Thinking of building your practice with corporate coaching clients? Here’s how it can be simpler than you think.
Before I became a coach I was working in a global company as a procurement manager.
In one of my meetings with potential suppliers, I came across a guy, a managing director of a large company in the financial industry. Let’s call him Jason.
Years later after I got into coaching, a friend of mine noticed I had a LinkedIn connection with Jason. My friend told me he could be a potential great contact since he was very into personal development.
I reached out to Jason and he said “let’s meet up!” But after suggesting a time I didn’t get any reply from him, even after following up a week later.
Nothing happened and I didn’t know why.
(At this point, I could’ve made the mistake of assuming he didn’t really want anything to do with coaching and decide to never contact him again. This is something I see with so many coaches wanting to build their practice, they hold back from reaching out because they believe people aren’t interested – killing the chances of creating a potential client.)
Fast forward one year later I reached out to Jason again and served him: I sent him a copy of my book Sweet Sharing and he apologised for never getting back to me and we set up a meeting.
I met him in his office in London. Following some small talk, he asked me about the coaching I did. I suggested that we dive into an actual problem or challenge he was having. He told me he was not feeling appreciated by the owners of the company, which was when I coached him around where his feelings of unappreciation were actually coming from (i.e. not from the owners’ behaviours).
After our conversation, he went away, read my book and contacted me saying how much our interaction – and the book – had been helpful in navigating the ups and downs of his business.
Upon his request, I gave a presentation to his colleagues on what I had learned about the impact of the Principles at work and in business and shared copies of my book with them all. Several months later we met again and he asked me to coach one of his team members and referred me to one of his family relatives – who became a client for my men’s immersions.
This short story points out how simple it can be to create business coaching clients when we come from a place of true service and little to no assumptions.
And if you think “that’s because it’s you Ankush, you have a book written and a full practice already.” let me introduce you to Peter McCammon.
Peter has been working with me as a client for 1 year with the sole focus of building his coaching practice with leaders and business owners. In the beginning, Peter didn’t have many clients, he doesn’t have a book he’s written or a huge social media presence.
But slowly – although much faster than many other coaches I’ve seen – he created a full practice with 11-12 business clients, one conversation at a time, within 1 year!
Peter wrote a document distilling his 6 main lessons from filling his practice and he was kind enough to let me interview him to talk in detail about such lessons.
Access the interview here.