My advice to a friend starting a coaching business today

Hello and welcome to The Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm Elly Scarfe, your host, an experienced executive coach of almost 20 years and coach and mentor to other executive coaches and leadership coaches who want to work with more corporate clients. So today I want to talk about, for a bit of a change, not how to do business, right? Not advice on how to grow your business, what you should be doing, practical steps, but a question. That must come first, right, before we grow our business, which is, should I start a coaching business? And this is so important because being in business is not for everyone. And after being in business for close to 20 years, I can really attest to that, that there are some elements of business, and I've seen a lot of people start businesses, leave businesses. It is not for everyone, right? It is not for everyone. And there are just some things that are deal breakers for people. But today, rather than sharing a list of tips on how to start your business or questions to ask yourself, and I might do those in another episode, today I wanted to share what I would say and what I have said to a friend, and I consider you all friends, who asked me if they should start a coaching business. So of course, as a friend and as a coach, of course, there is no definitive answer to this, right? So of course, my instinct is yes, absolutely, it's the best.. But the question whether you should do it depends on a lot of factors. And the first factor I want you to think about is what do you want to get out of a business if you were to start it? Like, really? Because there are a few red flags that exist in answer to this question. Now, some green flags, right? If any of these are you, then consider that a green flag. And you might have multiple, right, green flags. Would be things like, oh, I just love the work of coaching and I want to do more of it. I want more autonomy and flexibility with what I do and when I work, or I want the ability to make more money working less hours. Those sorts of answers, none of them make coaching easy, but combined with a willingness to do a few things, and I'll share a few of those in a minute, you can make it work if those are your driving factors, right? But there are some other things that if they are the driving factor for what you want out of your business, I would ask you to pause and just really reflect on what is going on when you're thinking about starting a business. If you want a steady, predictable, consistent, or peaceful workload, I would say that your expectations and the reality of business might not match.. Now it is true that in time it is likely that you get so much more predictability, consistency, steadiness from your work, but early on, not so much. And by early on, the first few years. Another reason why I would ask you to pause in starting a business, if you only want to do coaching and nothing else, right? If that's you and you're like, I love to coach. I don't want to do anything but coach. Then starting a business is probably going to be very frustrating for you. Because as you start out, especially, a large proportion of your time is going to be business growth. And by that, I include sales and marketing. There's going to be admin, there's setup. And beyond the part of your work life that will need to be on these, these growth activities, and it's not just in the early days, it's also, that's a maintenance activity. But you also might find that you need to take on work that isn't the perfect work that you wanted to do in order to build relationships and build revenue. And for example, what I mean is you might say, okay, I just want to coach. That's all I want to do. But to get in the door, you might have to do some facilitation. You might have to work in a place where it's not just working with high performers. Maybe you're working with people who are struggling. And a lot of coaches who are straight out of their coach training are like, no, I just only want to coach people who are really passionate about being coached and who are really excited about the opportunity that coaching presents and other high potentials in organizations. And that work absolutely happens. But when you're starting out, you may need to do more of the work, which is people who've been given some constructive feedback or people who are grappling with an issue or work like running lunch and learn training sessions or leadership training or working with a team. And I think in order to build a coaching business that is really robust, particularly in the early days, you need to be very flexible about the work you take in because it's those clients that become your ongoing coaching clients, even if the work isn't perfect upfront. So if I guess that's really me saying you can't be too narrow about the work you want to do early on if you want to build sustainability. Also, I would say that you should question whether you start a business if you consciously or subconsciously might be wanting your business to prove something to someone, right? Maybe even yourself. I think if you're in that bucket, you should really consider starting your business very carefully. What are some examples of that? So for example, if you want a business so that you can have this identity of I'm a successful entrepreneur, you can tell people I'm a successful entrepreneur, you can post it on Instagram, I would encourage you to reconsider because I promise you the reality of what is required to get to that stage is not going to stack up against the shiny expectations that you have. And And ditto, if you want to prove something to your family, right? I can start and run a successful business or an ex-partner. No, go deeper into why you want to do this work, what the lifestyle you want to build is before you start building a business. Now, as coaches, we all know that we have these stories, right? We have these stories from our past. So as you go through the process of deciding whether to start a business, make sure it might be some self-coaching. It might be some journaling. On what it is that you're really hoping to get out of your business. Now, in all likelihood, you're going to have a combination of all of these things, right? There's going to be a bit around the financial rewards, a bit around the joy of doing, a bit around impact. And if there's a blend, then that's all good. Just be sure that it is not just about the appearances of being in business because that's going to be really frustrating. If it is, okay, so having had that conversation, why do you really want to do this question? The next question that I would have with you, my friend who was thinking about starting your coaching business, right? Our next conversation is whether you are willing to do some of these key things that you need to do in order to grow a business. Now, I want to be really clear. I'm sharing these things. I don't mean you have to have them nailed, right? You don't have to be good at them. I just mean that you must be willing to grapple with them because these are the things that will be your growth edges. I promise you when you start a business, but if you start your business and you lack a willingness to try and tackle these things, I would say that it's going to be really hard and you might find that it is not worth the stress that it gives you if you don't want to do these things. So what are those things? The first one is, are you willing to embrace being both a CEO and a coach? Right? And that means owning this dual identity as coach and as business owner. And the consequence of that is that if I have this identity that I am half CEO slash business owner as well as coach, then I'm, I'm fundamentally recognizing that there are tasks that are required of me and that I have to be in sales, right? I have to be. I'm willing to show up for my business, not just passively rock up and do the coaching, which can be tempting. So you really need to have that ownership of this identity as CEO. And alongside that identity piece, that one of the other consequences of that is that you need to be willing to make decisions, right? And own them. And often I see newer business owners really looking for someone else to make their decisions for them. And often that's because we've come out of corporate where literally every decision has been made for us. And so making a call on, I've got all this information about marketing strategy, am I going to go down this path or this path? You've got to make that decision for yourself. And yes, what I always encourage is let's think about it as an experiment, right? Think about all these decisions as experiments, but really own them and make them right. Make those decisions the right thing for you. So are you willing to own this aspect, this power in some ways, as the CEO of your own business and as a business owner rather than just a coach? Another one is, are you willing to embrace sales and marketing? And I cannot overstate how important this is because if you are in business, you are in sales, right? If you're in business, you're in marketing. If you don't sell, you do not have a business. And so you need to be willing to figure out what that means for your business. And there are lots of ways you can figure that out. You can, you can learn from others. You can do training. You can experiment. You can read. All of those are very valid options, but it's the willingness to do that that is most important. And along with that is that there will I promise you there will be times when you go, oh, that feels a bit too salesy, or, oh, I don't really, I don't feel comfortable doing that. And you will have to grapple with that and find where your boundaries are, find what sales means to you, figure out how to make sales something that feels good and authentic and helpful and service-oriented. But you have to do it, right? So you can find ways to do it that feel good, but there is no option. In terms of whether or not you do it. And so if you want to start a business, you have to be very clear that you're willing to embrace sales. The next thing you need to be willing to do is tap into your network. Now, I don't mean that in a multi-level marketing kind of way, and not to cast aspersions on multi-level marketing, to be honest, because really we're all out here trying to do the best and trying to support ourselves and our families. This, but tapping into your network, what I mean when I say that is a willingness to look into your professional network and to reach out to those people. And this is often the most uncomfortable thing for people who start their coaching businesses, the outreach. But you need to be willing to do that because this is one of the biggest assets you have in your toolkit. And if you're not using that asset, then you are going to go slower and it is going to be much harder. So a willingness to connect, reconnect, and be in touch with people in your network is vitally important. You also need to be willing to be visible, and a willingness to be visible means a lot of things. So partly it means being physically visible, right? So your photo exists on the internet. You are Showing yourself physically on LinkedIn or maybe other social platforms. So there's a physical visibility, but there's also a visibility that comes from showing your opinions, showing your ideas, owning your expertise, owning your authority, positioning yourself as an authority in a particular area. And I think the more significant part about being willing to be visible is this, being willing to be seen to have opinions and put things out out there and do it consistently again and again, knowing that not everyone is going to agree or is going to like you. And for me, I've found that so difficult in the past. I find it much easier now, and I can talk about how I've done that if you drop me a message. I can talk a lot about that. But just know that visibility is something that is not optional either, and that's part of embracing sales and marketing. But it's a sort of a subset that we don't really think about, but being willing to be visible, not just physically, but in terms of our ideas and our authority. You also need to be willing to be not very good at things and to accept that is part of growth. Now, most coaches, most coaches come to coaching from a senior corporate or organizational background, and they have been known for their expertise, right? Been known for being good at things. Being good at what they do and being very good at them. And then suddenly they're stepping into coaching, and you still are good, right, at things. And coaching is a skill set, but maybe marketing is not, right? Maybe you are not very good at marketing. And to be honest, I go— I have days where I think, yeah, I'm good at marketing, and I have days where I think, oh my God, I'm terrible at marketing. You may not be good at writing posts tailored for LinkedIn. You may not be very good at writing proposals. You may not be very good at running certain workshops, and that is okay. And that is important. And you have to be willing to just be not very good at it because the only way you get good at it is by doing it and feeling less good. And of course, this is like our conscious competence model, which you all know, but This is a very live example of that we often don't think about. So we just need to be willing to not be the best at things, not to be that good, and willing to accept that is part of our growth. Related to this is that we need to be willing to operate outside of our comfort zone much of the time. And the reason we're outside our comfort zone much of the time is because we are doing things we have not done before. The things that would build our comfort zone, the things that would build our confidence, right? And so yes, we need to be willing to not be very good at things, but we also need to be willing to just be a bit uncomfortable. And that means things like— I think things where we're outside our comfort zone is things like putting together a proposal for work that we haven't delivered in that format before, or having a sales call and talking about things that we haven't actually delivered outside of maybe our corporate environment, or maybe not at all, right? When we haven't done this work before. And I always think about it as we operate in this zone of an educated fake it till you make it situation, which is that maybe we haven't done it in this format before, but we have all of the building blocks that mean we are the right person to do this work. And so we need to sit with that confidence, even if it feels fake to start with, that we can pull it together. Right, that we can make it happen even if we haven't done it exactly like this before. So we need to be willing to do that because otherwise we'll never get those first opportunities. So we need to be willing to actually just take the opportunity even if it feels like we're not entirely comfortable or confident doing it. We also need to be willing to back ourselves when it gets hard, and it will get hard. And What I mean by that is that I think I shared this, maybe it was in a LinkedIn post, which is that in any given week as a business owner, there will be days where you think this is the best thing I've ever done. And there will be days where you go, I've got to go back and get a full-time job. And what we need to be willing to do, given that context, is willingness to sit with that, oh my God, I should go and get a job. Right? And give ourselves that inner backing that we can do this even when it's hard, right? And that we will stick with it. And we need a willingness to stick with it because it's not going to be— your business is not going to be built in 3 months. It's not going to be built in 6 months. It might not even be built in 12 months. Yes, you will have clients. Yes, you will have work coming in the door, but it might not be where you want it to be. And so If you want this to be like a long-term sustainable business, you have to be willing to stick with it when it gets hard, and you have to be able to back yourself when it gets hard. You also need to be willing— and ask yourself this— willing to get the help you need and take advice. Now, I'm talking specifically about getting help and advice from people who've done it before successfully. And most importantly, being willing to act on that advice. Now, I don't mean blindly take advice. God, I don't want my clients ever to just take what I do and just implement it. I want them to listen. I want them to ask questions. I want them to integrate it into their businesses. Remember, CEO, you make the ultimate decisions. But I want them to integrate it, and then I want them to take action, right? So getting help, not reinventing the wheel, and acting on advice— those are really important things, and you need to be willing to do that. Otherwise, it's going to be a very frustrating journey. And like, I often have questions from people, some sometimes my clients, sometimes people in my, for example, my LinkedIn community, who have a lot of pushback to the advice I give them. And I love that, right? Pushback. Let's ask questions. Let's grapple. Let's figure out how we make this work for you. And that is fine. But some people push back so that they don't have to do the work, right? And often people who push back, push back, push back, 6 to 12 months later, come back to me and say, I wish I'd just done what you said because it bloody works. And we always, we all get there in our own time, but if we can open ourselves to that prospect of taking advice and taking action, we're going to find the transition to business ownership to be a lot smoother. And similarly, the last thing I would say is you need to be willing to take action generally and probably take a lot more action than you think. And so applications of that are sending more outreach messages, posting more on LinkedIn, doing it all consistently, repeatedly, again and again. Just that willingness to take action, that willingness to be imperfect, the willingness to get it done. Those are the things that are going to make you well suited to being in business as opposed to, oh, maybe that's not right for me. So if you are thinking of starting a coaching business, and I think we are all friends, then this is the advice that I would have given you. I hope it's been helpful, and I will see you next week.