The following is taken from David’s interview with Marcia Reynolds in 10 Super Coaches.
What were the biggest doubts you had in your early months?
Why would people pay out of their pockets for coaching, especially when I hadn’t completed my training? And then when they paid me, would I really be able to help them shift and create new lives? I suffered from the “fraud factor” as I have now found that almost all new coaches experience.
To overcome this, I just “acted as if”, knowing that if I gave 100 per cent to my clients, really listened and cared about them, I would know what to say. Since coaching is more about facilitation than having answers, I found that I could “be a good coach” faster than I realized.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Leza Danly in 10 Super Coaches.
What was most disheartening for you while building your practice?
I built my practice quickly, reaching my goal of 20 clients in less than 6 months. It was my goal for the end of my coaching certification, to have a full practice before the exam. I got my 20th client on the day of our last group call. I never really had a major block, but I remember the first time I lost a lot of clients in a short period of time and I went into some scarcity about that.
How I dealt with it was to take a deeper responsibility for why I created them leaving. I discovered I was hungry to make a deeper commitment to coaching clients who wanted to do really deep work, and that the clients I lost were not fulfilling for me. It was a shout from the universe telling me to raise the bar on my standards.
What was the most interesting or exciting thing for you about building your practice?
Well, the most exciting thing was watching the dream come alive. The idea that I could create a professional life for myself by loving and supporting people and building intimate relationships was a revelation. It was my dream career, and I was creating it magically. It was a total high! And I was giving it to myself.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ernest F. Oriente in 10 Super Coaches.
How would you recommend coaches start to build their business?
I co-authored a book with my partner Judy Feld, titled ‘SmartMatch Alliances’. If we were building a business in 90 days and we put the driving principle of SmartMatch Alliances into play, we could catapult our business from nothing to something and be moving forward at a rate that is simply extraordinary.
The interesting piece, or the challenging piece, is that many and most coaches are not using this formula, and quite frankly they’re not building businesses that thrive and exceed their expectations. Many, many coaches are not making enough to even be considered a paycheck.
It took us thirty two thousand words to put this formula together. It took the entire first half of the book to explain the concept of ‘living in the world’ and having maximum exposure and having the foundation in place so that you can serve those who are your exact perfect audience.
The once you have that in place, the alliances, and all the additional services that you might provide for that audience, it just falls right into place like dominoes, it’s extremely easy.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Michael O. Cooper in 10 Super Coaches.
What was most disheartening for you while building your practice?
I barely survived my first year as a full-time coach – and sank over $40,000 of my own money into the business and on living expenses. That was a real slap in the face. After all, I was helping my clients achieve success in their businesses and I had succeeded in other businesses before, why couldn’t I do it on my own now?
I felt like a fraud. But I also knew dozens of other coaches experiencing the same situation; some even left coaching for more security. Underneath, my fears of failing, attachment to the outcome of marketing efforts (the antithesis of attraction marketing), and stubborn resistance to positioning myself as an expert within a niche, nearly contributed to catastrophe.
Within one month of allowing success – by providing value for the joy of it, establishing a clear nice where demand already existed and trusting that I could succeed – my business quadrupled in revenue. More importantly, other coaches started sending me endorsed referrals out of the blue!
The following is taken from David’s interview with Ginger Cockerham in 10 Super Coaches.
What was the most interesting or exciting thing for you about building your practice?
Number one – creating my own business.
Number two – results for my clients.
I had a client who was a professor in a major University who was on her way to becoming tenured and was miserable. She came to me to help her put more zest into her life outside her work so she could accept the fact that she wasn’t happy in her job. I challenged and encouraged her to look at alternatives to what she was doing. She loved to travel, spoke several languages and enjoyed cultural diversity. She also liked to work intensely for short periods and then have a break.
She explored how she could use her strengths and expertise in another model. When I asked her about being a Global Trainer, she replied that she had never heard of such a thing. After days of research, she found herself in all the descriptions of a global trainer. Soon she was headed out on her assignments to Turkmenistan training managers for a Multi-national company. She doubled her revenue and had four to six months off a year working in new environments intensely for a few months. She is happy in her work life now and in her personal life.
I have so many examples of people having the courage to make changes in their lives that I feel the excitement for each one of them and the joy that I was part of the coaching partnership.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Judy Feld in 10 Super Coaches.
What was perhaps the biggest mistake you made in practice building?
Not exactly practice building mistakes, but here are some “don’ts” based on experience:
When closing a deal, don’t put yourself in a position of ‘negotiating with yourself’. Don’t do work on speculation. Don’t create long responses to complex RFPs. Don’t spend a lot of time “auditioning”. Coaches are different from consultants, and coaches get paid in advance. For career coaching: Don’t let a client assure that the first “exit package” offer received from their company is the best offer they can expect. You can always do better, and a coach can help you see how.
