All professional coaches want to have a successful and prosperous practice. Don’t they? Some of us have this and some of us don’t…yet.
The challenges we face here is are old and longstanding ones. Here are the three that I hear most about (and which incidentally I have been through myself )
Being good at Marketing and Sales. Marketing and sales knowledge, skills and application are not necessarily the strong point of coaches. Independent coaches in private practice need to get competent in these areas if they are to prosper. Incidentally, often coaches who are less interesting and good at coaching are more successful with their practices due to being good at marketing.
Getting balance right. Balance is tricky. In any business we need to have our attention on:
Finding and enrolling new clients
Delivering our services well
Administering the practical side to our business. Invoicing, accounts etc
Spending time ensuring we are up to speed with our profession and integrating marketing trends into our planning.
Developing new products and services
3. Having your business work for you so that it fulfills your primary motivation for being a coach as opposed to you working for your business, burning out and losing touch with why you are doing this in the first place.
Most coaches are driven by the desire to make a positive and beneficial impact on the lives of others. This can get lost in the mix over time.
Many aspects of the above can be outsourced, if you you have the funds to hire freelancers. But you need to know first of all how it all works and how it all fits together.
Recognize any of this? We would love to hear from you about you have solved some of these challenges for yourself.
Over the next weeks and months we will be going through these three main challenges, picking them apart and looking at how we can improve our experience of being in private practice.