As an executive coach, I will be the first person to tell you that the world of coaching is following internet marketers’ footsteps. It is not that anything’s wrong with that, but we need to understand that people are oversaturated and oversold with the same tactics used repeatedly.
Here’s a typical formula:
- Create content – a blog or a book or a video or a podcast.
- Run ads on Google or Facebook to build the “email list.”
- Focus on building your community by giving them more free stuff.
- Work on creating a coaching certification program that will produce 1000 coaches every quarter in a year.
- Create an expensive online course that will cost a leg and an arm along with a substantial passive income for you.
- Do a whole less 1:1 coaching and a whole lot of group coaching with over 100 folks in each group
- Market the group coaching “packages” like hell because they’re cost-effective at only $19.99 per month!
- Rinse and repeat.
And on it goes.
The other day I was thinking about the direction I need to be taking my coaching company towards. Here’s a small under-ambitious list I came up with:
- Create content – my blog and podcast (no plans to work on a book in 2021).
- Build and engagement my community via email regularly (and not just when I have to “sell” them something).
- Create artisan-grade programs that complement my group coaching programs.
- Have not more than 20 people in any of my groups; and my groups coaching programs will be expensive although so much more cost-effective than my 1:1 engagements.
- Create 1:1 powerful experiences for some of our finest leaders and up-and-coming leaders of the world.
- Create an online platform to host and facilitate workshops that emphasise the “work” part. This one is for the game-changers who want to take their learnings to the next level. I’m already working on finalising two programs: The Emerging Leaders Workshop (ELW) and The Senior Leader’s Workshop (SLW) (fancy titles, right?)
That’s it! I’m screwing the packages, marketing, and pricing “theories” designed to make the coach rich by “scaling” their business. I’m here to serve my minimum viable audience, and though that might be 20 people right now, it can grow to a 100 or even a 1,000 people eventually, but that’s who I want to serve.
Having this clarity has freed me to think of all the possibilities and success I can share with the leaders I want to work with. They will be few, but I’ll know them and hence, be able to play a significant role in their success. And boy, that’s so much more satirising than certifying a 1,000 coaches every quarter or creating those silly packages to lure more clients into my funnel.
Of course, I’m not asking or expecting anyone to drop all the marketing and become a saint. That’s not the point. But I think the “helping professionals” need to tone it down and go back to the basics and reflect on why we exist. To serve others and not ourselves.
That doesn’t mean we have to starve ourselves and raise skinny kids but be reasonable to serve our clients well.