful, rather than trying to show up as what someone else has said is valuable and helpful. I don't know if that makes. Makes sense, but hopefully it does. And you know, these, these, these feelings we have when we're comparing ourselves to others can also make us procrastinate. And I see this heaps because we are often dwelling on feeling like we're behind or failing somehow, like we're not doing as well as we want to in comparison to others. And so procrastination often comes up then because. Because it's fear, right? There's this fear. And fear is not something that us into positive action. It tends to translate as high levels of stress, a bit of a flight or a freeze response. So, you know, and I think comparison is one of the reasons why we can tend to do that in our business, particularly when it comes to this, you know, am I growing quickly enough or big enough? It also doesn't help that there are a lot of messages out there that are unrealistic and helpful. And there are sort of two ways I see this. The first is that we have to remember that what we see out there from other people. So in this case, think about other coaches that you see on, on LinkedIn or other platforms. What you see is not, not necessarily true. And, and I don't mean that they are lying in any way. What I mean is that you see the shiny highlights package and for a lot of people it can be really, you know, a bit, can make you feel a bit sick when you worry that you're not doing the same things that all these other people are or that you don't feel like you've got it together all the time in the way that these other people seem to present themselves. And the truth is, what people put on social media is not, is not the whole truth. Right? It's not that it's a lie, it's just that it's not the whole truth. You don't truly see how many clients are engaging them. You don't see what their revenue is. You don't see how many hours they are working. You don't see if they're paying to outsource their social media. Right. And there's nothing wrong with it if you do. I encourage it if you have the resources. You also don't see if they are truly happy and how their life is. So what you're comparing yourself to what might look like someone growing a business really fast and really successfully may be accurate, or it may just be a social media strategy. The second way I see some messaging that's out there, particularly on social media, be unhelpful for coaches growing a business and wondering if they're on track is that I know a lot of business coaches and I suppose I am one of those for executive coaches, although that terminology I tend not to use. But they sell a pretty ambitious story. So if you have been looking into business coaches, you will hear a lot of talk of 10k months and, you know, really, really quickly. So hitting those within three months or hitting multi six figures in your first six months or seven figures in your first year, now all of it absolutely is possible. But in my experience, when you look under the hood of a lot of these claims, there is, there is either a lot more to it, so there is a lot that they're assuming is already in place before you can get there, or there is a lot less to it and it is a claim without a lot of substantiation. So it may be that there are a lot of hoops you need to jump through. They could be talking about revenue rather than profit and you actually have to Engage a lot of staff to get to these numbers. You know, my point is just to examine claims like this carefully and do a reality check. And you know, I include that if you're looking into my program with the accelerator, make sure you are looking at whether it makes sense for you and whether it stacks up. So I am at the, towards the end of this episode, going to share what we aim for in the accelerator in terms of ramp up time. But I always want people to set their own goals relative to what they know their capacity for action is and what their personal priorities are. So without beating around the bush about it, then, how long do I think it does take on average for a coach to grow a practice to a point that is sustainable? I think that the average executive coach selling to corporate clients needs two years to build a business that includes some financial stability, regular client flow, and some repeat clients with a solid pipeline of work. And by solid pipeline, I mean that there are generally a few pieces of work that you're pitching for at any time. So you can always see where more work is coming from. So how two years, how does that land for you? When I tell people that two years is the average, I often see faces drop. And that is because they want, and often they need it to be quicker than that. And I wish I could say that it wasn't the case. But for people who are doing it solo from scratch, then this is realistic. In my opinion and based on my experience and what I've seen, this factor alone is what has spurred me to relaunch the Impact Coach Collective as the corporate to coach accelerator. Because I know that there are things that we can do to accelerate this ramp up. So one of the major outcomes of the accelerator that we aim for is halving this time so that you are in that place with financial stability, regular clients, and a pipeline of work in 12 months. Months instead of two years. But let's put the accelerator to the side for a moment. I'll come back to, to sort of how we do that in a minute. But there are some core factors that will impact this time frame. Right? And there are some things that you can do to accelerate it. And the first one is knowledge. So do you know how to be in business? Do you know what you need to do to get clients? And do you know how to work as a coach in a corporate environment? So if you don't already know that your learning curve is going to be longer because you will be learning through doing in the accelerator. Right. One of our strategies is imparting that knowledge, and that's knowledge that I have from my almost 20 years of selling coaching into companies. We want to impart that knowledge in the accelerator as efficiently as possible through our curriculum, which is evolving for this iteration of the accelerator. And we also do it in our weekly coaching calls where people can ask questions pretty much as soon as they have them without then having to figure things out. So I've learned it all the hard and the long way so that my members don't have to. But you can also acquire this knowledge through, you know, previous experience running businesses. So if you've run a business before, then I would expect that your ramp up is going to be quicker. Otherwise there's just, there's just a lot of knowledge that, that you need to acqu. And that takes time and you know, you can't. There's no, there's no injection, right? There's no way of saying I immediately give me all this knowledge. You actually have to go through a process and you can go through a process that is more efficient or you can go through a process that is, you know, more, more natural or organic way of learning. The second factor that can accelerate your business growth is the quality of your professional network and your skill in tapping into it. Again, in the accelerator, we focus on this a lot because I know it is one of the biggest shortcuts for, for your, your growth. So. But whether or not you're in the accelerator, you should be leveraging and leaning into your existing professional network as a client acquisition strategy because this is a quicker sell, largely because of the trust that already exists and the professional credibility that you already have. So if you can do that, you will accelerate your, your ramp up time. And the third way that you can accelerate the ramp up time is by having a willingness and a capacity to take a lot of action. So this is probably one of the dirty secrets that those business coaches don't talk about is that if you want to achieve the targets of a lot of these programs or reach these lofty goals, you have to do a lot, right? There is a lot of work to do. I don't think there's anything, you know, truly that is passive about passive income. And we're not talking about passive income, we're talking about building a service business here. Now, there is a point at which we can talk about scaling and I love talking about different ways of scaling. But when you're starting out, there is just quite a lot of work to be done and action to be taken, particularly because we need to, we need to get through. It's, it's a learning curve, but it's also a phase where we're experimenting, we're trying, we're figuring out what works for us, what works for our clients. And in my experience, the people who move faster in their business are out there straight away. They are doing things and they are doing them imperfectly. They are prioritizing action over perfection. And it also, it's, it's a numbers game, right? A lot of coaches haven't really processed when I, when I talk to them the first time, that they need to reach out to a lot of people to get the yeses and that sales is a pipeline, right? It's a funne. And so we need a lot of people going in the top of our funnel for some clients to come out the bottom of the funnel. So in the accelerator, we identify the most strategic actions you can take and we help you to do them most efficiently. But people who just take a lot of action are going to get better results quicker. So you need to be prepared for that when, when you run your business. And I often have people who are a bit shocked when they come and talk to me about, about outreach, and I ask how many messages they might have sent by way of outreach, and they tell me they've sent like, you know, three or four messages and they're waiting and they haven't had the response. And I have to very gently tell them that we're not talking about three or four, we're talking about a few hundred as what, what we need. So there is a bit of a reality check there, that, that there is a lot of, a lot of grunt work, frankly, involved. But it doesn't have to be terrible and it doesn't have to be tedious. We can do it in ways that are much more enjoyable. But, and so we want to do that. So there are lots of ways that you can fast track or slow down if we apply the inverse strategy, your business growth. But I want you to know that it is realistic and totally okay for it not to be as fast as you see other people implying they are doing it or that other people are suggesting you should be able to do it because their goals may be different. They may in fact not be telling the truth. I know, I know. Shocking that something on social media may not be true. But we need to take everything with a grain of salt and, you know, your timing is your timing and we can, we can expedite it if you're willing to, to invest the time and the energy in, in being Very deliberate about, about your growth and about ramping up. So most of you will now have heard me mention the corporate Teco accelerator. It's launching in late November and honestly I am, I'm, I'm very excited about this re. I guess it's a refresh if you like and it's like a new iteration of the Impact Coach Collective. And we're changing the name to be the Corporate to Coach Accelerator. And I've really been focusing a lot on what are the goals and what are the outcomes of the accelerator that, that people want. And so the goals are pretty simple, not necessarily easy, but they're simple. So you are going to build your thriving coaching in half of the time, right? So our goal is that you're doing this in 12 months, the 12 months that you're a member while getting your first or next 10 high paying corporate clients. So to get to that place, we have some key things that we'll do during the 12 months that you will be a member. Firstly, we're going to leverage your professional experience and your professional network to build your sales pipeline. With more than a hundred ideal prospects. The depth of your pipeline is the biggest predictor of new client flow. So you're going to learn how to grow your pipeline and the more you focus, focus on your pipeline, the healthier it is and your business will grow. So it's a bit of a virtuous cycle. We are also going to take the stress out of your marketing system by implementing a marketing and business development system that you can implement in five hours a week. Right? So content, outreach, network growth, that's what we're doing and we're going to do it as efficiently as possible. Now that doesn't mean if you want to do more, if you want to, you know, take it up to another notch, you can do more than that. But we can build a great business with five hours a week of business development, really, really targeted and focused marketing and BD work. We are also going to build your key assets and I include things like your website, your LinkedIn profile, your coach bio, more than that during your first 90 days. Because I know that perfectionism is a trap that can derail people with, in relation to these key assets. So I'm giving you as much guidance, accountability and advice as you need to get it done in the first 90 days. And so it doesn't become that, that holds you back for, for the rest of your year. You'll also be joining a global network, right? So the people who are the members are coaches around the world. And they're all working to build businesses that are profitable and making an impact. And this source of collaboration and brainstorming, support, encouragement is a community that you may have lost when you stepped away from the corporate world. So these will be your people. You're also going to get a chance to build a schedule, a flexible schedule that suits your business and allows you to show up for all the priorities in your life that you push to the side in your corporate role. Right? So if you want to take Fridays off, you do it. And we'll build you a schedule that, that works for you. And also ultimately you're going to have a coach and mentor on your side to help you every step of the way. And that, and that's me of course, as coaches. You know, we all know the power of having a coach and a mentor when we're in transition. And through the accelerator program, you'll have a coach there with you as you, as you grow your business. Now practically, what that includes, it means that members, members receive like a number of components in the program. And this is what I'm super excited about. So every member will start with a one on one kickoff with me which will help them to identify their goals for the program, audit your current state and answer any questions and we prepare to get things moving. We also have weekly group coaching calls. Now we now will, we will be having as of December, three different times available every week for coaching. So you will join one or you can join three if you like of these calls every week. And these calls are a chance for you to check in, report in and review your progress and also bring all your questions, all your challenges for hot seat coaching, brainstorming with the group or help to get unstuck. And this is where you get my eyes and the eyes of everyone else in the group on your business. Right? So this is the very hands on personalized component. You also have access to the 90 day quick start Challenge which will start in January. So our members who join in November will kick off their program in, in January. Although people who join in the early bird component of the launch, which will be the first 48 hours, will get immediate access. So get a free month of access, but we're starting in January and you will get access in January to the 90 day quick start Challenge. And so this is a course so some, some curriculum that you can absorb. And it's a group, group challenge and it's our time capped way of getting through the fundamentals of growing your business without allowing perfection or procrastination to derail you. So you're going to come out of that with your website, your coach bio and your LinkedIn profile and also your thinking around your audience. And your offer will be done and it will be done early. You'll also have access to your business development accelerator framework. And this is the guide to what the marketing activities you need to do every week are to grow your business. And so you'll have tools, processes to follow and metrics to report on so that you can get traction now and maintain your growth over time. So these will be the habits that you put in that you will maintain as you grow your business. People who join the accelerator also get immediate access to the corporate to coach Blueprint, which is, you know, my signature course that is all about how you set up an executive coaching business. And it's everything from your compliance requirements like how to set up a business that is legal, you know, insurance, all of that through to client acquisition framework to how to sell into corporate clients and the nature of setting up as a supplier, your, your what training you should do, how to leverage your investment in training and certifications and good stuff like that through to support hiring a va, how that can work. It is very comprehensive. So I think there are 36 modules, 36 lessons in there and there's like a 55 page workbook with a tool or a template or a guide or a checklist for almost everything you can think about when it comes to running a executive coaching business. Another component of the accelerator that I think is really exciting is the reviews and feedback process. So you will receive reviews of all of your key assets if you submit them, such as your website, your Coach bio, your LinkedIn profile, your proposals and you'll, you will submit those and you'll receive recorded feedback on a loom video that you can then implement to just increase alignment with your goals and make sure you're getting more of your ideal clients. So that'll be me giving you feedback on your, your key assets and that that's unlimited. So if you need something, you want my eyes on it, you've got it. And then we also have the on demand portal which is where you get access to all of the, the courses and the blueprint. What you'll find is that there is a whole raft of bonus masterclasses, guest expert panels, workshop series templates and access to recordings of all of our past coaching calls. You'll have everything at your fingertips that you need to build your coaching business. And then finally, and like I keep saying, everything is my favorite part that we're adding, but this might be actually my favorite thing we're adding to the accelerator this this year is that we're adding a private podcast feed because we know that a lot of our members absorb their content, right? So from coaching calls to our curriculum in lots of different ways. And I know that people find it easier to listen to coaching calls if they can't attend live as as podcasts. So we're going to be going to be creating a private podcast feed that you can access from any of your podcast podcast sources. And you'll be able to listen to all of the coaching calls either either instead of attending live or as well as or you know, you might not be able to make. You probably only make one of those each week or you can come to but you can listen to the other ones just to hear what has been discussed. So if you are interested in joining the accelerator, there are two steps that you can take today before doors open for our 2025 group at the end of November. And those steps are firstly, head over to the webpage for the accelerator and that is at www.elliscarf.com CCA. That's short for Corporate to Coach Accelerator CCA and add your name to the waitlist. So if you add your name to the waitlist, there's no, no obligation, but it ensures that you will get all the information about when doors open and you will get access to the best bonuses when when the doors open. The second thing is that when you join the wait list, you will get an invitation to come and have a sales call with me. And this is super important. It's not like a usual sales call. What we'll be doing is helping you to get clarity on your business and your priorities. And it'll be valuable whether or not you choose to join the accelerator. Of course, I hope you do. You can get the link to book that call either by joining the waitlist or I'm also going to include the direct link in the show notes. So I would love to talk to you. Podcast listeners are my favorite clients. You know a little bit about me. You tend to. You understand the way I think. So if you think we'd be a good fit, I really encourage you to to have a chat with me and let's see if the accelerator is for you. Okay. I hope you are having a great week and I will be back next week with some more some more thoughts. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business, education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.