In your coaching business, you know you’ve found the sweet spot when you:
- reliably earn well
- by offering services you enjoy to client’s you enjoy
- and you’re in high demand.
You’re well known and respected in your space.
Being in the sweet spot of your coaching business is fulfilling, fun and profitable. Working with ideal clients makes your heart sing.
Coaching in and of itself is not the sweet spot in your business. I’m referring to something more specialized and discovered over time.
It is the overlap of these 3 factors:
- You STAND OUT in the crowd by doing what you are the best at.
- You are growing expertise.
- Your audience is excited to invest in your offer because it hits the mark for them.
This is niching at its best. I’ve found that sweet spot you can have it too.
Let’s talk about how you get there.
Early Struggles to Reach Coaching Business Success
After coach training, I struggled for 3 years to attract enough coaching clients to sustain my business. Most coaches give up too soon but I did not.
The delay in success for coaches is:
- Partly because most coaches start too broad and try to sell coaching as if that in itself is something people want.
- And partly because the coach is not visible enough in front of their target audience. Coaches often rely too much on the internet not realizing that it takes time to build traction there.
I was searching for answers in all the wrong places — purchasing training programs and enrolling in masterminds hoping to find what one of my clients calls his ‘True North’.
The Coaching Business Treasure Hunt
I attended a seminar for coaches that was actually named Find Your Coaching Business Sweet Spot. The presenter kept pushing the idea of passion…
What’s your passion?
What’s your purpose?
I didn’t KNOW the answer to those questions!
And I wasn’t the only one sitting there blank faced in the group. I left that even more frustrated than before and shed a few tears because I felt so lost. Was there something wrong with me that I couldn’t identify my passion and purpose?
Years later I realized those were all the wrong questions for me. They might be the wrong questions for you too so I’m not going to talk about passion or purpose.
By the way … remember that when you’re coaching. If your question or message doesn’t land with your clients or your audience, try different language such as a different question or message to them to help them get to AHA!
It’s important to know this … your sweet spot won’t be revealed on day 1 of your coaching business and maybe not for years.
There’s nothing wrong with that!
The thing is, you grow into it. It’s a product of staying the course, sticking with you audience and niche until you find your groove.
It might take years to realize what is second nature to you that is also something people really want and will invest in. That’s totally normal. Do you think all the businesses that surround you found that sweet spot right away? No they didn’t.
It’s like the best marriages or healthiest body. It takes time to find that.
The journey can be so rewarding if you don’t get impatient and give up.
Look for your sweet spot in your business with the same kind of attention that you scan a wild landscape to see beautiful birds or animals that might reveal themselves to you.
You’re looking for joy. But you aren’t weighed down with expectation if it’s not there yet.
3 Steps to Move Towards Your Coaching Business Sweet Spot
- Observe yourself when you are with your clients. Notice what they respond to. Notice how you feel when they respond to it.
- Notice yourself while networking in your space. What gap do you fill that you fit beautifully into?
- Notice what emerges as your most unique, enjoyable and leverageable skill or skillset. It’s not that no one else will have the same sweet spot but no one else will do it YOUR WAY.
Your sweet spot could include:
- Your unique model, approach or system you’ve devised of working with clients that really works! (This is one of things I help my VIP clients to create.)
- Innate skills you have that aren’t easy for others that you take for granted.
- Newly developed skills you never dreamed you would have.
I never dreamed I would have been a podcaster, that I would have had an award-winning blog for 8 years or that I would have written coach training curriculum. Those things just weren’t in my mind when I became a coach.
I stumbled across two innate skills that I didn’t have in school or any job I’d had — writing for impact and breaking complex things into easy to accomplish steps. These are integral to how I work with coaches to help them develop a niche, messaging and offers to attract high paying clients.
Going back to that sweet spot seminar I attended … a better question for me would have been:
What do you excel at that you really enjoy doing and that other people would value highly?
That would have kept me out of the lost place because I thought I didn’t know my passion and purpose and moved me closer to my sweet spot.
I’m the best in my space at 2 main things for my audience:
- Helping coaches identify their ideal target audience and stand out coaching niche
- Then helping them learn & craft everything to attract ideal high-ticket clients
Most of my colleagues in this coaching business space don’t love doing these things so I am a gap-filler for something coaches really want help with. Coaches know that without a smart niche they can’t really move forward towards all the good things that their future business holds for them.
