10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started as a Coach

When I started my coaching business in 2017, I thought I was ready for being a business owner. I had been reading books and doing courses for years, plus I was a qualified accountant and I knew a fair bit about how businesses worked.

The truth is, I wasn’t prepared. Not mentally anyway. I had a lot of technical knowledge but I didn’t have ‘street’ knowledge about what it meant to run a coaching business.

In this article, I highlight 10 things nobody told me before I started, but that would have been super valuable knowledge for me as a new coach and could have saved me quite a bit of stress and worry.

1.?Being a great coach doesn’t guarantee an influx of clients

There is an unspoken assumption that after you qualify as a coach clients will knock down your door to work with you — sadly, that is not the case.

A qualification is important and I’ll always advocate for it, but?we shouldn’t confuse the skill of coaching with the business of coaching.

A coaching qualification teaches you the necessary skills so you can coach people, but it doesn’t teach you how to monetize those skills and build a business around them. There’s a big piece of the puzzle that’s missing:?business development .

I receive a fair number of emails from coaches who ask me why their income doesn’t reflect their skills as a coach. Now you know why, but if you’re interested in my exact answer to such a question, you can?read it here .

2.?Business development is not free

Soon after I qualified as a coach, it became apparent that I would need to invest in learning how to get clients and build a successful coaching business.

As a new coach without (m)any clients, you have two options. You either try to figure it out on your own and learn through trial and error, or you invest in programmes and people who have done it before so you can learn from them.

At first glance, it looks like the first alternative is free, and the second one costs money. The truth is they both come at a price.

While paying for a product or service is a tangible cost, the costs of trying to figure it out by yourself are very real as well — time, effort, mistakes, stress and the opportunity cost of not having had these skills earlier. It’s up to you how you do business development, but be mindful that both alternatives have associated costs.

3.?It takes a while to make it work financially

Bar a few exceptions, you can expect to spend an average of 2–3 years building your coaching business before you see some significant financial results. Factors like your goals and the time you have available to invest in your business matter, but financial sustainability doesn’t happen overnight.

With that in mind, although it’s tempting to?quit your job and go full-time on your coaching business , don’t rush into it. Having another source of income while you build your coaching business puts you in a very favourable position. Not only will you have the peace of mind that your bills are being covered, but you won’t have to say yes to every Dick (Tom and Harry too) driven by the need to put food on the table.

4.?Working for yourself is lonely

When you do become a full-time business owner, be prepared for how lonely and isolated it can feel sometimes.

I went from having colleagues, work lunches and team-building exercises to being on my own in a small office without a soul around me for 10 hours every day. That was a huge shock and I didn’t expect it to affect me as much as it did. Two years of a global pandemic didn’t help either.

5.?Your family and friends might not understand what you do

On top of the loneliness was the isolation I felt among my circle of friends and loved ones. I am the first one in my family to ever start their own business, the first one in my circle of friends to be an ‘entrepreneur’ and all of a sudden we couldn’t find common topics of conversation.

Even to this day, my parents don’t entirely understand what I do in my business. The word coach doesn’t have an equivalent in Romanian and although coaching is becoming more popular in Eastern Europe, it is still somewhat of an obscure subject.

As for my friends, I found myself not being able to relate anymore to the things they experienced as employees. Just as they didn’t relate to what I was going through as a business owner. I didn’t have issues with annual leave and performance reviews, flexible working arrangements and conflicts with colleagues. And they didn’t have to deal with pipelines and sales pages, lead magnets and personal branding. All of a sudden, it was as if we were speaking different languages.

Therefore, I had to find people who were speaking my language. I made some business friends and formed relationships with people who also run their own businesses, but that doesn’t change how isolated I felt within my immediate circle.

Be prepared to talk to your family and friends about this subject and how you could best manage such a situation if it occurs. I didn’t have these conversations in advance, because I didn’t expect this to happen. The coach in me should have known better — never make assumptions!

6.?Being a workaholic is not a badge of honour

When you work for yourself and by yourself, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of working all the time. Call it ‘hustle culture’ or the pressure we put on ourselves to make the business a success, the bottom line is that not having clear work boundaries can lead to some serious damage. In my case, it led to?burnout ?and the worst thing is I didn’t even realise it until it was pointed out to me.

My experience with burnout forced me to create a?strict working routine ?and now I run my business in less than 30 hours per week. Sadly, I had to learn the hard way.

7.?You’ll wear many hats in addition to the coaching one

Many new coaches believe that running a coaching business means that they’ll spend most of their time coaching people.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Coaching accounts for about 30% of the work I do in my business and this percentage is confirmed by other coaches I know and work with. The rest of the work you can expect to do in your coaching business is either administrative, marketing and sales-related, strategic work, financial management and more.

I have identified?8 roles that I play in my business ?as a solopreneur, from the CEO to the janitor.

8.?It’s unlikely you will only do pure coaching

When I started as a coach, I only wanted to do pure coaching. That is what I learned during my two qualifications, and I had an idealistic image of never stepping outside the coaching circle. I quickly realised how naive I was to think that I could do that.

When I was doing personal finance coaching, there were certain technical terms and financial concepts that I had to explain to my clients before we could move further with the coaching. As much as I was taught to believe that the client has all the answers inside of them, in some cases they didn’t. They first needed to learn about something and understand it intellectually and therefore I was their teacher as well as their coach.

In the work that I do now, helping coaches build financially viable coaching businesses, I do a lot more teaching, mentoring and consulting than I do coaching. That’s because my clients need to first understand business concepts such as financial viability, business models, the customer journey, sales pipeline and marketing as a basis for building a successful coaching business.

The?2020 ICF coaching survey ?revealed that 94% of more than 20,000 coaches who responded did other things in their businesses such as training, consulting and teaching.

Having known this when I started as a coach would have given me the opportunity to think about what?other revenue sources I could add to my coaching business ?and perhaps I would have chosen a completely different business model than the one I chose.

9.?You’ll need to educate prospects on what coaching is

I didn’t know what coaching was until I did my first qualification. But after that, once I entered what I like to call the ‘coaching bubble’, I forgot what it was like before I qualified.

As coaches, we enter an environment where everyone around us talks about coaching and knows what it means. Think about it — our fellow students, teachers and other coaches we connect with, we all speak the same language. We know what coaching is and how powerful it can be. And because we connect with other coaches online, very soon our social feeds are filled with posts and articles about coaching.

However, there are still a lot of people who don’t know what coaching is and why it’s so valuable and among those people are our potential clients. The fact that many professionals call themselves coaches although that is not what they do, makes the situation even more confusing. Therefore, we need to be careful not to make assumptions about people’s knowledge and understanding when it comes to coaching.

Instead, we should?educate our prospects ?on what coaching is and how it works. By doing that, we will not only help potential clients understand what they’ll get if they work with us, but we will also differentiate ourselves from other professionals who call themselves coaches, but do something completely different.

10.?You don’t have to say yes to every ‘opportunity’

Once you’re a bit more established, you’ll notice a lot of ‘opportunities’ coming your way. Some of them are downright spam or scams, and you’ll learn from experience how to spot those and not bother with them. But some are genuine, perhaps have potential and you might even enjoy doing them.

Here’s the thing: you can’t say yes to all of them. You will reach a point in your business where time is your most valuable asset. And even if an opportunity sounds good on paper, if it doesn’t take you closer to your goals or pulls you away from the strategy you’ve set for yourself, you’re going to have to?learn to say no .

Takeaway

Nothing can fully prepare you for starting a coaching business. You’ll cross that bridge when you get there, but it sure is nice to get a heads-up on what to expect while you do so. I hope the ten things I mentioned here will make the crossing more manageable.

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This article was originally published on?Medium.com .

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