If you don’t know my story, I’ve worked for about 6 ½ years from
one of the world’s leading coaching companies. Within that company I’ve learned
a lot of skills and information. Eventually I reached a point where I
wanted to try it on my own, so I left the company back in 2008. When I
made that transition, like most coaches starting out, I found it was a little
bit tricky trying to get my first few clients.
After 6 ½ years of working in the best coaching companies, I
had 250 hours of training and took hundreds of calls. I had a mentor who was
constantly listening in on my calls and helping me do better.
There were times when I was amazing, but there were also times
were I kind of slumped. With all that practice, I decided to open my own coaching
practice. I think there’s way too many people today who decides to call
themselves a coach and they are 22 years old, just out of school and like
“I’m a coach, let’s do this!”
I want to give you 2 important distinctions that a good friend
of mine, Topher Morrison, gave me. He works for Key Person of Influence here at
Tampa, FL and runs a growth accelerator for businesses and has partnerships all
over the world. He came in to our Performance Coach University training program
where we were teaching our trained coaches how to market and grow their
business. While he was there, he taught us 2 really important points and what I
realized was that these were the things that I had done back then to grow my
business from 2 to 3 clients a month and rolling to 20 clients in a day,
all the way to 52 1-on-1 coaching clients a month (way too many clients!).
Finding the NICHE
3 ways you can market:
WIDE to NARROW: Market to a wide
audience with a very specific topic – help anyone with a specific thing –losing
belly fat for example.
NARROW to WIDE: Help one type of
person to do array of things.
NARROW to NARROW (BEST
OPTION!):
Help one specific group to do this one thing and be the best in the world at
it. In the beginning it can be very scary. The truth is the better and
more refined you get in the process, the quicker you will get more clients.
The next major lesson I learned early on in my business was
about partnerships. Luckily I found a partner early on who helped me grow my
business tremendously. However, at the time I didn't know these 3 criteria that
especially make partnerships successful, which could have saved me a lot of
time, money and energy with other not so great partners down the road.
3 Criteria For A Great Business
Partnership
There are three components to a great partnership: product,
great brand and great distribution.
Product: a product must
be scalable and creates raving fans – they love it!
Brand: brand reputation
must be rock solid. People trust it, refer others, and keep coming back.
Distribution: Reach and platform
are key to connecting with prospective customers with your product/service.
The key is that one of you have at least 2 out of the 3
and the other has at least 1 (or 2) to compliment each other, so that when
combined you have all 3 components to a great partnership.
My first business partner had great distribution (she was
holding events for women starting their own businesses), she also had a great
brand (people trusted her). When we partnered, I had an excellent product they
needed (coaching focused on mindset, achieving goals, accountability). I also
