Get More Coaching Clients Series
READ TIME: 4 MIN 39 SEC
If you’re like most coaches I meet, you want to get the ‘business’ stuff dialed in so you can focus on coaching and getting results.
Among that ‘business’ stuff are likely financial goals and goals about the impact you will have.
Why do you want those results in your business?
Because you believe they will allow you to be a better version of yourself. To do the work you love in a way that feels good. To have the things you want in this life.
So you’re looking for the ‘right’ way to build a successful business as fast as possible.
And in the process, you miss the whole point.
Entrepreneurship is a journey. If you let it, it can be one of the most impactful personal growth experiences of your life.
Embrace failure with an experimental mindset.
Like in life, there are no ‘right’ choices in business. There are actions. There are results. There is learning from your experiences.
The mindset shift you need to make is embracing failure and making it a part of your process to find success.
Building a business requires an experimental approach:
Desire -> Hypothesis -> Action = Result -> Reflection -> New Hypothesis OR New Desire
- It starts with a desire. Something that you believe you want to achieve.
For example, let’s say what you want in your business is to sign 3 new life coaching clients on a package.
- Then, you create a hypothesis or best guess about how you are going to achieve that desire.
For example, you might guess that posting your offer on social media will get you those new clients.
- Next, you take action on that hypothesis.
For example, you write a post with a personal story and a link to your offer on your own profile as well as in a few groups.
- The action ALWAYS leads to a result.
For example, you didn’t make any sales or receive any inquiries about your offer. The lack of response from your audience was the result.
- Spend time reflecting on the result of your action.
For example, you might ask yourself what it was about your action that lead to the result of no inquiries. What new information did you collect?
Was the messaging clear? Did you get any interest at all? Did anyone tell you why they chose not to sign up?
Was it the offer itself that wasn’t appealing, or was the wrong audience, place, or time to try to sell?
- From your reflection, you use the new information to create a new hypothesis to take action on.
For example, imagine that you received comments on some of your posts. From those comments, you see that what you offered is not what your potential clients wanted.
You might form a new hypothesis that you need to change something about your offer or your messaging. Your guess is that when you make this change and try again, you will see the result you expected – 3 new clients.
Sometimes, the result shows you that you no longer want to achieve the original desire. You use the new information to create a new desire.
For example, let’s say that your posts did lead to 3 new clients. After working with those clients, you might decide that you don’t want to offer 1:1 packages anymore.
Instead, you set a new desired result to create a group coaching offer.
This approach continues in a loop, with step 6 bringing you back to steps 1 or 2 over and over.
The process of making decisions and plans in your business is never certain and it’s never done.
If you aren’t able to embrace failure, you won’t be able to take the actions needed to gain new information.
Instead, you’ll either be stuck in indecision or you’ll decide that the desire isn’t possible.
You might even let the failure tell you that you’re not cut out for business. This is an extreme response to the result of your best guess based on the information you had at the time.
Instead, now that you have new information, you can make a new hypothesis and try again.
Fail small and fail fast.
Let’s say that you decided instead to plan a new offer that you were going to sell to a new audience.
You spend months developing the curriculum for your coaching package. You get the brand and messaging just right.
Then, you spend tens of thousands of dollars on executing a marketing campaign.
At this point, you’ve invested a considerable amount of time and money. Your desired result – a six-figure launch – is necessary for you to recoup your investment.
The stakes are high. The room to ‘embrace failure’ is small.
This is why failing fast is so important. The faster you can fail, the faster you can confirm your hypotheses.
Small failures help to take away the risk of big failures.
Instead of taking a huge gamble, what is the smallest imperfect action you could take right now?
For example, you might decide to offer a one-hour session on the topic of your offer instead. There is little prep time to invest in creating the offer.
You reach out to a few of your potential clients to see if they will buy it. No sales page is needed. This is a simple invitation by email or direct messenger.
This way, you can validate that the topic is something that they want before you build out a full offer.
If they do buy, you’ll know that you’re on the right track with the problem you’re solving.
If they don’t, you’ll save yourself months of work and thousands of dollars. Then, you can ask follow-up questions to gather more information before you try again.
Action time:
Use the experimental approach from above to quickly take action on a goal in your business:
- What is the desire?
- What is your hypothesis or best guess for how you can achieve that desire?
- What small and imperfect action can you take in a low-risk way to test out your hypothesis?
- What is the result of that action?
- What new information do you have from the result of your action?
- How can you use that new information to refine your hypothesis or refine your desire?
Stop rushing to the finish line. Embrace the journey for who it will allow you to become in the process.
Allowing failures to be a normal part of your business is the key to achieving business success. Whether you achieve your goal or not, the new data will help you grow as a coach, as an entrepreneur, and as an individual.
The experimental approach above will help you at all stages of your business.
In the previous post, we explored the myth that your clients want life coaching (hint – they don’t).
In the next post, we will be applying the experimental mindset from today to the love-hate topic of choosing a niche for your coaching business.