Having a Coaching Business is a people sport. Working as a coach supporting people every day can bring great meaning to our working lives. The pros are that it’s your business and this business can be built to enact your personal purpose. You can be in control of the game! The cons are that it’s pretty lonely being a professional coach and it will take time to replace your previous income and running the business side is hard. The rules of the game are also hard to find out before you play!
Five years into running my own business I don’t have time to dwell on working on my own, but I do remember what it was like in the first year. It was lonely because, as with all entrepreneurs, it takes time to build a business and, if you have chosen to leave a job to build your new career as a self-employed person, you start to miss your team environment and even the odd “thank you” for your efforts at work! It also took me some time to learn about what was needed and how to make the necessary changes required to run my own business.
Coaching is a support profession and we give our all to help our clients with change and make their goals come to fruition. Clients will come and go and, after receiving your help, will be ready to change. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we need the same support to effect our own change and transition to being a Solopreneur.
The coaching profession is growing by 7% year on year according to the latest ICF report and I would like to be part of supporting coaches to take a share of that market after their qualification. I want to see more coaches succeed in business and see more newly qualified coaches make a faster start to getting the return on their qualification investment.
What- To help this mission succeed, I have packaged up all my learning and used my commercial strengths to build out another part of my business - one which focuses on developing coaches alongside my current Supervision services.
I wrote the book “The Coaching Solopreneur- How to build a coaching business with sustainable foundations” because so many questions being asked in Supervision sessions were fundamentally about the need for Business Mentoring. The insight that coaches were losing confidence in their coaching abilities due to lack of support for their business build was enough to collate my learning into a model – ‘The coaching house’ which is core to the book. It is simply a guide for newly qualified coaches or those stuck in their business build to understand their Why and What is needed to build a coaching business to house their coaching services.
The writing of the book has led me to believe that we all need a sense of Community to be a Solopreneur so I hope use of the book will help coaches to find that community within the profession of like-minded coaching business builders. Launching with the book is a community forum and support membership pages filled with additional resources for coaches to reflect on their Why, What and How!
Why have I done this? In its foundation year I hope that the book and community mean fewer coaching businesses fail and we all get to share in the market growth and do the good work that society, organisations and the ecosystems we live in need right now.
I plan to work with the community to share more of my experiences and encourage all the coach members to do the same – we all have so much to give our profession to make it a happy, successful choice to be a supported solopreneur.
Who do you know that would benefit from joining us in 2023 or would be prepared to contribute to get this community started?
Kate
Link to Purchase "The Coaching Solopreneur" Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/191585007X
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