118: How Coaches Devalue Themselves Which Keeps Them From Earning Well

This episode is a story about a coach whose business has yet to pay off 5 years in.If you’re in a similar situation where your coaching business hasn’t paid off after years of significant investment I hope this will be an AHA for you.Show notes for this episode are at prosperouscoach.com/118A few weeks ago, a past client of mine re-emerged. She was clearly frustrated about the lack of income from her coaching business. Feeling defeated but also at an important crossroads in her life she was considering whether she should shutter the business we created for her a year ago or pivot somehow. I invited her to have a call with me.And by the way, this generous coach gave me permission to share some of our conversation with you. For her privacy, let’s call her Sherrie.Sherrie was acutely aware of the large investments she had made over 5 years to learn how to coach, to create websites, to purchase mentoring to build her business and more.It’s not unusual for a coach (and by the way other entrepreneurs too) to invest large amounts of money and time to get their business off the ground. I myself spent over $75000 before my business reliably paid off. I have recouped those investments several hundred times over now. But it took me a while.Looking back, I can easily say that much of my own financial investment was frivolously rather than strategically spent. I purchased many bright shiny objects in the form of training, applications, VAs and experts. I was thinking … “Maybe THIS will be the thing that makes me successful!”However, what was really missing for me was about mindset — I was treating my business like a hobby rather than treating my business as a business. I was going through the motions week after week but not crossing the important thresholds.I was acting like a perpetual student. Episode 82 is all about this. Check it out if you haven’t heard it already.The truth is if you want to earn as a coach you have to take the risk to get serious about your business.Back to Sherrie …   For our call, I instinctively knew that my role wouldn’t so much be as a business mentor for Sherrie, which is my usual role with my clients. I felt that pure coaching was called for.While I always use coaching skills in the work I do with my clients, most of my sessions with clients are more consultative, guiding them to strategic choices and actions based on my expertise about successful coaching niches and coaching businesses.A couple of months after Sherrie launched her new business targeting a unique and viable audience the pandemic hit. And many in her audience were caught in the front lines as essential workers.Being a person with a caring heart, Sherrie swung into action to help … offering her time for free.She said that over the last year she didn’t have any opportunities for enrollment and she felt she couldn’t charge for two reasons:1.     Her audience was beleaguered (that was Sherrie’s word) with the events of the pandemic. 2.     There were many free services for this audience being offered by non-profits.Click here for more Show Notes and the big AHA of the coaching session.