Coaching Business Wisdoms From Expert Carol Leek

I’ve known Carol for years from LinkedIn and various conversations we’ve had over the years. Carol Leek is a business mentor for coaches. Here’s her short summary of what she does:

As a Board Certified Coach and business expert, Carol Leek helps new and emerging coaches through the beginning stages and struggles of their practice so they can begin to generate an income and get on with what they do best…COACH!

In our discussions, I find one of Carol’s best gifts is her belief in you and her excitement and enthusiasm about YOU succeeding. She dishes out such a powerful dose it’s hugely motivating and encouraging.

She recently wrote a juicy blog on What’s Next after coach training with great tips to get you to succeed. You can feel her wanting for you to succeed in her voice.

It’s here: The “What’s Next” after Coach Training.

Sparked from her writing, here are three points I’d like to add for those who leave coach training and enter the realm of business creation.

1. Get support immediately. Breathing, warm-blooded support in the form of human beings. Don’t go it alone, as the wisdom of well-chosen people and the fun from those relationships is invaluable. Carol highly recommends a business coach – a good move. I recommend both coaching support as well as specialized knowledge to help you jump the learning curve as well. Support is my word and that could be a coach, mastermind, triage of some sort, etc.

2. On mindset. Carol wants you to have a mindset for success. Think about what fabulous means to you 1, 5 and 10 years out. I would add to spend plenty of time spelling this out. Make it exciting, juicy, and even a bit unreal. Excitement is what you want. Spend hours on this.

I urge you to accept the notion that you can, and have every right to, have a great, well-paying coaching business that you love. And there are endless people out there who need and want help.

3. On information consumption. I completely agree with Carol’s suggestion to avoid too many webinars, programs, blogs out there. They are endless.

Do NOT over consume. It’s too easy to do and you’ll find yourself on runaway idea trains or buried under a mountain of too-many-to-pursue ideas. Be cautious of information overload and keep it minimal. Avoid “research” and just get answers to what’s needed now.

There are 20-30 more juicy advice nuggets for new and emerging coaches in this article. This article could be the basis of a bigger book on how to get a great start on your coaching business. Nicely done Carol.

Here are two pieces of advice I recommend on coaching websites which come directly from her wisdom.

Get website support. Websites are often a huge time sink and can pull you away from the big picture. If your funds are tight seek low-cost help or barter. Bartering gets you more coaching practice instead of one-time web design learning. But even before the “doing” of creating a website, get good strategic advice so your site is helping your business and not just a line on your business card. You want your site to produce results to get you closer to bigger goals – often meaning a full client list.

On information gathering, the same holds. There’s so much information out there on websites, web marketing, blogging, themes, plugins, tools, etc. What you need is a website (or websites) to support your current goals (got them right? a vision of your business 6 or 12 months out?). No more no less.

If you’re seeking primarily 1-1 clients and networking in person to engage new prospects, do you really need a webinar now? Or, if you’re writing articles online to drive traffic to your site and leads to your email, do you need a local workshop? Determine your business goals and the website strategies to realize them. (I wrote about websites for attracting clients in The Coaching Site Guide)

Or, perhaps you’re looking to have 100 members you support via a forum based coaching model. So be it. That means you’ll need a membership platform to deliver the service. But know your aims and then find the website strategy to support that.

While you’re at her site, download her A to Z checklist. It’s for the new coach and is full of more great wisdom from her 20+ years of business experience. It’s organized in a fun A to Z way. There’s no cost for it. It’s here: A to Z Checklist for New Coaches.

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