What Is The Coaching Revolution?

Transcription

1 What Is The Coaching Revolution? In a nutshell, The Coaching Revolution is the antidote to what's currently out there for coaches. Online and in the real world too, there are a number of organisations and individuals who are offering coaches an awful lot. There are organisations who say - Why don't you use our proven marketing system to develop your coaching business, and we will help you get clients to whom you can deliver our materials. There are a significant number of them. They're mainly overseas organisations, and their proven marketing systems have been proven in other markets, and actually, when you translate them to the UK, they don't work. The other kind of expert, are the online gurus and I call them the just one thing merchants. We believe that they prey on coaches who are feeling passionate about wanting to become coaches and wanting to succeed. They prey on coaches who have their coaching qualification, the coach wants to become successful and these online coaching gurus say- if you do this one thing, you can have a sixfigure income in a matter of days. You can attract high-paying clients. You can do " (fill in the blank) - and they promise the Earth. Sadly, it doesn't work. There isn't just one thing that coaches need to do. There are lots of things. The Coaching Revolution has been started to help coaches, initially in the UK (but we're now moving into other markets internationally) to help coaches understand what they have to do in their own market. Let me explain that a little more. In the UK, The Coaching Revolutionaries are successful coaches who operate within the UK market. Within the other markets that we operate in, there are also successful coaches working within those markets, who support coaches. And that's the revolution, really. We're not making 1

2 it up. We're not telling you, - If you use this just one thing. We're actually the real deal. We're out there doing it, and we can help coaches do it too. Who Are You And Why Did You Create The Coaching Revolution? Hank, Paul, Stephen, and Sarah are coaches. That's what we do. We're coaches, and we between us have decades of experience of running our own coaching and training businesses. We offer one-to-one life coaching, executive coaching. We offer business coaching; we offer group coaching; we deliver training workshops; one-day workshops; two-day workshops; 12-month programmes etc. We all work as coaches. What that means is that we all have the experience of setting up coaching businesses from scratch. When we sat down to compare notes, we all made very similar mistakes when we set off on our coaching journeys. We spend a lot of our time talking to coaches and so many of coaches replicate the same mistakes. We hear stories of the same pitfalls, the same problems that we came across, coaches are still coming across now. Hank, Paul, Stephen, and Sarah have cracked the code. We have all developed successful coaching businesses. What we've done is pooled experience to create a system that is followable, it's a process which will result in coaches getting coaching clients who are going to pay them. The reason we set up The Coaching Revolution is because there are so many charlatans out there who will take your money from you to sell you their proven marketing system, or to sell you their programme, because if you do the one thing that they did, you'll be successful. And honestly, it's not true. 2

3 The thing that makes a coaching business successful is having a clear plan, understanding the process, and being consistent. The Coaching Revolution is there to help coaches do that in as short a possible time as possible. Why Is There A Need For Something Like The Coaching Revolution? The percentage of coaching businesses that fail is astounding. Global statistics say that 82% of coaching businesses fail within the first two years. But, we happen to know in the UK, anecdotally and through experience that 95%+ of coaching businesses in the UK fail in the first two years. That's absolutely astonishing. That's a shockingly bad statistic. If we flip that on its head, what that's saying is that globally only 18% of coaches who set off with all the passion, fire, enthusiasm, and commitment that we all feel as coaches, actually come out the other end with a viable business. In the UK, it s just 5%. Put it another way. Globally, only 1 in 10 coaches succeed, in the UK, it s 1 in 20! To The Coaching Revolution, those statistics are unacceptable. Why Do Your Coaches Succeed When Others Fail? The reason that our coaches succeed is because there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to crafting a coaching business. Organisations that are out there are cookie-cutter organisations. They say, for example - here's our marketing presentation or, here is our material. Go out and shoehorn yourself into it and it will work. 3

4 However, it doesn't. The problem with that kind of cookie-cutter idea is that not only does it feel very inauthentic when you're delivering it. Even if you add your bits of material to this type of thing, if the core of it isn't yours, it feels inauthentic. Now, add into that the fact that a cookie-cutter marketing presentation is being delivered by a lot of other people. What we do is we help our coaches craft their own personal marketing presentation. What that involves is working alongside the coach, we help them to craft their own marketing material. We help them to incorporate themselves, their personality and their story, into their own material. We help them create a marketing presentation that when it's delivered, it is absolutely delivered from the heart, because it's personal. When anybody delivers something that's personal, it makes a huge difference to not only how it's delivered, but also to how it's received. The best thing about the marketing presentations that our coaches create is that there is nobody else out there delivering it. It is unique. Once the coach has that marketing material, we then help them to identify where it is they need to be to deliver it to people who will want to engage with them, and more relevantly will want to pay to engage with them. I m Already A Qualified Coach, Why Do I Need Something Like This? Some coaches say to us but I already have my coaching qualification. Why do I need The Coaching Revolution? The Coaching Revolution has been set up specifically to help coaches with a coaching qualification. That's our core business. 4

5 When we as individuals discover coaching, we find that we become ignited with a passion for this thing that we realise is transformational. Coaching changes everything, and our understanding of it becomes like a burning desire. From there, we find out more and more about coaching. We might read some books or watch some videos, and invariably, we end up taking a coaching qualification. Coaching qualifications are expensive. We absolutely appreciate that they are an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. On our coach training courses what we learn about is coaching, the skills that we need to coach. Those are incredibly important skills, and they are the core of what all of us do. We become skilled coaches. What coach training organisations don't deliver is training on how to build a business. Let s look at that in detail. If you imagine a weighing scale, on one side, we have all of the skills and knowledge needed to coach, and on the other side business development skills. Coaching courses rarely, if ever give more than a cursory nod towards business development skills. Coaching and the business of coaching are two different things, and The Coaching Revolution is the bridge between the two; the way of balancing the scales. What happens to the majority of coaches - from both our personal experiences and from the literally hundreds of coaches that we've spoken to is this: We take our coaching qualification. When we get to the end of it, if we're lucky, we get a little bit of marketing advice and what it usually says is - what you need to do to build your coaching business is get out there and deliver an earthshattering first session, and make it so good that the person on the receiving end 5

6 of that coaching session is absolutely inspired and wants to pay you to achieve the goals that they ve talked about. The reality is it doesn't work like that. You may pick up the occasional client like that, but you can't build a financially sustainable business from delivering earthshattering first sessions. What usually happens next with the coach following this process is that they find that people don't want to take you up on your offer of becoming their coach. The coach then thinks - Okay, this isn't working. What am I doing wrong? They're not doing anything wrong. They're doing exactly what they were led to believe was the answer to the problem of creating a coaching business. Next, they think - I know. What I'm going to do is I'm going to coach somebody for free, and so they find somebody who's very motivated by their first session, and they say - I'll tell you what. Let's make this into a mutually beneficial arrangement. I will coach you to reach these goals for free, and in return, you can give me a testimonial. (After all, word of mouth marketing is the best marketing of all, isn't it?) They then set off on this coaching journey with a non-fee-paying client. What actually happens is that it gets hard for the client; It always does get hard for them because change is difficult. At this point is that the client loses interest. They suddenly find that their other aspects of their life have crowded in, and they don't have time to continue with this coaching. The coach is left thinking - what happened there? That isn't what I thought was going to happen. It really isn't a win-win situation. It actually becomes a lose-lose situation, and if by any chance that client does refer someone to you, they tend to refer people who want free coaching, and you can't build a business by coaching for free. We re left with a coach who's delivered some earth-shattering first sessions and then tried to coach somebody for free and found it's just left a really bad taste in their mouths. 6

7 The next place this coach goes is upskilling. The thought process behind this is that - well, if I go and do X, Y, and Z courses I will have much more to offer my potential clients. At face value, this seems really reasonable and the coach stuffs their quiver with arrows that are qualifications, and skills, and abilities, and programmes that they can deliver, until in the end, that quiver is bursting with experience, and is worth an absolutely fortune in terms of what they've spent on courses. However, what the coach has not recognised is that on the other side of the scale, this entire skillset is missing and until they do something about this gap, they won t be able to build a business that enables them to deliver the programmes they want to. We regularly talk to coaches who tell us that they are done spending money. That now, having invested so much in their knowledge and personal development, they want to earn money. However, without business development skills, you simply can't earn money, and these business development skills are what The Coaching Revolution is all about. We re about building up the gap in coaches knowledge the business development skills gap as it s critical and needs the same attention, in terms of investment of time and money, otherwise the scales are not balanced. How Does It All Work, What s The Process? Historically, the way we have taught and been taught, is that the person with the knowledge stands at the front, and the people who want the knowledge sit in front of them. The person at the front, the teacher will impart the knowledge in their heads by talking, and the people sitting in front of them learn by rote. 7

8 As a way of passing exams, it's been reasonably successful. As a way of learning business development skills, it has limited success, because what you need to learn about business development skills kind of isn't only the actual detail of the skill. It's not just the process - it's how to apply the process. Again, if we look back in history, running alongside this sort of Roman way of chalk and talk learning, has been another fundamentally different way of learning; immersion. This immersive method sees individuals being mentored by somebody who not only has the knowledge, but also has the experience and breadth of skill to enable them to hold the mentee by the hand and say - this is what you need to know, and now let me help you apply it, and as you're applying it, let's keep talking to each other, because there are going to be pitfalls, and you're going to fall into them, but I can help you negotiate them in a much shorter time than you would on your own, because I have already fallen into those pitfalls. I have already experienced the road that you are now walking. I'm just further down it than you are. That s the revolution. That's The Coaching Revolution. We are experienced coaches who hold the hands of coaches who want to achieve success. What Do You Offer? The different things that are available from The Coaching Revolution are as follows: The core offering is our mentoring package. Package One - Mentoring Mentoring on its own is available for the coach I mentioned earlier, with a quiver full of skills, and materials that they are able to deliver. The mentoring on its own is a ten-session package, but it's actually 11 sessions, because we have what I 8

9 refer to as the ground zero session. The purpose of the ground zero session is to establish the baseline, what it is that you want to achieve, of course always essential, where you've been, what you've done, what you've tried so far, how it's all panned out. Also, in that first session, we go through your Myers-Briggs personality profile. We don t use the Myers-Briggs personality profile to pigeon-hole people. We use it as a way of shortening the journey to getting to know you. We go through it with you to ascertain where your strengths and challenges lie. Then, over the first few mentoring sessions, we help you craft your own marketing presentation, and it's going to be all about you. It's going to be about the things that you are passionate about. It's going to definitely be aimed at encouraging people to engage with you further. Next, we re going to help you to identify who is most likely to work with you and we're then going to make absolutely sure that you understand who the decisionmakers in that group of people are, where they are, how to get in front of them, and then we are going to support you through the journey of getting in front of them. By the time you get towards the end of the 10 sessions, we're going to be analysing conversations that you've had to enable you to improve your success at signing clients. After the 10 sessions, we're into accountability to keep you moving forwards. Throughout all of this, we have an online group, a community, where you can interact with other coaches, and if you get stuck, you can ask a question. 9

10 Package Two Mentoring and Elements One of the things that we know from looking at the material that is available out there, out there in the world, is that it's really prescriptive. The other thing that we've noticed is that at no point does this coaching material recognise the fact that trained and qualified coaches are professional people. We don't need to be prescribed to. We are perfectly capable of understanding the challenges and the triumphs etc that the client in front of us is facing. If for example we realize that the client in front of us is having an emotional management issue around a particular scenario, a particular relationship, then wouldn't it be lovely to be able to say - have a tool for that, rather than saying - I recognise that you have an issue managing your emotions around that situation, and we're going to wait until session six or session eight to be able to deal with that for you. What we want, as professional people, is to have a toolbox of things that we can lay our hands on really easily, and so what we've done is created Elements. Now, as its name suggests, Elements are big sections of coaching/personal development topics, broken down into really small, bite-size tools, exercises, suggestions that you can use to deal with things on the spot. The beauty of Elements is that you can combine them to create a one-day workshop, or to create a six-month program, or to create, really, whatever it is that you want to create, because they cover a huge range of personal development areas, and they fit together very well. We wouldn't expect you to be able to fit them together on your own to start with. They are there for you to learn and understand with our support, and we will obviously initially help you to put together these workshops, but as you become more familiar with the materials, you'll be able to do that yourself. 10

11 Package Three Start Up/Level Up and Mentoring We have two business development programmes, both of which are 90 days long. One is Start-Up and the other is Level-Up. These are for coaches to deliver to local businesses as a way of earning an income and of finding clients who may want to work with them for a longer period of time. Start-Up is, as its name suggests, aimed at businesses that are just starting up, and it looks at all of the things that business owners need to be working on, as well as the thing that they're doing, because just like coaches, who are absolutely passionate about coaching, business people tend to be passionate about the thing that their business is, and just like coaches don't have these business development skills over here, often, business owners don't too. The Start-Up program is designed to help business owners get the maximum they possibly can out of a 90-day period, in terms of business growth. Level-Up is for the business owner who has a business that s up and running. Their question is this: How do I grow this from here? Level-Up is designed to get them focused on the things that are important at that stage in a business, and to move them, again over a 90-day period, to get them moving and growing just as quickly as possible. Will I Really Get Paying Clients? In short, yes. However, there are caveats around that. We don't get the clients for you, but what we do is we provide you with the tools, and the knowledge, and an understanding of the process, to go and get those clients yourself, as well as the support throughout to do that. 11

12 As coaches, we know it's all about the action. When we're working with our clients, we know that it doesn't matter what the client says. It's what the client does that will make the difference to where they end up. And it's the same with this. If you commit to taking the actions that you agree with your mentor at the end of each session, then yes, you will get clients. What we've discovered so far is that somewhere between sessions three and five is where the people that we've been mentoring so far have started to pick up clients. If you are prepared to do the thing that may be uncomfortable, as change often is, you will get to the destination that you want. So yes, you'll get paying clients, but you're going to have to put in the work yourself. What Next? If you're thinking - this is for me. It s exactly what I'm looking for! then probably we're looking for you too. If you're thinking - hmmmm, not sure - then this isn't for you. What we're looking for are coaches who have reached the point where they've said enough! I really want this. I really want to be one of the, nationally within the UK 5%, globally 18%, who actually make this work. I don't want to be the 82%. I want to succeed. In order to succeed, what we need from you is your commitment; your commitment to putting in the work. Revolutions don't happen by sitting at home with your feet up thinking about it. Revolutions are all about the action, and so if you're thinking - yes, this is it - then guess what? You're ready for your own Coaching Revolution. 12