Fear Less, Brand More

Coaching Mistakes To Avoid

January 11, 2022 Season 1 Episode 5
Fear Less, Brand More
Coaching Mistakes To Avoid
Show Notes Transcript

How many coaches have you hired to help you in  your business?  Coaching is HUGE right now and I've hired a few coaches myself, but I've noticed some disturbing trends in coaching.

There's a major focus in marketing, growing, and scaling - which is an important part of running a business - but many business coaches are really just marketing coaches.  They don't do much when it comes to actually running your business. 

As service providers, especially when you're only working with a couple of clients at a time, marketing to more clients isn't going to help you.  If you're charging a premium rate for an outstanding service, you should be spending your time providing that amazing service to your clients rather than worrying about marketing so much. The referrals from customer experiences will do much of the marketing for you.

An ideal coach for a service provider is someone with real world experience who understands your particular service-based needs and what is going on in the current climate.

Clearbrand Interview Information https://jenniferanastasi.com/services/#clearbrand

A Subito Media production

Jennifer Anastasi:

Today's episode is all about the various coaches that I have hired. And my experience when it has come to hiring coaches for my business, I want to preface this by saying, I don't think any of the people that I hired had bad intentions. Exactly the opposite. Every single one of the people that I hired as a coach for my business, I believe had the best of intentions and really wanted what was best for me and my business. And they honestly believed that their coaching was the best thing for me. That being said, I definitely hired some of the wrong people. My goal for this episode is to help you see some of the different ways that things can go wrong. The coaching industry is unregulated and there's a lot of stuff out there and it makes things very confusing for business owners, especially new business owners. So the goal for today is to cut through all of that. Give you some examples of things to look for when you hire for yourself. And hopefully you can avoid going down the path. The very expensive path that I did. All right. Buckle in and let's go. How many coaches have you hired to help you with your business? I'm going to guess there's at least one coach in there. Coaching seems to be this huge thing going on in the online space these days. I don't know, personally of many people who have created a thriving, successful business without hiring at least one coach along the way. I am someone who has hired multiple coaches. As a service provider. I have some thoughts. I love the coaches that I hired. I have only regretted hiring one person. The rest of the coaches. I have loved, I felt at the time I was getting so much value out of their services. And even though there were things that I was getting frustrated with, I had bought into the coaching idea that it was really all on me and that I just didn't have the right mindset. That being said, looking at the coaching industry. Now I've noticed some disturbing trends. And the trend that I want to talk about today is this focus on marketing. Most of the coaches that I see out there, whether they are business coaches, messaging, coaches, marketing coaches, or sales coaches, there is always a huge part of their program, their services. Focused on marketing tactics. If you look at their sales messages, if you look at their marketing messages, if you look at what they're putting out there to bring in new clients, they're often making these claims about, if you work with me, I will teach you how to get more. I will teach you how to get better quality clients. I will teach you how to get in front of more people. I will teach you how to explode your business, scale, your business, grow your business, et cetera. Often it is about the marketing. I look at the program that I am in. Which is not necessarily marketed that way. There are some messages that are similar to that, but it is marketed differently. I was on a group coaching call and basically people almost like created a mini revolt in, in one of these calls because everybody kept saying, we really want you to give us marketing help, because I truly believe that. Service-based businesses believe that the reason why they are not being successful, if they don't feel successful is because they haven't quite figured the marketing piece out yet. That's the fun, sexy part of business is figuring out how to get more clients, how to get in front of more people, how to get more people into your system, how to get more people to hire you. And that all comes down to marketing. What I have noticed, however, is that a lot of these. Business coaches, especially who do not market themselves as marketing coaches, you hire them thinking that they're going to help your entire business. And in reality, they help you out with some marketing. And what they're not helping you out with is the actual running of the business. Once you get these clients marketing absolutely is a huge part of your business. That being said, it is not your entire business. In fact, it doesn't even need to be 50% of your business. There are very successful service-based businesses out there that spend less than 15% of their time marketing their business. And they do a very, very good job at it. That 15% is not over the lifetime of their business. Typically it means that they've kind of front-loaded things and they have systems in place that continually bring them. A successful service based business does not need to spend hundreds of hours marketing their business every month. It's just not something that needs to be done, especially if you're charging premium prices where you only need one or two clients a month in order to make your business work. If you only need one or two people a month, you should be spending less time marketing your business and more time working with your clients and improving the client experience because the client experiences everything. If somebody is paying you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for an amazing service, they should be getting an amazing service. And this is what. Bothers me about so much of the business coaching that's going out there these days is that these business coaches are teaching you how to get more clients, but they don't teach you how to serve those clients in the best way possible. And often what I see are business coaches who their target client would ideally be other coaches so that they can give them some sort of tips, some ideas for their own coaching, because it's what they think. For service providers. I am a huge fan of hiring a business coach who has worked in the industry. And preferably is still working in the industry where they are still providing services, where coaching isn't, their full-time gig, because services change. The market changes. Having that person with that real world experience means a lot. When I was in college, I was a software engineering major. I took a lot of classes at night because my school was set up to really cater to students who were going there at night. They had nine to five during the day and they would go to school to get their degree after. Traditional working hours. My college experience was a little bit different where I was taking my non-engineering classes during the day. Cause I did go to a liberal arts school. So I was getting my liberal arts education during the day that I was required to do. And then every night I would go to my engineering class. There was a distinct quality differentiation between the professors that would sometimes teach during the day and had been a college professor for a very long time. Some of them that was their entire career. Those were typically the classes that sometimes we could sneak in during the day. But the really good classes were the classes that were at night because these were the professors who worked the day job during the day and then would come and teach about it. So not only did we learn the subject matter, but we learned it in context with when you get a job, this is how it's applied. I learned so much more in those classes than I learned from people who just knew how to teach. That's not to say that every service provider can be a good coach, because there are certainly people that have no business teaching certain things. And not every professor I had at night was brilliant. There were a couple duds there. But that being said, it is very important that you hire someone who understands what your particular service-based business needs. They have to understand the services that you provide, and they have to be able to give you advice to level up those services. An example is that I used to only provide web design services. Now I do the full branding. I've learned about brand strategy, the messaging, how to position people. These are all things that I've learned and up-leveled my business. My current business coach has taught me how to take my timeline and shrink it down. That is a huge value to my clients because they get their websites way faster. It used to take me six months to put a website out. And so literally I would have a client that for six months would have. That they knew was not bringing them clients. They knew it wasn't bringing them leads and it stressed them out. And they had that stress around their neck and they had to wait six months. I've had clients that I've said to them. I'm so sorry. I'm booked out for several months. You need to wait three months and they still got their website faster than what the old Jennifer anesthesi would have taken to put it out there. This was all because I hired a business coach. Who is able to take a look at my business and say, I think we should change the model. I think we should change how you work. I think you should rearrange this, this and this. I've also learned from her how to up-level my skills, the logos that I create, the color. That I come up with, they are better now and more aligned with brand strategy because I have learned these things from a business coach who understands that I've also learned how to market my specific service-based business better. I've learned messages that work I have learned. Things that I might want to avoid because she is still somebody who is out there with a brand strategy business. And she sees these things not work. She works with similar clients that I work with. So I'm so aligned with this business coach that I get phenomenal advice from her, not only on how to bring in. Clients, but how to give those clients a better experience, which ultimately elevates my business to another level and allows me to leave a greater impact on those businesses, because I'm able to provide a much better service when you're out there. And you're evaluating these coaches because I do think that a coach can help you level up your business much faster. If you can't afford it, I always think it's a good idea to reinvest into your business. But I think as a service provider, it's extremely important not to hire a coach who mainly focuses on other coaches, but to hire somebody that's going to help you elevate your customer and client experience. So that you can elevate your entire business as a whole, by providing more value to your clients, you're able to raise your prices. You get more referrals, you get better testimonials and you're able to make a greater impact on their business. So I strongly recommend that you take the time and hire someone specific to what you do and someone who's in the field and understands what's going on in the current climate. Thanks for listening today. Next week, we're jumping into one of my favorite topics, the software and tech tools that you use to run your business. This is by far one of the most requested topics I get. So I can't wait to dive in with you until next time.