Are coaches also getting BUSINESS training?

Hello, hello, it's Mary Schiller, author and results coach of MarySchiller.com. I am coming to you live today from my local, pardon me, coworking space here in Paris, France. I am just at the end of a little cold, so I may have to pause occasionally and get a sip of water as I am talking to you. But something has been on my mind for years now that I have just recently started to talk more openly about. And that is, what is the state of coach training and certification programs when it comes to business? Are coach training, coach certification, institutions, coach training schools, are these institutions teaching coaches anything about how to run a coaching business or are they referring newly minted coaches to any sort of business training, uh, institute or anything like that? Because my sense is that that isn't happening. And this is after spending more than 3 years talking to a lot of coaches. I couldn't even estimate at this point how many coaches I have spoken to, probably numbering in the hundreds, because a lot of the people that I have coached as a coach have been other coaches, which has been interesting. And just in the last like 6 months, I have really turned my attention fully towards business coaching. And pardon me. And I have really seen that there is a major, major gap here. In what most coaches know about running a successful coaching business. Now, normally, I'm, lately anyway, I've been making my live videos short, but I think this one's gonna go on for a bit, so I hope you'll stick with me because I have some questions that I really want answers to. And if you are watching this live or on the replay, I would really love for you to tell me if you went through some kind of coach training, coach certification, anything like that, what did you learn in terms of creating a coaching business? What courses were included in your training process to help you launch a business afterwards and not just launch it but what kind of support were you given to keep it going? If any, by the coach training institution that you worked with? Because, you know, that's only a part of it. If you're, you know, if you're in a coach training certification program and you get some advice on how to launch your business, well, that might be fine for the first, you know, few months or something, but what about after that? Are they offering any sort of ongoing support to you? So the reason that I'm asking this is because many, many, many, many, I'd have to say probably, I don't know, 80 to 90% of the coaches that I have interacted with over the last few years have had major difficulties getting their coach business off the ground. And even if they have gotten it off the ground, it's not been at a level that has brought in an income to support them. And if it has eventually gotten to that point, it's taken a long time and a lot of effort to do that. So, so that's my first question is, are these certification programs providing coaches that they're training to be professional coaches? Are they giving you adequate business training not just to launch your business but to keep it going in a way that is sustainable and doesn't have to take so long? That's my first question. My second question is, if they are not offering that, which, you know, maybe they don't feel qualified to do that, you know, maybe they feel that's a separate issue, you know, are they referring you to someone or something or some— something that you can then invest in to get your business going. And, you know, I was talking with someone a couple of days ago, and we were saying, you know, for instance, a dentist goes to dental school, she learns how to be a great dentist, she gets all of the licensing and certification and everything like that, and then, you know, unless she's independently wealthy, she then has to invest some money in building a successful dental practice. She may have to take out a loan to invest in all of the equipment needed, and she may have to invest in an accountant and an attorney and maybe even business training herself so she understands how to run her practice effectively. Well, the same is true for a coach. I mean, When I look at what's involved in running any business, there are a lot of similarities there. You know, there are things like understanding how to market yourself, how to price things appropriately, how to, you know, get new customers and keep people coming back for more, and how to, you know, really create something that is attractive to people and is helpful to them and all those things. And for some reason, there's just, there just seems to be a big void from my vantage point in the coaching world related to business education and business training and business support. The reason I can say that is because I'm not part of that world. I didn't get any coach training at all. I didn't go to any school to get coach training and so I never spent time around other coaches before I declared myself a coach. I simply declared myself a coach and one of the interesting things about my own journey as a coach was that I had really no serious thoughts about becoming a coach. I played with the idea for a little while and realized I was not in a good place to become one at the end of what I guess would have been 2012, 2013, somewhere in there. And then in 2014, I had a major life transformation myself and decided, you know, I really want to talk to people about what's happened and maybe this will be helpful to them. I didn't think about becoming a professional coach. That wasn't even in my head, like, at all. I was just talking to people. Anyone who would talk to me, I would talk to them. I didn't charge for these sessions or anything. Nobody became a client or anything like that. They were just people who wanted to hear what I had to say. And then in early 2016, I had had a blog going on transformation. Again, it was a personal project. It was not a professional project. It had no aim in that direction. But in early 2016, I lost my job and I really didn't want to go back to the work that I had been doing professionally. I didn't really want to ghostwrite books and, and all of those kinds of things that I'd been doing. And I thought, you know, maybe I'll just start charging for these conversations that I've been having and I will call myself a professional coach. Now I consider myself being at a real advantage. At that point because I had not been part of that world. I simply called myself a professional coach. I knew how much money I needed to earn in order to get the bills paid. At that point, I was in kind of really weird financial position and really needed to get money in the door quickly. And so I thought, this is how much I need to earn, so this is how much I need to charge for my coaching, and this is how many clients I need, so I'm going to go do that. And that's what I did. And fortunately for me, perhaps I had some other skills that were helpful to me in the beginning, such as my communication skills and writing and things like that. I had written lots and lots of marketing emails in my career, and so I had some sense of how to do those sorts of things. So if you take, you know, the, the skills that I already had, the experience I already had, in terms of I had been a freelance writer before, so I was used to drumming up business. I had worked in marketing in various capacities for an agency and for other departments and things for a long time, so I had some understanding of all of that part. Plus my simple naivete at just saying, this is what I need to charge because I need to make X amount of money per month. I was able to launch my business really fast. I, you know, I hit my monthly goal in the first month and I kept hitting it and going past and going past it and it didn't seem difficult to me. And at certain points along this journey, I have run into plateaus where, or a knowledge gap as I've called it, and I've realized, you know, I need to invest in something to help me through this. So I've invested in some kind of online training program. Or I've invested in a business coach, you know, at various points along the way. And I've never thought twice about doing that because I'm in business. I'm a professional coach and I'm in business, therefore I need to invest in that business to take it to the next level and to the next level and to the next level. And one of the things that happened, of course, is that I started as a life coach Eventually, I started getting lots of questions from other Coaches about, "How did you get your business off the ground so fast? Because I've been struggling and I can't get it together." So, I started to morph into more and more business coaching until at the end of 2018, I said, "Okay, I'm now going to call myself a Business Coach." Then, just in the past few weeks as I'm recording this right now, I decided I really want to focus on Coaches because I love the coaching profession. I love what it— the gap that it fills in the marketplace. I just think it's an amazing, amazing thing that people do and can engage in. And I just can't say enough positive things about the coaching profession. But my question still comes back to this: how are coaches being helped in developing a profitable, sustainable business by the institutions who are training them. Is there anything being offered, and if so, what is it? Because from my vantage point as someone who has not been part of that and who has interacted with a lot of coaches over the years, it looks like there is a chasm there that they are trying to navigate on their own, buying this random program and that random program and not really bringing the pieces together and making things way more complicated for themselves than they need to be. So if you have some comments on that, I would love to hear your insights. So please feel free to comment on this video wherever you happen to be watching it today. I would love to hear from you. If you would like to learn more about me, you can visit my website at maryschiller.com. I will put the link in a comment as well as I have a free Facebook group called the Healthy Wealthy Coach. I'll put that link in a comment as well. So thanks for watching, and I'd love to hear from you. Have a wonderful day. Bye for now.