If you’re finding it hard to attract clients into your coaching business, I’m sure you’ll know how frustrating it can feel to not be sure which bits of your business need to be tweaked or tuned up to help fix this issue.

The truth is, your success is down to more than just working on or ‘fixing’ any specific element – any approach to getting more clients needs to be looked at more holistically than just following a ‘shiny object’.

I like to look at business like an ecosystem with several key ‘organisms’ that are all vital to how likely that ecosystem is to survive.

In this post I’m going to share what these key organisms are, the role each play in your business and how they connect together when it comes to building a coaching business that is aligned, authentic and wholehearted.

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Foundations

The foundational pieces of your coaching business include your niche, message and branding – which includes things like your mission, vision and values, your website and the most key piece – an understanding of how your business needs to work around and within your life.

I’m passionate about helping people create businesses that are rooted in how they actually want to live their lives. Starting and growing a business is not for the faint of heart, but one of the many things that makes it more than worth the effort is knowing that you have a way of making a living that makes your life better.

My business has been consciously created to work for my desired lifestyle and to meet some of my personal values and core desired feelings. I get to drop my kids off and collect them from school each day, go to the gym and wild swim during the day and generate an income that would easily be the equivalent of a very decent full time job despite working only 20-25 hours and taking most school holidays off.

Marketing

Marketing is how you’re visible and able to be found and discovered by the people who would benefit from your work as a coach.

It’s a huge area of business, but it doesn’t have to be super complicated.

I tend to think of marketing within 3 key areas – organic, paid, collaborative.

The biggest issue I see with coaches and marketing tends to be from a mindset perspective which we’ll get on to in a sec.

But without the marketing piece of the puzzle your business can become very stuck. We need to be reaching new people on a fairly consistent basis to grow, but all of the options around marketing and what we think we should and shouldn’t be doing can make it a much bigger faff than it needs to be!

Lead Generation

Not everyone will think of ‘lead generation’ in the way I do – for me it’s a slightly separate thing to marketing. It’s how we move the people who interact with us and our businesses via that marketing and move them into a place where we can actively sell to them.

Personally I think one of the best ways to do this is via your email list.

If you’re not thinking about that process of moving people from your general marketing into the place where you can more actively sell, this can make your whole business a bit ‘leaky’.

I should also add here that I’m not a massive fan of the word ‘lead’ as it feels a bit impersonal – but for the sake of keeping it simple I use it here, just know that your ‘leads’ are all individual people with their own struggles and dreams – this part of your business puzzle is about how you call them deeper into your world.

Sales

I think most people do a bit of a cringe when they hear the word ‘sales’, but it doesn’t have to be icky or cringe worthy at all! If we are not intentionally selling our stuff then our business is not going to be profitable. It’s something we all need to figure out if we’re going to have a successful business.

Like with the other organisms in our business, sales doesn’t have to be something that feels scary. It’s how and when we are making invitations to those leads we’ve generated in the last step to actually work with us in a paid capacity.

I love to think of sales as simply invitations – and when we’ve got the foundations, marketing and lead gen right the sales bit becomes even easier because we’re selling to people who want and need what it is we offer and who know, like and trust us enough to consider it.

Offers

Obviously a pretty essential part of your business ecosystem is the things you’re actually selling. For a lot of coaches this is really straightforward and it’s a 1:1 coaching package. But even with this most simple offer structure, if the foundations of niche and message are lacking, or if the way you have to show up to deliver the offer doesn’t align with your life then we’ll hit a road bump.

Your offers need to be strategically created to meet the needs of your people as informed by your business foundations and the marketing, lead generation and sales all need to flow into your offers structure.

Systems, Planning & Mindset

I group these bits together because they are all the ‘behind the scenes’ bits that are still vitally important to the success of your business.

The internal systems you have around cashflow, your client onboarding and offboarding systems, the tech you need to have your business function – all of these make the other organisms in your business work.

Planning is another important piece of the puzzle. Although not everyone is a ‘planner’ (I’m what you might call an obsessive planner!) Having some organisational system that helps you progress to where you want to get to is going to make a huge difference.

Mindset is another behind the scenes element, but it can have a huge impact on what happens in the rest of your business. Business is a personal development journey like no other. It really is going to bring up all your shit around money, visibility, worthiness, confidence and more. When you don’t work on your mindset, it can be easy to find yourself staying small and safe – and that can have a negative impact on your business moving forward.

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Although that’s a lot of ‘organisms’ to consider, it doesn’t have to be very complicated. As long as it’s aligned for you and feels authentic it’s going to get results.

Many ways of growing a business can seek to take us out of our authenticity – but my approach is always to lean into that as much as possible because you will always do better when you’re focusing on what feels good to you.

An example of how these elements might look in a coaching business:

The coach has a clear understanding of how she wants her business to fit around her life and the impact she wants to make. She has a clear niche which in turn has been developed into key compelling messages and a brand that feels like her. She has a website that communicates all of this and hosts sales copy for her offers.

Her marketing is focused on organic growth via Linkedin and collaborative growth via in person networking

Her lead gen looks like inviting people to get a free workshop that attracts them on to her list where she nurtures them with a welcome sequence funnel. She also invites people to DM her on Linkedin where she helps them with a specific issue.

Her sales looks like the email sequence inviting people to book a discovery call (as well as directly inviting people she connects with via Networking and DM’s) and running these calls really well after practising what works for her and what doesn’t. She also has a downsell offer which increases her sales overall. When she wants to attract more clients, she runs a live workshop to drive more discovery call bookings.

Her offer is a 1:1 package that helps her people overcome a set of specific issues and achieve a key result, via her coaching them through a framework she’s tested out with practice clients.

Internally, she has a CRM that manages her client onboarding, offboarding and invoicing. She also has the tech set up for her emails, automated emails and booking in for calls and discovery calls. She has a business bank account and tracks her income and expenses each month. She has a quarterly plan set up in Notion so she knows what she needs to work on next to meet her income goal.

She’s in a program with other coaches where she’s been supported to set all of this up, almost from scratch where she can reflect on her mindset stuff, to consider what her next steps are to increase her client bookings and to generally feel like she’s not in this alone.

That program is Wholehearted Business – my 12 month group and 1:1 program that helps you create a system just like this so you can get more clients and grow your business.

Wholehearted Business is open for enrollment until 13th May, check out the program if any of this has resonated with you!

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