Do you want to start a coaching business but aren’t sure how to start it right?

Or, have you started coaching already and haven’t attracted your first paying client?

In this second part of the four part video series, we’ll cover the 4 mistakes which are most commonly made in the mid-stage of the coaching business startup process:

We’ll also discuss:

• 0:33 The Problem in The Middle Stage of Starting Your Coaching Business
• 0:48 (MID STAGE) MISTAKE #1: “I Have to go to The Best School, or Else…”
• 2:00 (MID STAGE) MISTAKE #2: Spending Too Much Time on Certification & Education
• 2:30 Getting Your Coaching Business Launched: Getting off the Ground
• 4:35 (MID STAGE) MISTAKE #3: Spending Too Much Time on Coaching Skills
• 5:19 Coaching is NOT a Business
• 6:01 Navigating The “Vehicle” of Your Coaching Business
• 6:52 (MID STAGE) MISTAKE #4: “When I Get a Certification, Then I’ll be Confident”

If you’re looking for the early stage mistakes, you can find them HERE. If you want to skip forward to any of these topics, you can click on the (above) time codes to skip to that part of the video.

Stages of Starting Your Coaching Business 

This series covers how NOT to start a coaching business, and the 16 deadly mistakes every coach must avoid. Over the 17 years I’ve been working with new coaches, I’ve found that people typically start their coaching business over the course of three stages:

1. EARLY STAGE (this is when you’re imagining, researching, and considering becoming a coach)
2. MID STAGE (this is when you’re learning coaching, getting certifications, and going through coach schooling)
3. LATE STAGE (this is when you’re starting to actually practice coaching, and working to launch your coaching business)

Each of these three stages have their own common, but deadly mistakes… 

…the kind of mistakes that can kill your chances of starting your coaching business.  

MID-STAGE MISTAKES: Learning, Getting Certified, and Coach Training

Let’s talk about the middle stage of starting a coaching business. Every new coach goes through this stage, when you’re… 

• Learning coaching
• Getting your Coach Certification
• Taking any coach training or schooling

…there’s one ‘big picture’ problem you’ll likely encounter in the mid-stage…

I call this problem “over-schooling”.

In layman’s terms, the problem is spending so much time and money on coach training, that it slows down your progress.

You’ll notice that, for the most part, these four problems are deeply associated with (or contribute to) this bigger picture problem… ‘over-schooling’ or just plain stalling.

MID-STAGE MISTAKE #1: “I Have to go to The Best School, or Else…”

0:48 The first mid-stage mistake that coaches make is to say, “I have to go to school at the best school, or I’m not going to become a coach.”

This is the all-or-nothing coach, the coach that has certain rules of how they have to become a coach, and if they can’t do it that way, then they’re just going to wait.  They’re not going to do it. 

These coaches often say things like, “I have to go to this particular school that does the best _____.”  Fill in the blank on the criteria. The criteria doesn’t really matter.

Fastest, cheapest, a certain guru.

And, if all the educational stars don’t align for them, they say “I don’t have the money right now (or the time or the circumstances), so I’m just going to wait.”

The major mistake with this mindset is expecting that where you go to school, or who you learn from, is going to open doors for you. 

The reality is, even if it does open doors for you (which is highly unlikely) you’ll still probably ruin it with a disappointing performance… because you won’t likely have enough experience coaching people in the real world to be a competent coach. 

Coaches who do this rarely succeed, because they leave too much time and too much opportunity for obstacles to show up, which then get in their way of their ever coaching. 

It can also cause a coach to cut corners or get lazy because they believe their method or coach training will do the work for them. 

This creates an opportunity for another coach who simply moves faster to get the clients.

All this perfectionism and hesitation is another way to avoid facing fears.  If you’re using it as a reason to delay coaching people today, your coaching business isn’t likely to go well.

MID-STAGE MISTAKE #2: Spending Too Much Time on Certification & Education

2:00 The second mid-stage mistake that coaches make is spending too much time on certification and education. 

Getting a certification for a specific coaching job or coaching role is fine, but you have to be honest with yourself about why you’re doing it.  Otherwise, it can easily turn into a never-ending cycle of chasing your tail.

I recently spoke with a coach that had not one certification, not two, not three, no, not four, and no, not five, but six certifications and still no clients. 

Coaches only have so much ‘runway’…

• money
• time
• family support

…before they run out, and the plane explodes. 

Getting Your Coaching Business Launched: Getting off the Ground

2:30 That’s why it’s so important to get ‘elevation’ early enough to survive.  It’s critical that you eventually start doing something to advance your actual coaching business.

SPEED

The critical areas that get your ‘plane’ of business off the ground will be, first of all, speed. 

Speed is the amount of people you speak with about the problem that you solve.  The more people you speak with about the problem you solve, the faster your business will move forward. 

RUNWAY

The foggy runway is the time, attention, focus, and energy that you have to invest into coaching before you get discouraged, run out of money, or a crisis happens in your life that you no longer have the reserves to continue through. 

You’ll never know exactly how much runway you have left until you run out of runway, so it’s important to keep a sustained sense of urgency or the plane will hit an obstacle and explode.

ELEVATION

Elevation is the amount of clients you acquire so you can get profitable as soon as possible. 

Once you’ve done that, then you have a business, and you’re past the most dangerous part; taking off.

Then you can unbuckle your seat belts, relax and think long term.  

What kind of coach falls for the mistake of spending too much time on certification and education?

I call them “the bag-of-potato-chips coach”.

With this coach, it’s always “just one more course, one more certification, one more class, one more training”. 

These are the coaches that say, “I have to know Reiki, meditation. NLP, DQA, philosophy,”…

…you name it! Anything under the sun!

They say they have to know these things so that they have all their bases covered before they start coaching. 

This results in overinvesting in certification, and then having nothing left to sustain the business.  

Let’s talk street smarts versus book smarts. 

There’s nothing wrong in taking courses, just coach while you’re doing them. 

If you’re not willing to coach while you take these courses, then you’re probably stalling your business progress to avoid failing. Another possibility is that you belief that, if you succeed, you won’t be able to sustain that success. 

What’s the bottom line? 

Life coaching classes give you insights on how to effectively analyze and change lives, but don’t expect clients to fall at your feet when you say you’ve been certified as a life coach.

MID-STAGE MISTAKE #3: Spending Too Much Time on Coaching Skills

4:35 The third deadly mid-stage mistake coaches make is spending too much time on your coaching skillset. 

Some coaches spend years and years on their coaching skillset, and it holds them back from getting their business started. 

I’ve mentored too many coaches who only wanted to talk coaching techniques and how to coach clients, but would never do anything to enroll any clients. 

The reason they do this?

They assume that being the best life coach possible is the most important part of getting their business started successfully. 

An understandable perspective, but It’s not true. 

Coaches tend towards overvaluing education and knowledge and undervaluing action and hustle. 

They think that coaching is 100% about being good at the skill of coaching…

They spend all their time and money learning how to coach their imaginary clients…

Then they run out of money and end up only coaching their pets…

…all because they never learned the business skills.

Coaching is NOT a Business

5:19 Coaching is a skill that you learn, not a business. 

The business side of coaching is selling the service of coaching. 

Coaching is not a business. It’s a skill that you use combined with all your other knowledge, experience, expertise, and skillset… to solve a specific problem.

Overtraining your coaching skill piece is an employee mindset. 

To have a successful business coaching people, you must think like a business owner. 

Being the best technician at your job can certainly help your success as someone else’s employee…

…but that’s because the employer takes care of going out and finding customers, managing the business, et cetera.

Coaching skill doesn’t help you find enough clients to be successful coaching. 

Navigating The “Vehicle” of Your Coaching Business

6:01 When you drive a vehicle from one place to another, you use both the brake pedal and the accelerator pedal. 

They each do opposite things, but are useless without the other. 

Even if they work effectively, you must use them BOTH skillfully, in order to navigate the route required to get from home to work. 

Your business of coaching is like driving a car:

• The car is your business. 
• The brake pedal is your coaching skill.
• The accelerator pedal is your marketing and sales skills. 
• The route is the free marketplace.
• The GPS is your mentor or coach. 

The bottom line is, in your own business, you don’t have to be the best coach ever in comparison to other coaches. You only have to be good enough to competently serve as a catalyst to help your client achieve the result they’re looking for.

If the client gets the result they paid for, then it’s good enough coaching for your business to succeed.

That’s why we hire coaches.  We don’t hire friends.

MID-STAGE MISTAKE #4: “When I Get a Certification, Then I’ll be Confident.”

6:52 All right, now we’re at mid-stage mistake number four; when coaches believe “If I get a certification, then I’ll be confident.”

Some coaches (without realizing it) are actually seeking approval from others to mask their insecurities. 

One form of this ‘approval seeking’?

They spend thousands of dollars on certifications, and years in training, hoping it will give them confidence… hoping a certification will convince others that they’re GOOD ENOUGH to be a coach.

The problem? A certification won’t give them confidence. 

In fact, it could easily do the opposite. The long term pursuit of a certificate could literally reinforce their lack of confidence… by causing them to put off actually succeeding as a coach. 

This ‘certification delay’ feeds the doubts that succeeding is even possible for them. 

Months (or years) go by.

Those doubts grow. Those doubts are reinforced by their peers, who will point out to them that they’re being the ‘forever student’.

Knowing ‘everything’ and doing ‘nothing’ isn’t a recipe for confidence.  

The bottom line?

Coaches that make this mistake look for permission to coach in the form of a certificate. 

Coaches that make this mistake look for permission to coach in the form of a certificate.” 

Kris Thompson

Are you potentially falling into this trap?

To whom are you giving the ‘power’…

…to to tell you that you have permission to coach? 

How do those people benefit from your handing the power over to them?  Are they a coach with a successful coaching business? Are they a good role model for you?

If you want to know the whole story about what certifications do and don’t offer you, and if you even need one, check out THIS VIDEO:

The coaching business is about moving forward when you’re NOT confident.  If you wait to be confident before you move forward, you’ll probably NEVER move forward.

That’s it… all the typical mistakes new coaches make in the mid-stage of starting their coaching business.

I hope that you took some great value out of this discussion about these ‘mid-stage’ mistakes!

So What did I miss?

Any other mistakes new coaches make?  If you disagree with any of these mistakes, let me know your point of view… 

I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure that you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions.

By the way, if you want my help with starting your own money making coaching business, Master Coach University is holding a webinar in a few days called “How to Start Your Coaching Business in 30 Days” that you can attend for FREE.  Just go to the link I give you HERE to attend:

https://quickstartcoachingcode.com/webinar

In the webinar, you’ll learn how to get your first paid clients fast and make it feel natural for you.

And don’t forget, you’ll find the FIRST PART of this series HERE.

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