Choice Insights

Coaching is a growing industry, so why do four out of five coaching businesses fail within the first two years?

This is a significant problem, not only for individual coaches, but for the clients we serve because coaches can make an enormous difference to the quality of people's lives.

In this article, you will gain insight on the difference between a coaching practice and a thriving coaching business.

Coaching Practice vs Coaching Business

When coaches seek coach training and certification, the organizations that provide this training service rightfully focus on training coaches to develop skills in the practice of coaching to be effective in delivering professional coaching services. Generally speaking, there is less attention given to how to build a successful coaching business which allows coaches to make their living from their coaching practice.

A successful coaching business involves two major functions: attracting clients and serving clients.

• Serving Clients - The coach...

Who are the thought leaders and what do they do? What are the steps to setting up a thought leader business? If you are an author, speaker, coach, consultant, or trainer, or if you are thinking about building a business using your expertise and experience to help others, then this will get you started.

Who are the thought leaders?

People who influence others through their expertise and experience.

• Authors
• Speakers
• Trainers
• Coaches
• Consultants
• Mentors

What do thought leaders do?

Thought leaders create and deliver content that educates, inspires, and supports a community to overcome challenges and achieve aspirational goals.

What does a business do?

• Attract Customers
• Serve Customers

Core Business Functions for any Business

• Marketing (attract prospective customers, or leads) (CMO)
• Sales (enroll leads to become customers)
• Operations and Customer Support (deliver value to customers) (COO)

Support Business Functions for any Business

• Strategic Planning (CEO)
• Financial Systems (CFO)
...

Since there are so many online assets to create, it is easy enough to get stuck in the analysis paralysis of what do I do first? Where to start?

When you’re starting up, it is natural to want to minimize expenses, so free sounds good. It’s also natural to want to focus time on meeting people online on social media, build a website, and move forward through the customer journey with them, eventually getting to your sales offers.

Unfortunately, this natural and intuitive approach has the drawback of requiring lots of time and effort, but not producing any sales revenues, so even though it’s free, it’s easy to get discouraged.

Step 4. Sprint to Success

The counter-intuitive approach to building your online assets is to start from the end and work backwards through the customer journey.

Start with having a service to sell. It could be your coaching program or a live event workshop, whether virtual or in-person.

Create the payment page first. This supports you...

Creating online assets is step 3 of the Online Business Success System.

Now that you have designed the customer journey  in Step 1, and selected the systems to support the customer journey in Step 2, you can start creating and building the online assets needed to support your customer journey as Step 3.

What are online assets? They include all the content you produce (written, images, audios, and videos), the various types of web pages, forms, and emails that you create to interact with your audience in online and offline conversations, customer databases, and online products.

Specifically, your online assets will typically include the following:

1. Social media pages
2. Website (home, about, contact, resources)
3. Blog, Vlog, Podcast
4. Marketing pages and emails (funnels, webinars, launches, affiliate support)
5. Online appointment calendars
6. Sales pages
7. Payment pages
8. Online products (membership sites requiring customer login)
9. Live events and workshops (either in-person or virtual)

...

One of the most challenging problems we face as thought leaders in getting our online systems up and working is the overwhelming variety of choices we face when it comes to selecting your systems.

Once you have defined a clear business strategy for your customer journey, then you are ready to start implementing the online and offline systems that you need to support the customer journey.

In a previous article, I drew your attention to the fact that your online business platform is a custom software system. In building any software system, the first step is to understand the functional business requirements. There are four major business functions that are needed to support thought leader online business platforms. These guide your audience through the customer journey you have designed for them.

The four major business functions are:

1. Public Content
2. Online Marketing
3. Online & Offline Sales
4. Private Content

Typically, you publish free public content to meet your audience...

The foundation of building any software system, i.e., your online platform is to first understand what the business needs. For thought leaders seeking to help others with their knowledge and expertise, the primary requirement here is to understand who your audience is, what their problems are, and how you can help them solve their problems.

Next you need to think about the best ways that you can engage your audience online. Your challenge is to get their attention, and then interactively engage them in a series of both online and offline conversations about their problems and how you may be able to help them. This series of conversations is called a “customer journey.”

The customer journey is a process where you meet and get to know people over time through a series of online and offline conversations. They need to get to know, like, and trust you before they will buy from you. Similarly, you need to get to know, like and trust them as well, so that you know how you can...

That is the big aha that I had a couple of years ago.

I built custom software systems for ExxonMobil and NASA to support collaborative engineering communities in my 30+ year traditional corporate career as a software development manager. In my current career as an entrepreneur, I have recognized that I work with other thought leader entrepreneur business owners to build their custom software systems – otherwise known as their online business platforms!

The difference is that today we generally don’t need to write code to build these systems, and we don’t need skilled programmers to build our online business platforms, but it can still seem overwhelmingly complex at times to put together your online platform. And if you are struggling with this, you are not alone.

The reason many of us have struggled with how to build an online business successfully is that we have been trying to do one tactical thing or another based on what we learned at our latest seminar. But,...

When I got home from Expert’s Academy I was faced with the question, now what is the next step to get started implementing what I learned? And, how can I apply what I learned to promoting my book?

I thought to myself, “I got this. I’m a technology guy. I can figure this out."

I conveniently forgot that I wasn’t yet a “marketing and sales” guy, so I focused first on the technology to support an online business with online marketing and sales.

All the thought leaders I was listening to at the time were saying “start with WordPress” to build your website and go from there. The advantage of WordPress is that it is relatively inexpensive, but it is hard to learn how to use. And there was no guidance on what content to put on your website.

Some people will say "Websites are dead. You don't need a website to sell stuff online. You just need marketing and sales funnels." I fell for that too. Neither were right. You actually need both.

I...

That was the question that triggered my entry into what I now call Internet Marketing Grad School. 

In my last article, I concluded that “if you’re going to make a career out of your book, chances are you’re going to need some higher priced products or services to sell, like online courses, or coaching programs."

My first year experiences in Internet Marketing Grad School included reading Brendon Burchard’s #1 New York Times Best Selling Book: The Millionaire Messenger, watching his Expert’s Academy course on DVDs (now available online), and attending his four-day live event, Expert’s Academy.

Brendon, who self-identifies as an author and a trainer in personal development and online marketing, taught me in Expert’s Academy about an emerging “expert industry” as a new career possibility for anyone who has knowledge and expertise in a subject area and is interested in teaching it to others. You can create a business by selling...

That was the question that a friend and a spiritual coach asked me about my first book while it was in first-draft stage and we were first talking about it and I was telling her what it was about.

I had already done enough research at that point to know that the average book author only sells about 200-300 copies, and these mainly go to family, friends, and acquaintances.

My answer at the time: I don’t know. 100,000 copies? It was the first number that came to mind that was well above the industry average. I had not really thought about it.

Her next question: Are you willing to do what it takes to sell 100,000 copies? I answered yes, even though I had no idea what that actually meant.

I didn’t know at the time, that traditional publishers do help some in the promotion, but it’s mostly the author’s job to do promote the book sales not only in short-term book launches, but over time.

Let’s do some basic book sales economics, even for self-publishing,...