I Want An Hour Of Your Time...

A coach hopped into the inbox of one of our mentors to ask if she could have an hour of his time, face-to-face in London to learn how to get clients.

This mentor suggested that perhaps the best way forward would be to speak to me, as I'm the 'face' of The Coaching Revolution. This was partly because that's our process, but also because he's based in the far north west of England and certainly isn't about to go to London to deliver an hour's coaching.

What happened next was interesting.

Understand What's Important

I sent the coach a message and she came back with a pointed response in which she said that she 'didn't want to be convinced of a service without having any idea of the price'.

'Ouch!' I thought.

I explained that we are utterly transparent with our pricing, for a start, it's all over our website. (For the uninitiated, we offer group mentoring for ￡1500 or 1:1 mentoring for ￡2950. We have a 12-month interest-free payment plan for both.)

This conversation went backwards and forwards and in it the coach made it clear that she wants a single hour and, (she said 'call me old-school') she only wants it face-to-face.

Let me explain why I think she is mistaken.

Cost And Value

Coaching qualifications are expensive and they provide the coach with 50% of the skills necessary to create a financially viable coaching business. The other 50% of the necessary skills are business development skills. The belief that you can learn everything you need from a single hour of someone's time is simply mistaken.

In the same way that you couldn't possibly learn how to coach from a single hour of someone's time, you can't learn the intricacies of business development and how they apply to coaches in particular, in an hour. Opting for a single hour of even the most experienced coach isn't going to give you the value you need in terms of business development skills. Yes, an hour of their time may be cheaper than a proper course, but at least with the latter you'll learn everything you need to know.

Proximity

At The Coaching Revolution, all our mentoring with clients is done online. We now work with coaches all over the world (literally from Australia to Colombia) and we know that what we do and how we do it, works.

The coach asking this question thinks that face-to-face is better than online, or at least better for her. Let me explain why I think she's mistaken.

What all coaches want is paying clients. We not only know this, but we understand the massive levels of frustration that's caused by coaches failing to find them.

In order to get paying clients, coaches need to understand exactly what they need to do. They need to be taught what to do and how to do it, as well as when and where to do it. Whether they learn that online or off-line is actually irrelevant. What they need is the information and they need it from a reliable source.

Our success rate is unparalleled in this industry. We have more than turned the 82% failure rate of the global statistic on its head. Part of the reason for this is that we keep working with coaches until they do succeed, we don't deliver mentoring sessions and then stop.

Why You Don't Want An Hour Of Our Time...

To think that buying an hour of someone's time will be enough to put your coaching business on the right track is at best, naive and at worst a complete waste of money.

I reiterate that you wouldn't think that an hour's training would equip you with the skills you need to be a coach, so why would an hour's training equip you with the skills you need to develop a profitable and resilient coaching business?

If you'd like to chat to me about how The Coaching Revolution might be able to help you to build a coaching business, my diary is here.