I’ve been running an independent coaching business since the end of 2018, so for over five years as I write this. At first, it was going really well. But then the trickle of clients started to slow down, and finally stopped altogether. This post is about what I think happened. It’s about some of the things I noticed about independent coaching businesses, and about myself, that I think contributed to that result.

Just to note that when I say “independent coaching business” I mean a business that is one or two coaches working with clients they find for themselves, as opposed to internal coaches (who work with employees inside a company that does something else) or agency coaches (who are contracted out by an agency to other companies).

Back in 2017, I was ready for a change. I had been running a pretty successful copyediting business for several years. I taught myself to copyedit from books and seminars, and I got good clients through networking and the tiniest bit of marketing. The work was steady.

But copyediting requires a lot of focus, so I could only do it for a couple of hours a day. It was lonely work, and it doesn't pay much. I wanted something different.

When I stumbled across coaching, it seemed to solve all those problems. It requires intense focus, but only for an hour at a time, and there's another person involved, which makes it a lot easier (for me). It's obviously not lonely. And the hourly pay was much better: I was getting around $40 an hour for copyediting, and coaches seemed to easily charge $250 or more — sometimes much more.

Photo of a fancy cheese plate — Photo by Natalia Rüdisüli

The Editors Canada Toronto group used to gather for monthly seminars in a small meeting room in an office building downtown. At the back of the room, the refreshment table held apparently the same couple dozen crumpled teabags from last month, some sugar packets, and an electric kettle.

By contrast, the first ICF Toronto (International Coach Federation) meeting I ever attended was held at the Old Mill, a fancy event venue, all dark wood, carpeting, and chandeliers. In the ballroom where our meeting was held, multiple refreshments tables were strewn with cheeses, fruit, and cured meats, and there was an elegant selection of coffee, tea, and other drinks. "Ah hah," I thought, "this is more like it!"

I went into coaching believing that it would be possible for me to make it work the way I had made copyediting work: some training, some networking, some marketing, boom. This post breaks down what was wrong with that belief, and what I've learned about coaching, self-employment, and me over the last five years.

I've been thinking about this topic for quite some time, but I've been afraid to write this post because I worry that it seems petulant. It feels like I'm making excuses for my own failure to run a successful coaching business.

The truth is, I definitely made poor business choices and got in my own way. I could have done different things, been more persistent, and tried harder. It would be fair to read this post and say, “That wouldn’t happen to me because I’m not like that.”

I'm writing this for people who are considering coaching, or at the start of their coaching journey, to give some insight into the specifics of my experience, so you can say you’re “not like that” with more confidence.

I'm also writing this for other people who might be in the same boat that I'm in, struggling to make a coaching business (or something similar) work and not sure what's going wrong.

The fact is, there are a lot of those people. Out of twenty people that I went to coach school with (chosen semi-randomly by whose names I remembered or wrote down in my notebook), only two are, according to their LinkedIn pages, running independent businesses where they primarily offer coaching. (And of those two, one is retired, so her business doesn't need to pay the bills).

Six others are internal coaches. Of the remaining fourteen, four offer coaching plus some other thing: two are training as psychotherapists, one is a Realtor, and one is an AirBnB host. And six people have no sign of coaching on their LinkedIn pages whatsoever. Think of that: between two and ten thousand dollars spent on training that seems to have made no impact on their careers.

So it's not just me.

Two disclaimers

Before I go on, I will say this: this post is not about coaching as a skillset. I continue to believe that coaching, as defined by the ICF, is a valuable and useful service that offers the promise of real change for people who use it. I love to coach: I think it’s a beautiful thing.

This post is only about coaching as a self-employment business offering.

Second, this is a blog post, not a work of researched and fact-checked journalism. I write about what I've noticed and concluded, and the post is subject to all the biases and assumptions that that implies.

My experience was probably also strongly influenced by the timing of my coaching career. People who trained ten or fifteen years earlier started their coaching career in a market where there were far fewer coaches, so they were much more in demand and clients and agencies were less selective. (The number of ICF members increased by 73% from when I started training in 2018 to 2023.)

Without further ado (sorry for so much ado), here's what I've noticed.

Coaching is intangible and hard to sell

A photograph of a slice of cherry pie on a blue and white plate — Photo by Diliara Garifullina

There's an aphorism in sales that people buy the hole, not the drill; they buy the sizzle, not the steak. People buy results, not tools.

It's relatively easy to sell a pie, or housecleaning services, or a board game. People know what the result of those purchases will be because they’re both concrete and familiar.

It's harder to sell coaching, because for one thing it’s unfamiliar and somewhat misunderstood. That puts coaches in the de-energizing position of having to explain what they’re selling before they sell it. Imagine having to explain what a pie is to every customer who walks in the door.

For another thing, the success of any given coaching engagement is heavily dependent on the client — their willingness to be open, to experiment, to fail and try again, to change course, and to persist, all inform the result of the coaching. Of course, the skill of the coach plays a huge role, but you just can’t say “my coaching will work for you” with the same confidence that you can say “you will enjoy this pie”.

Coaches who are good at marketing do sell the results — they use client testimonials or just they say, if you work with me you'll be happier, more fulfilled, your career will be better.

For me, I'm nervous about doing that. I like to underpromise and overdeliver, and selling coaching almost demands that you do the opposite: you promise the ideal results, knowing that those result will only come to fruition if the client works their ass off, doesn't get distracted, completes the entire engagement, and has a bit of luck.

I feel that all I can promise is that the client will have more clarity about their situation, that they'll commit to tangible steps toward making change, and that they'll follow up on those steps. But that's simply a description of what coaching is — it's the steak, not the sizzle; the drill, not the hole. So I always struggled to sell coaching.

Coaching is a luxury

Coaching can be a multiplier: If you're manufacturing widgets or closing sales or making goals or doing something else that earns money, coaching can help you do that more effectively, so you can earn more money. That's why business loves coaching. It's a way to work out the inner, psychological stumbling blocks that get in the way of your best people performing even better.

For businesses, the ROI (return on investment) on coaching is clear. You spend thousands of dollars on coaching for your top people, and they earn the company tens or hundreds of thousands more.

But if you're not earning money on the thing you're getting coached on, like setting boundaries or resting better or improving a relationship, there's no financial ROI. You might feel happier, more satisfied, more purposeful, more aligned, more self-actualized. But sadly, for most of us, that doesn't count for a damn thing when it comes to our bank balance.

(This is different for career coaches, but it turns out career coaching is a whole different thing with its own training and certification beyond basic coaching.)

This means that for most people, coaching is a luxury. Most people won't spend a couple thousand dollars to just feel better, more satisfied, more aligned — unless they're the kind of people who normally spend over a thousand dollars to feel better.

(In fact, the people who advise coaches about how to build a lucrative coaching business make it clear that "ability to afford coaching" is the main qualifying characteristic of desirable clients. Which is so obvious, when I type it out like this, but boils down to “work with rich people”.)

I'll say again, I do believe that coaching is valuable and effective, and I think it would be good if more people had access to it. There are numerous non-profits that offer coaching to people who can't afford it. (Most of those non-profits don't pay their coaches, instead asking them to donate their service.) So when I say coaching is a luxury, I don't mean in the sense of being frivolous, but in the sense of being expensive and not a necessity.

The fact is, anything you can do with a coach, you can do without a coach. It will be significantly harder, but anyone can cobble together a hotchpotch of friends, accountability groups, mentors, tools and rituals that might eventually get you where you're trying to go.

I know, because I've done it. Here's the rotten truth: I've never paid full price for coaching. I never hired a coach before I started training as one, and I haven't hired one since, apart from the coaching you’re required to get for certification.

I’ve been coached a lot — it's part of the training, of course, and it's a requirement for certification, and plus it's fun and it works. But for me, it was never something I could afford to pay full price for.

I'm not the only one. Once I was asked if I would coach an acquaintance's husband through a career change, but could I do it for free? The acquaintance was a coach. (I took the gig — it was fun and I got to practice — but the request should have served as a yellow flag about the affordability of coaching, even for coaches.)

It isn't surprising that I've never paid for coaching: I'm not a person who spends money on luxuries. I don't take extravagant vacations, I don't eat at fancy restaurants, I don't buy expensive shoes or bags. And that also makes it harder for me to sell coaching, because of something else I noticed: coaches tend to attract clients who are like them.

Coaches attract clients who are like them

I haven't done a lot of research on this, but it's a feeling I have: people tend to hire coaches who are like them. A person in finance will hire a coach with experience in finance. Someone with ADHD will look for a coach with ADHD. A writer will look for a coach with writing experience.

Or maybe it's the inverse: coaches tend to market to clients who are like them, or define their niche according to their experience. Someone who completed a lot of post-graduate work will be a coach for people leaving academia. The spouse of a diplomat who has lots of experience as an expat will coach spouses of diplomats who are trying to find their way as expats.

Either way — whether clients gravitate to coaches who are like them, or coaches market to people who are like them — the result is the same: coaches tend to work with clients who are like them.

So let's follow the logic:

I am a frugal person who doesn't spend money on luxuries like coaching.
Coaches tend to attract people who are like them.
I attract frugal people who don't spend money on luxuries... like coaching.

The math just doesn't math.

When I promote my coaching business, I indeed do attract people like me: frugal, practical people who love art and community, but don't have money for luxuries. I love those people… but they don't buy coaching.

I hear variations on the same story over and over again when I ask coaches how they got into coaching. People talk about their experience of being coached for the first time, and having been so impressed by how effective it was and how good it made them feel that they become a coach themself.

This scenario is a testament to the power of coaching, for sure, but there's a hidden message in these stories that I didn't see until recently: If you're a person who has never had coaching, either because you couldn’t pay for it yourself or you didn’t have it paid for by an employer, you're not likely to be able to sell coaching to people like you, because people like you don't pay for coaching.

The numbers are very demanding

A photo of a brown chalkboard with calculus written in white chalk — Photo by Roman Mager

Another thing I wish I understood about coaching before I got into it is the size of audience that you have to reach in order to make a decent income.

Let's look at some made-up numbers. (The numbers are made up, but the logic is based on what I've learned from Erika Tebbens, Kelly Diels, Jessica Lackey, and other small business advisors.)

Suppose I charge $2000 for a two-month coaching engagement, and I want to make $80,000 a year. Then I need to sell a full coaching engagement to 40 people every year. If my funnel looks something like:

X people see my content;
of those, 1% sign up for my mailing list;
of those, 5% sign up for a full $2000 coaching engagement

...then to make $80,000 I need to get my content in front of 80,000 new people every year.

If you know anything about content marketing, you know those numbers are wildly optimistic, to say nothing of the fact that I live in Toronto and running a business costs money, so $80,000 doesn't cut it. On top of that, most people (in my audience, at least) aren't repeat customers for coaching, so I would need to keep reaching 80,000 new people every year forever.

Social media marketing is not effective these days, with changes in discoverability algorithms and the advent of AI. It seems to be better to reach people through other media: radio and TV appearances, podcasts, magazine articles. But whether you reach people through social media or other media, in order to make numbers as a coach you have to be comfortable with being a media personality — with being low-key famous.

For me, I'm not comfortable with visibility. Ever since I started my first blog in the 90s, I dreaded it actually being read. Of course, I want someone to read my writing. But I don't want everyone to read it. I'm afraid of being wrong, of being criticised, of being abused, of being cancelled, of being doxed. I'm afraid of all the bad thing that happen when you poke your head up, and that fear has consistently overridden the promise of the good things that might happen.

And so I protect myself by holding back, by not writing or posting as much as I need to, and by not expressing the kind of strong takes that would get me the attention I fear (but also that I would need to get those 80,000 views a year).

Oh, about those strong takes...

You need a point of view

Photo of a child standing on a sidewalk. She is playing a large pink guitar and seems to be singing very loudly. A box of money is at her feet. — Photo by Felix Koutchinski

In order to get attention, on social media or to get on those radio and TV shows, podcasts and articles, you have to have a strong, simple point of view that's easy to describe and sell. "Start with why!" "Middle-age is a time of great strength for women!" "Because you're worth it!" "You can have a fulfilling career!" “It takes 10,000 hours of practice!”

For me, I've never developed a strong, simple point of view, partially because I never figured out a convincing audience for my coaching, and partially because I'm a person who prefers to lurk in grey areas, nuances, caveats and exceptions. I feel weird making bold, declarative statements; I always want to add a little asterisk that leads to a footnote that begins, "Except in the case of…." “This won’t apply to you if….”

But grey areas and nuance don’t cut it in marketing. You need a strong idea, and you need to keep hammering away at it year after year, another thing I don’t like to do. Once I say something I consider it said, but in marketing, you have to repeat the same ideas over and over.

You have to be an expert (to sell coaching)

One of the first things they tell you on the first day of coach school is that you don't need to be an expert to be a coach. "Your client is the expert on themself and their situation; you are the expert in the process."

This is true. In fact, arguably the best coaching happens when the coach knows absolutely nothing about the facts of the client's situation. That makes it impossible for the coach to over-relate to the client and get distracted, and the coach will be less tempted to offer advice.

(There's a guy who does coaching demonstrations where he coaches someone in a language he doesn't understand — he coaches entirely on body language and vibes. That this is possible, although limited in its application, illustrates how content-agnostic coaching can be.)

You don’t have to be an expert to coach, but I think you have to be an expert to sell coaching. People hire experts, because they either want advice, or they think they want advice. Or they want to work with an expert who can coach them and give them advice. A grant coach can tell them how to write an application, a family coach can tell them what to say to their dad, a children's book coach can tell them when to hire an illustrator, or whatever.

And so, most successful independent coaches either offer coaching as part of a package along with consulting, or their marketing is heavily oriented to some field they already have expertise in, implying that they will be able to give advice if necessary. (This ties in to the idea I wrote about before, that coaches attract clients who are like them.)

For me, I don't really have any great expertise in anything. I don't have an advanced degree, and I haven't worked in any field for long enough to call myself an expert. So I couldn't, in good conscience, hang my shingle out as a "something" coach.

I have had life experiences, to be sure, and for some coaches that's enough. There are coaches who have been divorced once or twice, and sell themselves as a divorce coach; coaches who have a child with some condition, and sell themselves as a coach for parents with a child with that same condition. I'm not comfortable doing that. Having your own singular experience of something doesn't make you qualified to advise others on it, and in fact I feel it's possible to overgeneralize your own experience and potentially do harm.

(There's that nuance again, or maybe this is just an excuse my subconscious makes to prevent me from being too visible.)

You can become an expert as a coach: there is training for ADHD coaching, career coaching, grief coaching, and many more. But I burned through a lot of money in 2021, on a team coach training I didn't really need and on professional photographs. That's also when I stopped making money, and, as I said before, I'm not a person who likes to spend money, especially when I don't have it. So I didn't want to throw good money after bad on another training that might or might not actually help me earn money.

(It might be that I’m too financially risk-averse to run a business!)

Coaching doesn't stand alone as a career

In my observation, almost every coach who is independently successful has been so in the context of another career.

Partly this is because having an existing career gives you a pool of people to draw on as coaching clients. If you're an accountant, you can coach other accountants, or you can coach your accounting clients. If you're a writer, you can coach other writers.

And partly it's because of what I talked about above: coaches attract clients who are like them, and people prefer to hire coaches who have some expertise.

This realization has helped me see an important distinction that I have never seen discussed anywhere: the difference between what I'll call add-on training and start-over training.

A photo of a classroom of adults looking at a projected slide while a lecturer speaks — Photo by Kenny Eliason

Add-on training versus start-over training

As a person in midlife who is looking at changing my career, I'm faced with a smorgasbord of training options. I could go back to university and get a whole new bachelor's degree; I could take classes to get a certificate in something like learning design or project management; I could do a bootcamp and be trained in a technical area like data science or UX design; I could take a college program to be a medical secretary or a social services worker. Or I could go to a private college and get certified as a coach.

Some of those programs are start-over training. They will set you up, from scratch, with a brand new career. They're the programs that you can enter out of high school (or jail, or full-time caregiving, or long-term illness) with no career or experience, and leave as an employable person.

And some of those programs are add-on training. They will leave you with a qualification that doesn't stand alone, but enhances or extends an existing career in a field that you can return to and enrich with your new knowledge and skills.

Coach training seems to be add-on training. For the reasons I wrote above above — you need expertise in something other than coaching, you need to have had a career that has put you into a peer group that you can sell coaching to, you need a strong point of view — coaching doesn't stand alone as its own career. No-one hires a coach who is just a coach.

This extends to coaching agencies, the companies that contract out coaches to other businesses. They won't take you on as a coach unless you have experience in the kind of businesses they work with. So an agency that provides coaches to software companies, for example, will only take on coaches who have experience in the software industry.

This is exacerbated by the glut of coaches on the market these days: clients and agencies can afford to be picky, even pointlessly picky, because they have so many coaches to choose from.

Having realized that success in coaching requires that you had a previous successful career, I've developed a suspicion of other training programs. As I said, the distinction between add-on training and start-over training is not one I’ve come across before, and you have to read between the lines to figure out which category any given training program fits into.

I suspect learning design and project management are add-on trainings — you need to have some existing area of expertise in which to apply your learning design or project management skills. I'm not sure about technical bootcamps — they seem to teach skills that are in demand without any other expertise, so I think they're start-over training. Any bachelor's degree is designed, by definition, for career beginners, so they are the first step of a start-over training program, if not the only step.

In the absence of other clues, one way to tell is to look at job postings for the career in question. A posting for a project manager, for example, will usually require project management certification along with a master's degree in the field, or years of programming or engineering experience.

So I've become wary, and in my second kick at the can of becoming employable I've learned to look for programs that truly stand up as the start of a career; programs that you can join out of high school and expect to eventually lead to some kind of role in the economy.

In Summary

That's what I've learned about coaching, and about me, that might explain why this business didn't work for me the way I hoped it would. In summary:

Coaching is intangible and hard to sell the results of
Coaching is a luxury, in the sense that it’s expensive and not a necessity
You need to tolerate a lot of visibility in order to reach enough people to earn a living wage as a coach
You need to have a strong point of view to get that visibility
It helps if you're an expert in something else, both to reach an audience and to offer some expertise alongside coaching
I don't do well with having a strong point of view
I don't like visibility
I'm not an expert in anything in particular
I don't like to spend a lot of money (and I attract an audience that doesn't like to spend a lot of money)

I hope this post is useful, especially to people who are considering coaching or another career that might have the same characteristics. And I hope it's clear that my lack of success as a coach doesn't mean that others would have the same experience: if you have some expertise, if you're comfortable with marketing and visibility, if you have a strong point of view, if you have resources and are happy to spend money on extra training, marketing and coaching, I think having a full-time, successful coaching business is possible.

Conclusion and What’s Next

A fellow coach recently referred to coaching as my passion and I winced a little inside. I love coaching, I really enjoy getting to know people and helping them achieve their goals, and, like I said before, I think coaching is valuable. But it's not my passion.

I trained as a coach after realizing that copyediting alone wouldn't work for me, and part of the appeal was that it seemed like a better way to make money. A lot of things are a better way to make money than copyediting, let's be real, but coaching was also a good fit with my skillset and my interests. My passion, though? Not really.

I just want to do something useful with fun people, and get paid a reasonable amount of money for it. Back to the drawing board…

My Coaching Business and Me