The State of Coaching in 2023

Note: This is a shortened version of the original post published on The Fully Booked Coach. There will be a link in the first comment if you would like to check it out.

Please leave me a comment with your views (either here, or under the original post on The Fully Booked Coach) even if you disagree with me. We need to be having more honest conversations about the coaching industry and hopefully, this can be a starting point.

The State of Coaching in 2023

This post is going to be a tough read for any coach who is not yet fully established. And an even tougher read for somebody considering becoming a coach.

But it’s a necessary read.

If you want unicorns, rainbows and assurances that doing what you love will bring untold wealth, you’re in the wrong place.

If on the other hand, you want the opinions of a guy who has spent the last 18 years working in the coaching industry and has worked directly with over 500 coaches, then buckle up Tiger, we're going for a ride.

The?ICF?(International Coaching Federation) has polled its members worldwide every four years since 2012 to get a feel for what is happening in the coaching industry.

The?last survey?was conducted in 2020 and read to me more like a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale than a true reflection of where the coaching industry is at.

This is hardly surprising. No organization is going to commission a report that will cast them in anything other than a very bright light.

The ICF?has a?lot? to lose by suggesting that most new coaches are at best struggling and at worst utterly screwed before they even start.

Like previous reports, the 2020 publication bore no resemblance to what I was seeing and hearing from the coaches who hired me, took my courses, or interacted with me on social media.

So in 2021, exasperated at what felt like yet another work of pure fiction, I decided to do my own research by asking the people on my newsletter list and in the?Fully Booked Coach Facebook group?for their feedback.

Admittedly, my sample size was a lot smaller as I only had about 10,000 coaches available to me and the ICF has over 50,000 members.

Nevertheless, I had 111 coaches fill out the survey and I’d be prepared to wager my firstborn (if I had one) that the results were far more indicative of an industry that is close to breaking point.

I decided to run the survey again this year only adding more questions to get a better feel.

This time a total of 95 coaches completed it with the drop off (probably) down to a combination of me not pushing it quite as hard and deleting about 2,000 subscribers off my list when I changed domain names last June.

Here is a sample of the results - and as I said, you can see the entire thing by clicking on the link in the comments or Googling 'the fully booked coach state of life coaching'

Where are you on your coaching journey?

Less than one-third of people were full-time coaches, but that is an increase from last year when the figure was just 27%

When did you start coaching?

Almost 40% of respondents had not yet started coaching or were in their first year.

I was reassured to see that over a quarter of coaches had been in business for over 5 years.

My sense after working with hundreds of coaches is that if you can get past the 2 to 3-year mark you’ve probably well on your way to being successful.

Have you had formal coach training?

A whopping 80% of people reported that they had paid for formal?coach training?which is brilliant!

How much have you spent on coach-related training?

What is even more pleasing is the fact that almost 60% of those people have spent $5,000 or more.

The amount of money spent on coach training doesn’t necessarily equate to how good it is because there are some bad but expensive training companies.

But it does indicate how serious the person is about becoming a professional coach.

Did your coach training offer help with marketing?

Disappointingly, only 44 of the 81 people who undertook training got any help with their marketing whilst doing so.

I totally get that it’s not the training companies’ responsibility to ensure their students know how to?get clients. Even so, it’s disappointing that almost half of the people who had paid for training got no help in attracting clients.

How good was the marketing/business training you had?

What was even more disappointing, however, was that only 5 people out of the 95 who completed the survey had had marketing/business help which made them feel confident that they could get clients.

It would be interesting to follow up with the 55% of people who thought their marketing/business training was a good start but left them with gaps in a year’s time.

I’m confident that the gaps will have proved to have been much bigger than anticipated.

One of the main problems with marketing is not knowing what you don’t know.

I thought I knew a?lot?more about marketing when I started my first coaching business in 2005 than was the case. And I had 20 years of sales experience to draw on.

In working with scores of coaches who have had marketing help whilst on their coach training, it’s rarely better than mediocre and it’s frequently dreadful.

Bad marketing advice is much worse than no marketing advice.

Do you have enough paying clients?

Of the 89 people who completed the question about having enough coaching clients, only 6 said they had?enough paying clients.

I have worked, or am working with four of those people and the other two have worked with a different coach.

Do you think that’s a coincidence?

The really scary (but not at all surprising) stat was that almost 40% of coaches had zero paying clients.

How serious are you about succeeding as a coach?

Almost 40% of respondents said nothing will stop them from succeeding as a coach.

We shall see.

I’m all in favour of you having a total belief in yourself and your own abilities to become a fully booked coach.

But you have to be sensible and understand that there are?always?things that can stop you.

Life can f*** you up in a heartbeat – quite literally if you suddenly notice that you have no heartbeat.

The ‘nothing can stop me’?approach concerns me for three reasons.

1. You may become too risk averse because with risk comes the chance of failing. Yet without risk comes certain failure.
2. It may stop you from anticipating potential problems because, ya know, nothing can stop ya!
3. If something does stop you (like it does most coaches) you’re going to feel like utter crap.

Failure is?always?an option, so embrace it or go back to bed.

How much money do you need to earn as a coach?

I would wager your firstborn (if you have one) that the average person who thinks of themselves as being a coach earns a lot less than $20k per annum.

I rarely meet coaches who earn north of $50k who haven’t been coaching for at least 3 years.

Not that it can’t be done more quickly than that, of course, it can.

It’s just very hard.

And getting harder.

56% of coaches who filled in the survey need that amount (or a lot more) if they’re not to quit.

If they’re not paying for help or are brilliant at marketing, let us offer them our thoughts and prayers.

What did you spend on growing your coaching practice in 2022?

But even though so many coaches need to scale up so quickly, only 10.5% spent over $10k in 2022 on marketing their business

A further 14.7% spent between $5k and $10k. Meaning 75% of coaches spent less than $5k growing their coaching practice and 21% less than $1k.

When I then asked coaches to estimate what they planned on spending in 2023 the figures were much the same.

How many competitive industries do you know that will allow you to start up and establish yourself with so little investment?

Where do you plan on marketing your business?

I no longer encourage?any?of my clients to devote all their marketing efforts exclusively online unless they are already reasonably well established.

You can no longer succeed as a coach by marketing yourself exclusively online from a standing start.

That ship has sailed and there are just too many coaches vying for too few clients.

The only possible exception to that is if you have a chunk of money to throw (and keep throwing) at ads and you know how to run successful ad campaigns.

It would appear, however, that a lot of new coaches haven’t got the memo, or refuse to believe it. Because almost 60% are only going to market themselves exclusively online.

I'm not confident that I could do it if I was starting from scratch and I know a little bit about this online marketing malarkey.

How long do you spend marketing your coaching practice?

If the wheels weren’t off already they are now.

I think we can all accept that no matter what some of the less scrupulous training companies are apt to say, the industry is saturated.

Imagine the coaching industry is a slice of white bread and somebody has poured a glass of milk over it.

That was the coaching industry 5 or more years ago.

Now imagine your mate Mick the milkman (I know I'm about 40 years too late with this metaphor, but humour me) backs his float up with 1,000 bottles of gold top on the back and tips the lot over the already soaking bread.

That's the coaching industry today.

I would conservatively estimate that there are 20 times more coaches than the industry can support at this moment in time.

Yes, I plucked that stat out of my ass, but I'd wager by best. friends first born (if he had one) that it's true.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that it doesn’t necessarily need to affect?you.

Most coaches suck at marketing.

So if you get to be good at it, you can leapfrog your way to front of the line.

But there is one rather large elephant in the room-sized caveat.

You need to invest your time.

All things being equal, it will take the coach working five hours per week on their marketing five times longer to hit their income goals than it will the coach working 25 hours per week.

But, it gets worse.

The coach who doesn’t have much time is not only seeing the coach who is treating their practice as a business disappear over the horizon.

They are also being passed by all the new coaches flooding into the industry behind them who have more time.

If you have 5 hours per week or less to work on your business and that is all online and not likely to change, then you’re going to fail unless you can afford to outsource your marketing.

Seriously, quit now and save yourself a lot of heartache and angst. I wouldn’t even take you on as a paying client because nobody can help you.

You won’t be surprised that 5 out of the 6 coaches who have enough paying clients were also in the group spending the longest on their marketing

More....

I'm going to call it a day with this post and I hope you can take the time to read it all in its entirety at The Fully Booked Coach (link in first comment).

I for one am sick of the training companies and marketers, at best misleading new coaches, and out worst, flat-out lying to them.

There are no quick wins, there are no coaches capable of helping you scale to $100k in 30 days and there are no secret marketing techniques being sold in Facebook ads.

Or maybe there are.

But none that are also ethical and won't require you to spam and annoy the crap out of people.

At the moment, there is an excess of coaches and a massive shortage of paying clients.

But the coach training schools don't want you to know that.

Neither does the ICF.

And whereas the marketers are ok with you knowing that, only if you know it on their terms.

Meaning they position themselves as the only solution to your problem.

You may well know already, becoming a coach is easy.

Really easy.

That's why there are so many.

But becoming a fully booked coach is f****** hard.

Getting to that stage requires persistence, a willingness to learn marketing, money and a lot of hard work.

Are you up for that?

Please do leave me a comment even if you think I'm utterly wrong. Let's talk!