Roundtable Recap: Excel As A Coach

This Roundtable Discussion is an initiative of Spendless Academy to gather industry leaders over afternoon tea - discussing insights in depth of a trending topic. On 15th September, we've gathered with experts and coaches to discuss on how to excel as a coach in Singapore.

Related Article: Read more about our last Roundtable Discussion on "Social Media Marketing" lead by Mike Li, a Career and Personal Branding Coach in Singapore.

We're honoured to host Anji Hallewell this time, to lead conversations on her experience, strategies and knowledge on how she've built her coaching career over the last years.

Anji is a Self-Mastery & Performance Expert, who over the last 15+ years, has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, such as Mediacom, FOX, RBS & QBE Insurance in a variety of talent development roles.

After spending years mastering the impact of behaviour on human potential, and personally experiencing some of the high-pressure challenges facing today’s aspiring leaders, Anji discovered that self-mastery was the key to achieving natural success. She has taught 100s of professionals proven mindset tools for them to rise above the negative workings of the ego and perform at their best.

Are you making the switch to run a coaching business? Learn the ropes.

Knowledge Capital

Unlike a typical business model, coaching involves the trading of your knowledge based on your experience and academic to help someone else improve in their work or life. Knowledge capital, also called intellectual capital, is the intangible asset that represents valuable ideas, methods, processes and other intuitive talents that belong to a company. In this case, your coaching business is you.

Starting Out

Anji emphasized that it's important to first identify what areas are you good at, and can see yourself doing for many years and then investing to specialise in it - self mastery. Starting out can be tough, so it's encouraged to start doing some pro-bono coaching in exchange for testimonials and to test out your coaching skills. This is a people-to-people business, hence recommendations and testimonials are the best marketing strategy, on top of networking.

As you make the transition to start charging, prepare your elevation pitch and constantly share it whilst networking. Being present, giving value and sharing more of what you do through personal branding builds relationships, because a client would need to feel comfortable before working with a coach.

Implement a system that measures results

Every coach and coaching program is never 100% identical despite the saturated market, hence people are buying into both you (the coach) as well as the belief that your program is going to change or improve their life.

Anji has her own system that measures her coaching programs to ensure when applied, could get the results a client wants to achieve from the beginning. It could be a simple framework that measures ROI in between and eventually captures genuine feedback after a program, which you can refer to - to improve in the future.

Mike Li, a career and personal branding coach runs as Principle Coach for Trainium Academy added on that there has to be a structure when collecting feedback after a coaching program or a training course. Start with asking how a participant got to know you so you can analyse which of your marketing strategy work best that led them to you - all the way, to asking how they genuinely feel about the program and if they would advocate to recommend it to their friends and family.

Mimi Marlina writes content to help elevate personal brand of realtors in Singapore, added that getting video or social assets of these testimonials could largely contribute as social proof and hence attract more leads online. This naturally adds on to the credibility of the coach herself.

Anji captures feedback in the format of "before" and "after" - this has proven to be a good strategy for her business so far. Her potential future clients could relate to the journey her current clients are going through with her coaching. She added on that the best referral happens when you've empowered your client enough to make them adequate and motivated to impact someone else.

Packages, Time, Client Expectations

When crafting your coaching packages, you need to include details to how long or how often the coaching sessions will happen, and what are the expectations or objectives a client can look forward to achieving at the end of each of those sessions with you.

It's best to understand the profile of the client, by getting to know them in person - to be able to offer the right coaching programs they need based on their circumstances, problems or needs.

Filtration Model

Each coach has his or her own way of filtering clients. Like every coach, the aim is to build a valuable profile and being able to select the right clients who are willing to invest into that value and stay committed till the end. This is however, not as easy as it sounds.

Through years of experience, coaches might come to realize that having a good filtration model will help solve any issues in the future.

Anji shared with us her filtration model when it comes to choosing her clients:

1. She runs a complimentary preview session to invite interested potential clients to for a two hours. Through that, she shares her value of content and introducing more of what she can do.
2. Interested parties can move on to sign up for 1 day coaching program to learn more in depth. From there, some will move on to signing up for a longer term coaching program ranging from 3 months up to 12 months.

Mike runs a monthly seminar to share his value at a low investment fee to his attendees. His aim to provide clarity to his attendees, so they are able to work out the kind of coaching they need should they want to pursue for more help.

Pro Bono or Low Investment?

It depends on the coach, and the content. Truth is, there is no standard or best way to market a coaching business. You start out trying various ways and methods, measure the returns, and eventually decided on the selected few that actually work best for you.

Why is it important to select your client?

Or at least profiling them so it matches you. This is a relationship focused business - you and the client will be communicating for a period of time, and both needs to be comfortable and approachable.

Scott Doughty is a Chief Wellbeing Coach with Radiant, who focuses on mindfulness and meditation for executives and corporate professionals shared that in his experience, the reason for the high prices set for his coaching program is because that automatically filters committed clients from those who aren't. He feels that these are the clients who can see his value, and more likely to stay committed towards the whole coaching program especially after making that monetary investment.

This also depends on the intensity of the program, as Mike do encourage lower price tagged programs to target those who may not afford expensive ones or are after something simpler in a less condensed version. For these lower price tags, you can still deliver good content - simply watered down in accordance to the price the client paid.

At the end of the day, the client is buying you.

You are half the reason why a client would sign up with your programs, so having a good personal branding that showcase your best qualities is a bonus. Scott emphasized that we need to consistently work on ourselves as well, to be a role model for others to admire and look up upon. This helps in winning clients, and easier to help them grow and learn through the coaching sessions.

Gabriel Perumal, teaches kids on robotics and is also an adjunct lecturer in a local polytechnic in Singapore. As his learners are usually kids and young students, he shared his experiences that as a coach you need to tweak ways to win an audience depending on their age group. His way of winning millennials involves being cool and making boring things fun, something not the other senior lecturers would invest to doing. But that made him a more effective teacher and coach, and hence brings about better outcome.

How important is certification?

Scott did mentioned that client needs to believe what they pay. So are testimonials from clients enough? That is a question we debated as well, if we need to keep on attending courses and certifications to stay as a clients' preferred coach?

Anji attended several certifications herself, and from her personal experience - she found the private certifications are more robust and informative. But depending on the target client, corporate companies do have a process that would insist a proper training certification before you can coach or train their employees. Bottomline, it depends on who you would like to attract as clients and to prepare yourself to meet those pre-requisites.

So what if a client is not getting the results?

Managing expectations can be really challenging, and can sometimes be a big mismatch. This can lead to negativity, disputes and arguments between a coach and his client. This is why monitoring results at every stage of the program is important, to identify if anything needs to be altered to ensure this time investment will lead to a positive outcome for the client.

Having a good filtration model can help you choose the right ones from the beginning. But if the results seemed harder to accomplish, Anji does offer to extend complimentary time to ensure more value is added to take the program back on course. Sometimes, a coach will need to shift certain paradigms and techniques. She also stated that it's easier if both parties can accept the fact the program is not working for either or neither first, before finding amicable solutions.

Like every coach, every client and results are also different.

Legalities

In any kind of business, disputes can happen and people may drop off halfway through the coaching session. This will results in potential lawsuits from seeking refunds or suing for failing to deliver. In any case, when a business transaction happen and money is exchanged for services, it's best to sign off a legal binding contract of service so both parties officially accept the scope of the work. You can also add disclaimers or extended clause where deemed fit.

According to Scott and Anji, you can easily download a coaching contract from the internet and personalised it to your company's deliverables etc. But everyone agreed that having a contract can help protect the business' interest and ensuring that it's fair for the business and the client when a dispute arises. It can get messy without a legal contract, and speculations by the client can lead to defamation or negative feedback which in turn will affect your business.

Peter Toh, a senior programme manager stated that a mismatch of personality can be an issue in the long run. Hence, being careful at choosing a client from the beginning is important to avoid unnecessary mess later on.

Tapping into Corporate

The two simple tips to getting into corporate is to firstly track down the decision maker or deal with the employee that influence the decision maker. It's more time effective as well. The second is to constantly network in person at the right events where you can build friendships with people in corporate. Through being present and letting people get to know you and what you do - can put you in a better spot to convince them to take up your coaching programs.

We also discussed on having a good follow up process after pursuing a lead. Anji quoted "Not now sometimes means not yet." So instead of getting disheartened, as rejection is anyways part of any business - you should follow up again in the future at a better time for the client and continue to pursue more potential clients as well.

Collaborate, not Compete

Rayson Choo, a host with The Raygacy Show and a coach, highlighted the importance of relationship building and collaboration. It should be one strategy used by a coach, in order to stay recognized in the industry and getting consistent referrals.

Collaboration is the new model for future businesses to thrive, and Anji said she worked in partnership with some companies that compliments what she does in trade of something she can deliver to them. For e.g. She partners with companies to help promote her preview sessions and in return pass on leads to them from her network, where fits.

Related article: How future entrepreneurs run companies?

Teach what you apply

You are the best testimonial of your own program, its your personal story that wins your client the most - knowing you've developed and applied something that changed your life. The result of that is the person you've become today, and that is a living destination your client wants to get to as well. Sometimes the reasons to why a client choose you is simply because they thought of you as someone who 'get' them or understand their situation since you've been through something similar - being relatable to their predicament.

But while a client can cling or depend on you to also assist their emotional and mental issues, Anji emphasized on defining clear parameters. Listening to their problems is one thing, but the aim is to get them back into focusing on the program so they can develop and not be handicapped to grow. We need to enable and not disable them, and making them accountable for every choice they make in life.

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