The One Thing Every New Coach Gets Wrong

One of the most common questions I get asked as a coach is, what would I do if I was starting all over again? So I've created this short guide on how to start a coaching business from scratch, and one of the things which I'm going to be sharing with you might really shock you because it goes against all of the other business principles that a lot of the other experts and gurus talk about. One of the first things which I'll say is that until you start coaching, you're not going to know whether this is a good career for you or not. I'm sure that you've already thought about Who it is that you want to help and how you're going to help them, and you need to be really clear on that before you start having those coaching conversations with people. But here's where it gets really fun. I'm a firm believer that you need to just get out there and start coaching. That's why it's called a coaching practice after all, because you want to practice the art of coaching and having those powerful coaching conversations with prospective clients and clients alike so that you can start to get better at the process of coaching. You can start to see what results you're going to get for people and what their transformations look like, and also how you feel about the coaching process and to develop your own coaching frameworks as you start to develop yourself as a coach. Now I'm a firm believer that if you're working on physical things, the mind, the body, and the spirit, then you do need some kind of coaching certification. I think that goes without saying. There's an ethical and moral code of conduct which you sign up to as a coach, and it's really important that you set that bar for yourself and you choose to make sure that you align with that ethical and moral code of conduct. When you're working with prospective clients. There are certain types of coaching which may need fewer certifications or qualifications, such as business coaching. I think if you've got plenty of experience running businesses for a decade or 2 decades, then you're more than qualified to start mentoring and coaching other business owners. There may be areas though where you feel that you need to do— you need to upskill yourself and maybe consider going out and getting some coaching certifications. But I don't see why most people can't just get out there and start coaching and start to help people because that's ultimately what it's all about. So my first tip for you is something which I call 3 for free. This is the fastest way to learn about coaching in a way that doesn't cross over any ethical or moral boundaries, that allows you to start practicing and see whether you can make an impact as a coach and to see whether you like it or not, and for there not to be any jeopardy in it for both you and the client. So 3 for free is exactly as it sounds. Now, if your intention is to be a professional coach, i.e., you want to get paid to do the coaching work which you're doing, then 3 for free works really well because it's not actually doing it for free. It kind of is, but what you're going to do is you're going to work with 3 clients. They're going to pay you a nominal fee, let's say $250 or $500 or something like that, and you're going to take them on a coaching journey. And that journey might look like you're going to be delivering 3 months worth of coaching with them to help them get from A to B. So they're going to pay you this money, you're going to take them on that coaching journey, but the agreement is that as they go through this process, you want to make sure that by the end of it, they're happy clients and you've been able to create the transformation. And you're going to invite them to leave a review or maybe even do a video testimonial, which you can use on your website in the future or something like that. And once they've delivered that review or video testimonial for you, you're then going to refund them the $250 or the $500 which they paid for in advance. So they kind of are getting it for free, but But I do believe that as a professional coach, starting right from the word go, you've got to get paid something for the coaching work which you do. It's just that what you're doing is rewarding them for committing to going through the coaching process with you and then for also helping your coaching career by leaving a review and testimonial, because those reviews and testimonials can then be used in future marketing to help you attract and acquire clients in the future. You're probably thinking now about how do you go about getting those 3 for free under your belt? It can be quite daunting to start to put yourself out there or maybe update your LinkedIn profile to say, hey, I'm a coach, I'm looking for clients. So what I would suggest is a lot of people will immediately turn to social media and build a website and all of those different things. I'll talk about that later. I actually think the best way to get clients is to reach out to your existing network. It's likely that if you've been working in some kind of a career before, you've already spent a good proportion of your career building a network of people, building relationships with businesses, business owners, other people in the, the business community and around you, or in your local community depending on what the nature is of the coaching that you're going to be going into. So I genuinely believe that most coaches can find their first 10 clients within their existing network, and what this means is you just need to make sure that you're getting out into those communities which you've created and spent years nurturing and start to have conversations with people. If you do it from a position, a place of leading with value, that you're just reaching out to check in with people to see how they are, and if it happens to crop up in the conversation and they ask about, well, what are you doing now, you can naturally start to introduce the concept of coaching with those people within your network. And if it sounds like it's a good fit, they'll say, oh, that sounds interesting, can you tell me more? And that's your cue to invite them onto having a powerful coaching conversation at a deeper level. You don't want to do that in that moment. You probably want to make sure that it's a separate conversation so you can set the boundaries around that conversation and start the coaching journey with them. But I can pretty much guarantee that if you get out into your local community, meet some people, start having these conversations with them, start helping them, start adding value, that you will be able to start generating coaching clients from that. And I genuinely believe I haven't met a coach yet who hasn't been able to create their first 10 clients from their existing network. And so this is the bit which might shock you. You don't need a website, you don't need social media, you don't need a YouTube channel, you don't need Instagram, you don't need LinkedIn, you don't need all of these fancy things or a brand, you know, and spending all of this money before you've even got any clients. You've probably already got all of your, your first 10 clients there, so you can start earning as a professional coach right away. I see far too many people get really caught up in branding and websites and social media and marketing spending hundreds, if not thousands of pounds on all of these things before they've even earned a single penny as a coach. And that can get quite disappointing because imagine if you're spending several thousand dollars on getting your branding done and a website set up and somebody to help you with your social media, either to do it for you or maybe to train you on how to use social media, or maybe you're spending loads of money on networking meetings and things like that, and then you don't get any clients from it. It's going to be really disappointing. And not only that, but you will have spent all of this money on all of that time investing in these things, which are actually a distraction from doing the engagement and the enrollment process, i.e., sales for coaching. So you'll, you'll spend weeks or months getting your website and branding and everything else done and have nothing to really show from it. And then you've got to then start the process of actually engaging with people so that you can enroll them onto your coaching program, which means that you're gonna have no money coming in. So it baffles me that all of these gurus and experts are quite happy to sell you marketing because it benefits them, whereas actually the one person it doesn't benefit is you. You need to get out there and actually start behaving like a professional coach and practicing actually getting clients. It's massively important. Don't get me wrong, you do need those things, but I don't think you need those from like day dot, from the word go. You can park those or Maybe a compromise is get— don't go fully, you know, get a fully blown website set up that's going to cost you thousands of dollars. Maybe it might be important just to get a single one-page website set up which has got a nice professional headshot on it and a description about you as a coach and what you do and the types of clients which you help. Maybe an indication about your packages or programs which you sell. You can promote yourself through things like LinkedIn, which is entirely free, and there are so many resources on places like YouTube and free courses online where you can learn about how to maximize these social media channels if you're going to go down that route. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars on all these experts and gurus that are out there. And the reason for this is— I'll be very honest— is because the LinkedIn expert will want to sell you their LinkedIn course, the Facebook guru will want to sell you their Facebook course, the Instagram expert will want to sell you their Instagram course, the TikTok, and so it goes on. There are so many different ways to market your business You know, and you've got to, when you start practicing as a coach, you've gotta do a few experiments to figure out which ways of marketing are gonna benefit you the most. To give you an idea, I've been coaching now for 8 years. The 3 things which work really well for me are podcast interviews, speaking engagements, and my books, right? But when I have seen other coaches try and replicate what I've done, those 3 things don't work for them. There's 1,001 different marketing assets you can build aside from the 3 which work for me, my marketing mix. So there's a lot of experimentation which is required when trying to figure out how to attract and enroll clients on a consistent basis. You've got to try out lots of different ways of doing that, and my 3 things which work for me won't necessarily work for you or the next coach or the next coach. I can help you figure those sorts of things out. If you're interested, do please get in touch. I can give you— look at kind of your makeup, your DNA as a coach, and the types of clients you want to work with, and we can figure out how to get you in front of those types of clients. But it may not be the 3 things which are working for me. We might discover 3 other things which you might want to try for that, which is why I'm always really hesitant. Don't get blindsided and just like solidly focused on marketing from the word go. Actually think about this from the perspective of I need to get out there and make some sales, and enroll and recruit those first 3 to 10 clients so that I can start to build case studies, reviews, and testimonials. Kind of what goes hand in hand with that as well is I know that ultimately you want to be a professional coach, you want to earn a living from this, but for the first 10 clients, don't make that your sole focus. You've got plenty of time to be able to escalate your prices over the next coming months and years into the future. And again, this is where a lot of coaches fall down because you go and speak to a business coach and the first thing they say is, have you got a business plan? Now again, you need an overarching idea about how you're gonna set about structuring your coaching practice and your prices and things like that in the future. But if you— again, if you spend like days or weeks writing out a 30-page business plan that nobody's ever going to read, probably most likely yourself you're never even going to read it, in my view that's a little bit of a waste of time. Ultimately, if you get out there and start enrolling your first few clients. You're going to learn 90% of everything which you need to know about business and running a coaching practice. So make sure you do 3 for free and, and start reaching out to your existing network to look for those first 10 paid clients. And it doesn't really matter, like I said, if those first 10 paid clients are $500, $2,500, $5,000, depending on where your level of confidence is at. Just price the packages, get out there and start practicing coaching. That is the main thing. One of the things that's really benefited me from the word go is I just got out there and did all of this activity to start enrolling clients, and I was able to practice coaching. And now, 8 years on, I've done over 3,000 coaching sessions collectively, either in a group setting or in an individual setting. And I think overall I'm approaching the 10,000-hour mark that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in terms of making me as an expert coach putting myself out there. One of the other benefits of just getting yourself out there and starting coaching is that yes, there will be other people's frameworks which you'll be using within your coaching, but it's really important for you as a coach to start exploring and creating your own frameworks. Putting your own magic touches on existing knowledge, I think, is a really great way to start to figure out who you are as a coach, how you want to show up as a coach, how you're able to create an impact as a coach when you're working with clients. So start developing frameworks. Again, I'll give an example of my own chosen way of building frameworks. What I like to do is I have an iPad Pro, I'll sketch out a simple framework, just a wireframe of an idea, and whilst I'm sketching it out, I like to explain that to the client who's sat in front of me. Typically, those diagrams and the explanation take about 5 to 10 10 minutes. And what that then does is it sparks the conversation, and then we can start to do some coaching around what beliefs and ideas and insights start to crop up between the client and myself. That's what I've done. And over time, I've developed about 50 of these frameworks, these simple wireframe diagrams, and I'm able to now dive into my toolkit whenever I need to pull out one of these frameworks and present it to a client to spark that conversation. That works again. That works really well for me. That might not be the way that you want to work, and there is a difference between types of coaches as well. So I'm a business coach, so those that framework modeling of drawing something and explaining it tends to work really well for me. But maybe as a life coach, you want to shift more towards the pure coaching way of coaching, which is around asking well-formed questions and allow the client who sat in front of you to be able to reflect on that and come up with. The concepts and ideas for themselves. What then starts to happen at this point is you'll start to see what's working for you and for your clients, and maybe what's not working between you and your clients. So you'll start to see things which are driving your coaching towards that transformational success, and what is taking it perhaps the other way. And the nice thing is you're able to pivot quite quickly within coaching, especially if you're doing one-to-one coaching, because in that moment, in that conversation which you're having with the client, If it's not going to plan, you can pivot the conversation and take it and steer it in a slightly different direction, or allow the client to steer it in a different direction if that's not what they were expecting. But the idea is that over time you'll start to see patterns to the coaching which you're delivering, and where certain conversations which you're having with clients happen not just with one client but with— over multiple conversations with different clients. And these patterns will start to drive towards success, you can then start to base your overall coaching framework or process around those patterns of frameworks which are working well across a multitude of different clients. Now the thing is, if there is worry or concern at this point about, oh well, it depends, it depends on the client, or it depends on the session, or it depends— what that tells me is that there are too many variables which are starting to creep in there. Ideally, if you're working with quite similar clients on quite similar problems, the solutions are also gonna be quite similar and you'll have similar conversations with them. So you can start to build up a pattern of success and the pattern of the coaching conversations which you're having. That means then that from those successes, you're able to articulate your value to new prospective clients, 'cause you can explain what type of results you get when you work with these types of clients on these types of problems. And what that does is it demonstrates confidence as a coach that you know what you're doing. You've had lots of experience of having similar conversations with clients similar to them. What that does is one of the biggest worries or concerns of a coaching client when they first start working with a client is, is this going to work for me? But if there is categorical evidence that your process as a coach is repeatable, that's going to give them confidence that your process is also going to work for them. So it just gives them a lot of confidence. It reduces friction in the sales process and it will make life easier for yourself. You'll have fewer objections, you'll have fewer prospective clients saying no to you, because hopefully you'll be starting to pick up patterns amongst who they are and what you can help them with. I would suggest only then, when you've started to see some successes, and maybe once you've worked with 10 or more clients and you've got those reviews and testimonials from those clients, only then start putting some of that money which you've earned back into investing into your business. And what I mean by that is then, by all means, go and develop a website, because now you know this is like great for your marketing message, because now you know who you help, how you can help them, how soon you can— they can expect to see those results when they start working with you. So go and plaster that all over a website, go and get a brochure done, go and get some nice professional branded headshots done, go and spend a bit of time investing into your social media so that you can start to market yourself. Go and start to invest time into doing videos like this on a YouTube channel or Shorts on the various different platforms or Reels. That's the point when you can double down on your marketing message because you have honed your craft as a coach and it's going to be really clear and consistent and also concise when you start to articulate that message in your marketing back to prospective clients. So there we have it. That's what I would do if I was starting out again. If you feel there's something which I've missed, or if any questions have arisen whilst I've been going through this, please don't be afraid to pop those into the comments below. I'd love that to spark a discussion, and who knows, maybe I'll take some of those ideas and put them into future videos. And also, if you're interested in knowing more, a little bit more about me, how I can potentially help you, and a bit about Fearless Business, there is a link in the description as well to go and apply for a free coaching session with me. I'd love to meet you and learn about your business and see if there's a way that I can help you.