Am I nearly there yet? a year in the life of a coaching business.......

I’ve been pondering the last couple of years, the career shift towards coaching, and the things I have learned, thought, and seen along the way. Writing it down because I breathe therefore, I write and all that, but also because it’s a way of reflecting and illuminating some of the things that I know I have learned, as well as bringing to light the things that I didn’t know I had learned along the way.

After achieving a diploma in counselling, practicing as a counsellor, and then coaching as a manager and leader within the workplace for over 20 years, I decided to formalise and consolidate my skills by training with Barefoot Coaching in 2019. The training was all I had hoped for and more, a brilliant course, excellent resources, great facilitators, and a group of fabulous fellow coaches, some of whom will be friends for life.

Although I could have added coach to my CV and just carried on, I really felt as though I wanted the badge, certificate, accreditation, permission even, to say that I was a coach. As a former long-time person with?imposter syndrome, I wanted someone else to say that I was a coach and that I was good enough.

Sitting in the room, in that lovely training space, with all those bright, sparky people was a bit scary on that first day. Immediately thrown into a panic and wondering whether I had chosen the right course, at the right time, and maybe I would be much better just staying as I was rather than chucking myself in at the deep end all the new learning with shiny, new, and much better than I was, people.

Slowly but slowly, I travelled through the days, returning for 3 months and by the end feeling as comfortable with the other course participants as I felt calling myself a coach. For real this time.

I left, July 2019, announced on my FB page, newly established, that I was open for business, and waited for the clients to flood in. And flood in they didn’t. I worked with some brilliant pro bono clients to get me through the initial stage post-learning, and then began to develop a small client caseload. Many of whom were people I knew already, either because I had worked with them previously or because we lived in the same area.

I started off doing some coaching and set myself an initial target of reaching ICF ACC accreditation a year after I had qualified. I worked with pro bono clients, I did peer coaching with other coaches and I worked with a small handful of fee-paying clients.

At the same time, I developed a new brand and set about creating a website. A small one to start with, something I wrote myself, I had a Facebook business page and a LinkedIn page where I talked about all the professional things I did within my portfolio career, coaching being just one of them.

I thought about a mission, vision, the colours of the website, the things that I wanted to put on my Facebook page, my business cards, and occasionally I talked about my coaching work on Linkedin and to actual real-life people.

I achieved ICF ACC accreditation in summer 2020 as per my original goal but was actually making a living at that point from unrelated work such as business development for a couple of public sector facing businesses and consultancy work within the NHS and local government.

Coaching was something I was doing, but not enough, with not enough people and I wasn’t really sure how I was going to be able to make a move away from consultancy towards coaching full time. So I didn’t, I carried on doing consultancy and I carried on doing coaching and somehow hoped that things would work themselves out in the end.

Work themselves out they didn’t as it turns out that if you always do what you’ve always done then people will only really ever know you, want to talk to you, pay you for what you have done. It got to the end of 2020 and with the help of some incisive, brilliant coaching, I knew it was time to knock the business development work on the head and have a clearer focus on coaching and related consultancy in 2021.

January came and I was working with a handful of private clients but didn’t really have a plan as to how I was going to develop the business any further and actually make a living from something other than consultancy. I had invested some money in a new website, had probably started talking more to a handful of followers on my social media pages, about the coaching work that I did, but it was still interspersed between all the other professional fragments I was involved in at the same time. On any given day I was talking about social care, NHS, public health, continuing healthcare, leadership development, coaching, business development, and performance management software. It wasn’t terribly clear who I was or what I did. Not to me sometimes and quite honestly, not to anyone else either. Portfolio it was, clear it wasn't.

So 2021 started with some business development alongside a group of other coaches. Time to let my guard down and be honest about the fact that I might have looked like I was talking a good game sometimes, but actually I wasn’t making a living. Not through coaching anyway, and to be honest, wasn’t really that sure how to or even if I could make a living through coaching.

Turned out that I wasn’t the only one, and the more I spoke to other coaches, even those who had more skin in the game, a lot of people, well qualified, experienced people were nowhere near making a living either, and certainly not within the first couple of years.

I was heartened by this as it meant that I could let go of the thought that I was doing something wrong. It meant that I could employ the services of a couple of other people and take a long, hard, and objective look at my progress to date and work out what I was doing right and what else I was doing that maybe needed a bit of a polish, rethink, chucking in the bin.

Starting with niche, or not to niche. A conversation that had started in my head a couple of years previously and that I had bored myself, and maybe a few other people, talking about. I had travelled through various thoughts, even set up a completely new business at one stage, thinking about amicable divorce as a niche, women as a niche, even though it’s not terribly niche! and then public sector, maybe public sector women. All of it was interesting and doable but not terribly niche or lighting my fire enough to be very compelling either for me or for anyone else who might be trying to fathom out what I did and whom I did it for.

A positive thinking course I did at the very start of January 2021 with the marvellous Annie Lee invited us to think about the things that made us mad, really mad, that we would get out of bed to want to try and sort out. I’m paraphrasing clumsily, but when I thought about a niche through that lens then it was the public sector, it was helping the public sector get the best bang for the bucks it spends, and it was bullying, especially within toxic, patriarchal structures. Women, because they are disproportionately leaving the public sector in midlife, washed out, fed up, and quite frankly ever so slightly knackered by managing the demands of raising kids, supporting older parents, working their way through peri and menopause, and sometimes navigating rocky long-term relationships. While holding down big jobs, in structures that are not always able to support them effectively, where they are trying to be role model leaders for the generation that are coming up behind us.

Basically, what I wanted to be, I realised through some of the later work I did with a business development coach (the glorious Authentic Alex), was to be more like the coach that I had some of but wish I had found several years earlier when I was finding my way through my own amicable divorce, while I was trying to work my way out of an organisation with dignity and grace, while I was trying to fathom out what exactly was going on physically and mentally before I realised I was in perimenopause in my early 40’s.

So, midlife women, knackered ones, values-driven ones, 40-65 year old ones, mainly working in the public sector or small businesses. That’s the niche. Not just because it’s a niche and therefore easier to describe but because it’s something that gets me leaping out of bed every day, the thought that today I will get to use all my experience, skills, intellect, and curiosity to help someone understand and untangle their mind spaghetti and to come up with a plan of how to move forward with that job, relationship, business or life change. It’s humbling, enlightening, inspiring, and such a privilege that I can’t even begin to describe the gratitude that I have that this is my job.

So niche sorted, what to do next. Well, tell people, obviously. Tell people, tell them frequently, tell them in words, tell them on your website, on your socials and talk to them face to face too. Ah, but what if you are also telling them about all the other fragments that you are interested in or delivering as a consultant. What then, can you keep talking about everything, or do you need to simplify, focus, and be clear on who you are, what you do, how you do it, and whom you do it for. Yes. Yes, you do. Even if you might want to talk about a whole heap of other interesting things, if you want to make a living doing a thing then it turns out that you need to talk about that thing, consistently, clearly, and constantly to the people who might be interested in buying that thing. So I did. I did and I do.

The other thing to sort out was money. As in money for doing the thing. The first thing, although it took me a while to do this, was to sort out how many working hours there are in a day, week, month and how much needed to be brought in across the month. Next to work out what type of work would need to be done with those hours in order to make the money required. Now, I’m not going to pretend that this was or is easy. I don’t think I had realised quite how many hang-ups and family stories I had about money (thank you Jenny Bracelin, money coach) before I did some of the work on this but also accepted the idea that starting a new business means that it might be a little while before you start to see any returns and that’s ok.

While I am on the subject of money, I am still thinking through the whole what feels like a thorny issue of charging. I say thorny as it’s something that I am still working on and am so thankful to have a network of coaching colleagues as part of the wonderful Coaches Gathering (thank you Sandra Whiles and Annie Lee) where I can ask the awkward questions about money sometimes. Specifically how much to charge who for doing what where. I have the words of a very wise, dear coaching friend of mine ringing in my ears who, when we talked about charging in the early days, said, ok let me get this straight, you charge some of your clients ￡1 a minute for your time? really ?? This was solidified into a big uncomfortable lump when I heard Sarah Short of the Coaching Revolution talk about businesses that don’t have enough paying clients or clients that pay enough are a hobby, not a business. I’m paraphrasing badly but that was the essence. I keep thinking of all the things that go into making me the coach that I am and the costs of supervision, insurance, continual professional development, books, more books, professional membership, and accreditation to name but some. When I think of all those costs and I think of my pricing, and my need to make a living, and I think of the value that what I do gives to people then I know that this is something that I need to revise further for 2022. If you are sitting reading this feeling uncomfortable, just imagine how hard it is to write.

There were a couple of other gems that turned up in 2021 that were uncomfortable truths that landed, right deep where they needed to. Things like my passion, and I really do mean passion, unbridled passion, for learning, books, courses, podcasts, training. I will have to do that round-up at some point soon for my accountant of what all that development cost me last year and I dread to think. Not least of which because one of the best questions I was asked last year was “what are you actually doing?”, to which I answered, well I’m busy, so busy, doing this, doing that, did you see that new book I bought, beautiful cover, blah, blah blah. To which the answer came yes, but what are you actually doing with it? Something that took me weeks to ponder on, before I came to the realisation that actually (I’m now whispering this to my knees) I wasn’t doing very much. Don’t get me wrong, I was loving it, enjoying the people, the discussion, the handouts, the working in small groups but the gap was any sort of a plan of consolidation and actually working out how I was going to put anything into practice. I was having fun but it wasn’t very purposeful. My aim for this year is to slow down that maverick magpie always looking for the shiny thing and be much more intentional and what I learn, with who and why and to plan in the time to consolidate afterward.

The second awkward truth, as I talked about how much networking I was doing, was illuminated by the question, how much of that networking is with other coaches? err, most of it…..and how much of that gets you new business ?...... a teeny, tiny proportion of it, and why do you do it? mainly network with coaches? because it's nice and it's my tribe and after 7 years of running a consultancy business alone I feel like I belong to a group and it's safe. Ouch. ?

The third issue, the biggest one to face was the voice inside that said who do you think you are. Or more accurately the one that said who does she think she is. I have an inkling of where that voice comes from, actually not an inkling, I know exactly where, who, and from when, and it no longer serves me. It took a while though, a long while, and quite a bit of challenge, coaching, and DOING THE WORK to shake it off so that I could say, without any hint of hesitation, I’m Sarah, I specialise (and delight) in coaching knackered women to help them get clarity, find their courage and make the changes they want at home, work and in their relationships.

So there we are, 2021 business year highlights, slights and delights, summed up in a nutshell. Am I nearly there yet? in all honesty, nope, not yet, but I am starting the year with a much clearer idea of just exactly where there is, how far away I am from it and what I need to do, and with whom to help me get there.

How about you ? are you nearly there or thereabouts yet? and if so what and who helped you?

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