By Ginny Baillie
I started writing this business column as a result of something I noticed in 2015. That summer I had been to several coaching conferences. Of the 50 or so keynotes, breakouts and workshops I could have attended, not one was concerned with the business of being a coach.
Fast-forward to autumn 2018 and the picture has improved a little. The same conferences have had panel discussions, talked about business models and covered business topics in specific sessions. Coaches have been getting into groups to work on their businesses, to support each other, to stretch so their businesses support the work they feel inspired to deliver (they’re called Braveheart groups) and they have been speaking more openly about money, contracts and raising their expectations.
These are only the coaches I know about, of course. There are plenty more who might not have access to this openness. For that reason, we need a collective crusade in coaching. Grant and Zackon, in their 2004 research* talked of the need to know far more of how coaches work, their fees, their contracting, how their practices are being built. To the best of my knowledge, no one has comprehensively done that yet.
Grant and Zackon also talked of how switching to being a true ‘profession’ requires government regulation, a deeply painful process I can’t see we would want. If we are to remain a self-regulating industry we need to take care of our own.
What does ‘care of our own’ look like? I think it is split into three broad responsibilities:
- The industry
Coaching schools and associations have to cover the business of coaching properly. At the very least, they should publish earning statistics, sector values and industry growth rates. At the very most, detail how their alumni or members have gone on to use their coaching skills.
If I were choosing a coaching school now I would pick one that turned out coaches who were successful. These bodies need to help incoming coaches make informed choices as to whether or not it is the industry for them.
- Coach mentors
Those who incorporate mentor coaching of coaches as part of their business model need to be transparent about the success of their clients. I think they should subsidise fees to new coaches to support them in getting a foothold in the industry. This would also discourage coaches from filling their practices with other coaches – unless there’s a very good reason for it do you really need a 100% coach-to-client rate?
- Us
Honesty among colleagues (and not just the close ones we can call at 3am sobbing about what a failure we are…or is that just me?). This honesty would inspire research on the subject and could reduce the shame coaches can feel when their work is not going well.
A bit more on that last point.
When my business is not going well I can slide into a bit of a black hole and start to harshly judge myself both as a coach and a human being, instead of looking to my business process and working through it.
The irony of coaching is that I know what I should be doing in those moments (I coach businesses after all), yet I can find myself curiously useless – and furiously disabled, cross, ashamed and judgemental of myself.
Why do we, and I know it’s ‘we’, judge our coaching when the business is not going well? More transparency would really help us understand this curious affliction.
We might even go so far as to publish different business tracks in, for example, our professional bodies. The only access coaches currently have to such ideas is from other coaches who share their progress to success.
Let’s say my core coaching group numbers 10 people. I can’t think of a single one who has the same business process as me and yet their business approaches have made them very successful.
We need a think tank made up of coaches who know what it is like in the marketplace. They could interview, gather experiences and publish stories. Other coaches could then read them, realise they are not alone, become inspired and get a much truer picture than their current one. The fact is, there’s lots of successes out there that can be shared and it may even flatten out some of the learning curves.
This is my last column on the real business of coaching. I’ve written what I know from my perspective and it’s time to hear from others. There are wonderful contributions being made by new voices in the business – young people are coming in far earlier than they did 20 years ago.
There’s so much to be proud of in our coaching community – we have changed the face of how people approach development in their everyday personal and professional lives. Let’s keep doing that for ourselves in our businesses as well.
* A M Grant and R Zackon, Executive, Workplace and Life Coaching: Findings from a Large-Scale Survey of ICF Members, 2004 http://bit.ly/2IXPyVW
- Ginny Baillie specialises in what happens to leaders in everyday leadership, outside courses and coaching www.ginnybaillie.com
- She also helps coaches build their businesses through a strong associate portfolio
- www.theprofitableassociate.com