Growing a coaching business.
My wife and I were on the flight home from a trip to New Mexico when I decided that I would officially pursue a career as coach. It had been suggested to me more than once and I had acted as a lay coach or mentor to a handful of young professionals over the past 10-15 years. This tends to happen when you have started/run multiple businesses.
I started this journey by filming a short video and emailing it out to 60 people in my network that I know well and could trust. I told them what I was doing and asked them to connect me with anyone they might know that could potentially use some coaching. I only wanted 3 introductions so I could begin to prototype and test some ideas I had around a coaching approach. Most of these ideas came from years of being coached, having outstanding mentors, and then a strange melange of my time in recovery, years of mindfulness practices, and my habits around journaling and movement.
I got 1 client from that email. He was a friend that I’d known for years and he would be a strong indicator for the type of clients I’d continue to meet and work with. He was a high achiever, successful in many regards, self-aware, and had a quiver of good habits. This was polishing the stone more than chiseling something from nothing.
At the same time, my desire to learn more and more about how to be helpful to my clients became insatiable. I took classes on Buddhist Psychology, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Peer Recovery Certification courses, and eventually enrolled in a proper coaching school to seek certification. This was not my initial intention as there is no governing body around coaching. But I wanted to learn the science behind how people change and make decisions. I wanted to learn about different ways of coaching other than what I’d done in the past. I figured I’d sign up for one class just to get a feel for it but I loved being in school so much I continued with classes throughout the year and will finish my certification next month.
I’ll go ahead and chime in about being a certified coach here as well. Not everyone does it and I’ve worked with a few coaches in the past who were not certified. That’s OK. But I decided to seek certification for 2 reasons. 1) The coaching industry is run amok with people who have no business giving other people advice. Be careful out there! 2) If you’re a certified coach, chances are you are committed to a code of ethics like confidentiality, conflict of interest, etc. If I look around online, I can see more people that are just committed to making money in the field of coaching. Chances are that if you’re certified, you legit give a fuck about helping people.
My marketing strategy was both singular and uneducated. I’ve never tried to market online like I have this year. It was also easier than my marketing attempts at Stoked because I only needed to represent me and not a whole time of wildly diverse personalities and outlooks.
I started by creating 1 video a week that I’d post on LinkedIn and hope to Jesus that it went viral and people started calling me for more info.
Nothing. Then I started posting that same video to Instagram which I’d been on vacation from for 6 years.
Nothing. Then I started posting 3 videos a week on M-W-F.
I started to see some engagement here. I’m assuming the algorithms I hear so much started to take notice and so I was getting likes and occasionally some comments. But after a few months, even that started to plateau.
So I started posting 5 days a week. 3 videos and 2 written pieces both to Instagram and LinkedIn.
Again, there was a slight uptick in likes and engagements over the week but nothing went anywhere near viral. I could see that “watch times” were high, but not a ton of feedback which I know is the norm.
On LinkedIn I grew my list of Followers (not connections) from 1,424 to 1,709. I thought that was incredibly slow growth, but I’ve since found out that adding 5+ users a week isn’t slow. It’s normal healthy growth. We’re all just so used to seeing hyperbolic growth from extreme examples. But as one of my favorite LinkedIn storytelling guys says, we want readers, not followers.
On Instagram, there was a different story playing out. I was gaining followers there as well but they were mostly bot accounts. And the engagement I get there is mostly from friends and family and are mostly just being encouraging. Which is nice. But it doesn’t lead to sales calls.
Most recently, I’ve taken to launching a monthly newsletter as well as writing long-form pieces like this on Medium and posting to Twitter.
That means I’m sending content out into the universe via email, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. I also have a website that requires a shit ton of attention and dialing in because it’s homegrown and I have almost no idea what I’m doing.
So what have I learned from all of this?
