Allen Wendy - The business and practice of coaching: finding your niche, making money, and attracting ideal clients

Also by Lynn Grodzki

Building Your Ideal Private Practice:
A Guide for Therapists and Other Healing Professionals

12 Months to Your Ideal Private Practice:
A Workbook

The New Private Practice:
Therapist-Coaches Share Stories, Strategies, and Advice (Editor)

The Business and Practice of Coaching

Finding Your Niche, Making Money, and
Attracting Ideal Clients

Lynn Grodzki and Wendy Allen

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

This e-book contains some places that ask the reader to fill in questions or comments. Please keep pen and paper handy as you read this e-book so that you can complete the exercises within.

Contents

Take advantage of current trends and avoid past hype within the quickly changing coaching profession, so that the business you build today is viable tomorrow.

How to define the distinctions and similarities among these three professions and the emerging body of knowledge that makes coaching unique.

Adopt the top skills and competencies that lead to masterful coaching and evaluate your need for additional coach training.

A process of inquiry and insight to help you determine your coaching strengths, skills, and area of coaching expertise.

How to target and segment a niche market and build your reputation to make a bigger impact with your coaching services.

The eight best ways to bring in new clients, how to refine and plan your marketing so that it delivers results, and the marketing ideas coaches do best to avoid.

The essential steps to develop an entrepreneurial mind-set, a requirement for business success.

How to handle the inevitable negative emotions that arise as you establish your coaching business so you can avoid self-sabotaging behaviors and keep your business progress on track.

How to make more money, shift negative money attitudes, set and get a full fee, maximize profits, develop multiple income streams, and build a coaching business you can sell.

Risk management strategies, ethical matters, confidentiality conflicts, designing a coaching agreement, and other essential considerations that can minimize business problems.

Two well-paid coaching specialties that add value and meaning to the work and lives of executives.

Helping small-business owners and professionals in business learn to thrive.

Skill-based and peak performance coaching that gives clients far-reaching proficiency.

Showing clients how to design and implement an ideal career path, an essential resource for those in and out of the labor market.

The coaching specialty that helps motivated clients take steps to greatly improve their lives.

A new facet of holistic health care, coaching people to take greater responsibility for their own health and well-being.

Three coaching specialties that focus on the subtle interior aspects of human development.

This book is a family affair: The authors are sisters as well as professional colleagues. As family, we want to extend our appreciation to our extended family within the coaching communitythose coaches who so generously mentored, encouraged, and informed our work and this book. We also thank Deborah Malmud, director of publishing at Norton Professional Books and editor extraordinaire, and Michael McGandy and Kevin Olsen at W.W. Norton for their combined efforts to make sure the book reads well, looks good, and reaches the people who need it. Additional thanks go to:

(From Lynn)

The coaches I mentor who constantly remind me what it means to be a new coach on the front lines; the CoachU community; my husband for his patient, sage advice; and Wendy, for her lighthearted coaching perspective and steely sense of purpose.

(From Wendy)

My clients who inspire me every day; my wonderful husband and family who werent really 100% interested in this text, but were 200% interested in me and supported me in all the important ways; my sister, Lynn, who so generously asked me to participate; my fun next-door neighbors who were always glad to see me during my necessary and unnecessary breaks; and my dog, Rubby-the-Tummy, who loved this whole endeavor because he got to lie down at my feet without me moving, for hours at a timehis snores gently kept me focused.

The Business and Practice of Coaching

Building a thriving coaching business is a challenge. With an estimated number of 30,000 coaches worldwide, and with the majority hanging out their coaching shingles since 1999, the coaching market is definitely growing. But data show that these same coaches are finding that despite their best efforts, the business side of coaching is not as financially viable as they had initially hoped. In the latest industry-wide survey conducted by the International Coach Federation (ICF), the largest professional association of coaches, 70% of all coaches surveyed report that even though they are working hard to build their businesses, they are making less than a living wage. Coaches need help in order to succeed in the business of coaching, and they need it now.

Whether you are a veteran coach, a brand-new coach, or someone still undecided about coaching, this book is written with your business success in mind. If you have questions about what it takes to start a coaching business or how to expand your ongoing coaching business, we have answers that have been tested in the marketplace. If you are at a loss as to how to attract clients, retain clients, or earn what you need, we have strategies that will shorten your learning curve. If you love being a coach but dont yet love being in business and feel stuck or burned out, we can help you find an easier way to thrive in this challenging business.

To make money as a coach in business today, you need to be both a skilled coach and a capable entrepreneur. As a business owner, you need to select the right coaching specialty, target your ideal market, build a reputation, use the most leveraged marketing strategies, know how to set and raise your fees, develop multiple streams of income, and ultimately build a six-figure business not just to own but to sell. You need to develop a business mind-set, so that you can stay resilient and optimistic, even in the face of inevitable setbacks. All the while you must know how to stay risk-adverse and safe, promoting the core principles and ethics that are essential to the practice of coaching. This book will show you how to do all this, and more.

We have been involved in the coaching profession since 1996 in our own coaching businesses. One of us is a mentor coacha teacher-trainer for a large coach training organization, and editor of a previous book on coaching. Our research for this book included a review of the coaching literature and of several prominent coach training curricula. We also interviewed and tracked well over 100 new coaches as they worked to build their businesses and met with dozens of senior, successful coaches to hear about their best business strategies. We regularly attend coaching conferences, present workshops internationally on the business of coaching, and sit on panels and advisory boards as coaching experts.

Despite the challenges of the current coaching trends, we feel optimistic about the possibilities and opportunities available today for new coaches. But we also maintain a strong pragmatic stance. We want to correct the myth and hype that have unfortunately caused many new coaches to feel misled or disappointed as they start into business, and help you stay grounded in reality so that your coaching business is viable.