Most coaching businesses fail.
If you ask a coach why their business failed they'll give you a multitude of reasons:
- I hate selling
- Poor economy
- People aren't ready
- I can't do technology
- Too much competition
The list goes on...
But when you boil it down, in most cases, it seems like it's because they didn't work within a niche.
However, I believe it's even more fundamental than that.
I believe that a coach who doesn't see the need to focus on serving one group of people (a niche) doesn't truly understand that their coaching business is actually a real business.
This isn't their fault. They've never been taught this. And, they've been led to believe by all the hype and people selling to coaches that it's easy to start a successful coaching business.
The truth is that it's not. Yes, you need to have a true love of what you do, and that will carry you through the tough times (and there WILL be tough times), but you also need something else...
And it's certainly not for a lack of intelligence or drive that a coaching business fails.
Of the hundreds of coaches I've worked with, the vast majority are highly intelligent people who've been successful in other areas of life or in previous ventures.
Yet still, many of their businesses fail.
To make a real business become successful, especially when building a one-person business, a coach needs to become an entrepreneur and understand exactly how a business works.
So how does a business work?
Actually, it's quite simple.
In the words of the legendary Peter Drucker:
"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs."
Innovation relates directly to the product or service, which for a coach is the actual coaching. For a coach, that part is simple (I hope!)
The marketing is what stumps most coaches though. Sorry, but I'm going to quote Peter Drucker again for this one... 🤓
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself."
Marketing is essential to any business and that includes a coaching business.
Now, in Peter Drucker's day it was easier to understand your customer than it is today. And certainly easier to market to them.
People weren't bombarded with as much marketing information as they are nowadays.
The Internet has changed everything. There is constant noise coming at you every time you look at your phone, surf the Internet, listen to the radio, watch the TV, etc.
Marketing is everywhere. And unless you have a budget equal to that of McDonald's or Coca-Cola, you'd better find a way to cut through all that noise.
So how do you do it?
You choose a niche, of course. And this is where I see most coaches fall down.
I believe most coaches struggle with it because they don't set out to become business owners. They set out to help people. They want to make the world a better place.
Often because they had to overcome some seemingly insurmountable problem in their own lives and having succeeded, want to help others do the same.
This is very noble, and part of the reason I love to work withe coaches, BUT... it's not enough to base a whole business on.
There needs to be a shift in mindset to become an entrepreneur and remove as much emotion as possible from how you view your business.
I'm going to polarise a few coaches here, but I have to say this...
If you're a coach and you aren't ready to choose a niche and run with it then you aren't ready to transform your coaching into a real business.
I'm sorry if that sounds harsh. But it's true.
If you aren't working in a niche everything you do to create clients is going to be way harder than it needs to be. Keep reading and I'll explain why...
When it's so hard and you expend so much energy every day to create clients the chances that you'll give it all up, (and if you're lucky, maybe just keep coaching as a hobby), increase exponentially.
That's a crying shame. The world needs coaching now more than ever. People are becoming more conscious, realising how lost they are and are looking for guidance in all areas of life:
- Health
- Careers
- Business
- Spirituality
- Relationships
And so on...
As a coach you can be that guide and help people to live better lives. But to do that you must be prepared to see your coaching as a business.
How does picking a niche make things easier?
When you work with a specific niche, you get to understand that niche deeply.
You can figure out exactly how to catch their attention and break through all the noise.
Most importantly, you get to understand the common challenges and the outcomes they're looking to achieve by overcoming those challenges.
When you choose a niche, you'll find that there's a single common problem (or set of problems) that stands out above all others.
For example, my niche is coaches & consultants (you could argue that that's 2 niches...🤓) and the common problem they face in regards to how I can help them is: they don't know how to use LinkedIn to generate leads, create clients and hence grow their businesses.
I know this because I've asked my niche what their challenges are, collated the data, analysed it and come out with this information in those exact words (maybe I'll share how to execute this process in another newsletter... 🤔).
So this is the messaging I use everywhere (check my LinkedIn profile and you'll see it!)
This is very powerful. Read this article if you want to know exactly why, but when you do this, it's like calling someone's name.
You grab the attention of their lizard brain which is the part of the brain they're using when surfing the Internet and you break through the sea of noise.
Choosing a Niche
Now for the crunch...
Choosing a niche is simple. Not necessarily easy, but definitely simple. Here's how I recommend you do it:
- Make a list of all your favourite clients.
- Make a list of all the clients you've got awesome results for.
- Check the overlap of those two lists and focus there for now.
- If there isn't any overlap just combine the lists.
- Write out as many attributes as possible for each person on your list.
- Look at their professions, age, gender, situation, seniority level, how long they have been in their current role, beliefs (if you know them) and any other attribute that stands out to you.
- Capture all the commonalities. There may only be a few but there will be some.
- Now, imagine your ideal client. Give them a made up name. Give them a job and all the attributes you can think of. Create this fictional person as if it were someone you really wanted to work with and write it all down.
- The most important step: think of your own situation before you became a coach. Write down all your attributes at that time.
- Ask yourself what inspired you to become a coach? Write it all out in detail.
- The truth is going to be somewhere in these lists of attributes. BUT, you need to completely remove any emotion before you start to analyse what you wrote.
- Analyse it every which way you can. Upload everything you wrote to a word cloud like TagCrowd to give you inspiration.
There is no right or wrong way to do this but getting everything down in written form (preferably digitally so you can easily analyse it) will start to open things up for you.
Tip: More often than than not, as a coach, your niche will turn out to be a former version of yourself. It's kind of the case for me.
I was never a life coach. I was a consultant though. And I struggled to create leads and went on a journey to learn how to do it effectively because I knew that without this I would have no business.
This brought me to LinkedIn. I knew this was the place for me and I knew it was also the place for most other coaches & consultants to find their clients.
I invested, I learned from other influencers and experts, I studied, I failed, I iterated and eventually I found success and a formula that actually works.
And now I want to share what I learnt with people it'll help so that they in turn can help more people. So I chose my niche and ran with it.
Now I have a business that works.
Avoid a "cliche" niche
When you do this exercise, don't settle on a cliche. Don't be "fluffy". The niche you choose has to be something that people view as part of their identity. Here's a few examples of what NOT to choose:
- Empaths
- Stuck professionals (most professionals are stuck! 😅)
- People who lack self confidence
- People stuck in their relationships (see point 2! 😅)
- Those who want more out of life
Those things don't work because people don't view them as a part of their identity. It's not usually the kind of thing they would write anywhere on their LinkedIn profile (unless they're a coach!) Those things don't break through the noise.
Now look at this list:
- Engineering managers
- Accountants
- Jewish women
- GBTQ+ men
- Life coaches
All these work because they are all things that people consider a part of their identity so their lizard brain would deem this information as potentially import to the conscious mind and let it through the filter whilst bypassing all the other noise.
All of these terms would most likely pass what I call "the crowded room test", and that's what you're trying to achieve here.
The crowded room test
Imagine you're in a crowded room where lots of people are chatting and there's a general low hum of noise.
If someone from across the other side of the room were to say your name, it's very likely that you would pick it out and hear it above the noise of the room and turn your head to find out if they were either calling you or talking about you.
This is your lizard brain in action (To be precise it's your reticular activating system or RAS which is a part of your lizard brain).
It acts like a filter to block out the vast majority of all the sensory information you're constantly exposed to so as not to overload your conscious brain.
It only lets stuff through the filter that it deems as potentially important to your conscious mind, your name being one of those things, of course.
The way it does this is mostly through familiarity. If it knows your conscious mind has been thinking a lot about a particular thing then it considers this thing to be important.
It's like when you decide to buy a new car after having given it lots of thought. All of a sudden you start to see that type of car everywhere. Of course there are no more of those cars before, but your RAS blocked them out as they weren't deemed as something important. Now they are important, so they get through!
So, when you settle on a niche. Try to have it pass the crowded room test.
Example from above: If an engineering manager was in a crowded room and you said "engineering manager", would he turn his head? I believe the answer would be yes, so this passes the crowded room test.
The additional benefit of choosing a niche by profession means that on LinkedIn, it's also very easy to search for your niche and connect with them to start a conversation.
Most people don't put 'empath' on there LinkedIn profiles so it's somewhat harder to find empaths on LinkedIn. In fact, I did a LinkedIn search for "empath" and 9 of the 10 results on the first page were coaches! 😂
One last word on niche
If you aren't ready to go through this process, there's nothing wrong with that.
Finding your niche is a journey. As a coach, you'll most likely need to coach a few clients first to really figure out who you do and don't want to work with.
That's absolutely fine. Just make finding your niche your ongoing quest though.
When you do find your niche, I promise it will make your business a whole lot easier.
