5 Unconventional Ways To Make Your Coaching Business Explode

Everyone doing business in the 21st century is engaged in at least some sort of coaching (and if they aren’t, they should be). With offshore outsourcers and machine learning algorithms getting better and better at handling complex tasks, providing personal guidance has become a prerequisite for survival.

So it pays to take notice of what the most strategy-minded coaches do to set themselves apart and thrive— especially those strategies they don’t talk about publicly.

Here are five ways the most successful coaches ensure they never stop growing.

1) Forget Building an Audience

It has practically become gospel to tell coaches they have to build a huge audience if they want to rise to the top of their fields. As a result, they spend countless hours toiling away to grow their social media followings and email lists. Yet somehow they never acquire the same levels of fame and fortune as the people whose advice they are heeding.

In reality, the big name gurus who talk the most about grinding away to build a massive audience don’t actually do it this way. Instead, they work on building strong relationships with people who already have massive followings. Then they persuade their well-connected friends to spread the word about them to their audiences.

Follow their lead. Instead of working on attracting thousands of people to your message, focus on attracting twenty people who have access to millions.

2) Stop Being So Professional

Many coaches feel that if they’re not conveying their message in stilted language while wearing their Sunday best, people won’t take them seriously. That may have been true in 1955 but not anymore. For better or worse, we live in an informal age where entertainment is king. There’s even a reality TV star in the White House.

There are most likely areas in your life where you are silly, where you let your guard down, where you let your mistakes be known. Stop being so secretive about them. Capture your goofy side, your wild side, even your imperfect side in your talks, in your webinars, and in your posts. Your audience and your bank account will thank you for it.

3) Get Emotional

Data can be a big help. It keeps you from making unnecessary mistakes and lets you see what approaches to your marketing and client service are working best so you can do more of them. However, many people see data almost as a form of magic—a set of numbers that can tell you exactly what you must do to get exactly the results you want.

But no matter how sophisticated your quantitative analysis of human behavior might be, it’s still just that…human behavior. Human beings are messy emotional creatures, and you have to treat them as such.

Become familiar with the impractical, irrational, vindictive, and sometimes generous impulses that people really based their decisions on, whether they consciously know it or not. Tailor your marketing, sales, and service around those. Only then should you look at the data to see if you’re on the right track.

4) Pick On Your Enemies

People are inherently tribal. We are constantly on the lookout for people, causes, and points of view to rally against and are instinctively drawn to leaders that will go to battle of our behalf. Take advantage of this dynamic.

Is there a popular idea you feel does more harm than good? Is there a beloved guru in your space you have long believed is full of hot air? Is there an organization you feel has it all backwards? Don’t keep your opinions to yourself. Let them be known however and whenever you can. This is how you turn dispassionate members of a target market into raving fans.

5) Stop Coming Up With New Ideas

In their quest to remain perpetually relevant, coaches often move from one idea to another too quickly. As a result, nothing ever catches fire in a big way. This is understandable. The reason many people are attracted to coaching in the first place is because it’s about working with exciting new ideas. Unfortunately, it’s also the biggest reason so many potentially groundbreaking approaches never get traction.

If you notice a certain approach is beginning to work, keep it going. Put additional resources into it. See what small tweaks you can make to get it to perform even better. Figure out what other experiments you can eliminate so you can focus more time, money, and attention on the ones that are breaking out. Does this mean you should stop trying new things? No. But at the same time, don’t keeping blowing up the first-rate marriage you have for the second-class fling whose novelty is the only thing it has going for it.