The Burnout Avoider – 7 Mistakes Coaches Make While Scaling
- Brainz Magazine
- Jan 21, 2022
- 6 min read
Written by: Timi Orosz, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Growing an impactful business as a coach shouldn’t be confusing. Yet, there are countless skilled and trained coaches who haven’t been taught about how to scale their practice without burning out. They throw themselves into making a positive impact on their clients’ lives while they slowly slip into mental exhaustion themselves.
Perhaps you’re one of these dedicated changemakers as well. You are clear on your mission and you excel at guiding others to live their fullest potential. Still, you get frustrated when your coaching business is not growing. Sadly, I see this happening too many times and it makes my blood boil why no one prepares you for becoming an entrepreneur when you decide to embark on your coaching journey.
Coaches need aligned strategies
As a coach you are changing lives for the better so you should be supported by essential business knowledge to do such a meaningful activity. You can keep trying and testing ways to find new clients but without an aligned strategy, this will simply mean: spending hours and hours figuring out what works and wasting your energies on unnecessary tasks. No wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed when all you want is to help people.
So how can you avoid burning yourself out when growing your coaching practice?
First things first. You need to define your goals to know just exactly how much you want to grow. I don’t need to explain the goal-setting process to you, as a coach you already know this very well. Once you’re clear on the next milestone you want to hit, make sure you avoid these mistakes when trying to grow your business.
7 mistakes to avoid when growing your coaching business
Not disqualifying before a discovery call
You’ve already created your ideal client’s avatar and you know who you simply love working with. So why waste your time jumping on free discovery calls with people who are not aligned with your mission? When you do that, you are limiting your availability to put the spotlight on people who genuinely resonate with your services.
By implementing some steps in your call booking process, you can free up your valuable time to focus on the soulfully aligned customers that will truly benefit from your support.
Not having an alternative solution for disqualified leads
When you realise that the potential customer who engaged with you is not exactly the right fit for your 1-2-1 or group program, what else can you offer them? How do you cater to disqualified leads? You can still support others without saying yes to not aligned clients. With pre-recorded webinars, masterclasses, workshops or other digital products like ebooks and worksheets.
Alternatively, you could also buddy up with other coaches who specialize in different solutions. Cross-refer disqualified clients to each other so everyone wins especially the customers who want to make positive changes in their lives.
Dashing out content without an objective
As a coach your main thing is people. You’re not a content creator, a writer or a journalist.
Although you need to educate your audience through helpful content it doesn’t mean you should be spending hours and hours dashing out articles, videos, podcasts and infographics just for the sake of it.
You are here to support people to elevate their mindsets. And your content needs to serve that purpose. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It needs to be authentic, helpful, inspirational and informative. So next time you’re in that creative flow, ask yourself what kind of results you want to achieve with your new content? This way you can keep your focus on growing your coaching business while not falling into the content creation rabbit hole.
Copying your competitors
While it’s useful for you to know what’s out there, copying what your competitors do won’t take you too far within the personal development industry. There’s one major decision maker aspect when it comes to finding a suitable coach: it’s the personal relatability, it’s YOU. Instead of comparing yourself to other coaches and how they attract their aligned clients, you need to do you.
There’s also tremendous power in collaborating rather than competing. You can join forces with your competitors and multiply your impact together. When you unite with your competition, you can create a whole lot more value for people who need both of your services.
Not tracking properly what works
This is probably the biggest mistake you can make as a coach when trying to grow your business. All the effort, time and finances you invested in your activities only to have no clue about what really brought you the best results. As a soulful business mentor, what gets me frustrated the most is probably this part. No one has taught you how to become an efficient business owner and entrepreneur when you decided to become a coach.
When you are not tracking your activities and their results, how will you know where to shift your focus? You don’t have to be a business analyst or a digital marketing expert to get the basics right. A simple excel sheet and a basic CRM system are great tools to get you started. In addition to asking your customers how they found you. It always surprises me how many coaches still don’t know where exactly their customers came from.
The more you grow, the more you want to reinvest into this aspect of your business over time. You could outsource the monitoring, you could educate yourself more on this topic or you could allocate some of your expenses towards automation & reporting tools. If you’re not there yet, stick with the Excel sheets at least. Just have something in place to monitor your growth.
Not pivoting when your own mindset evolves
You don’t need to be afraid of transforming your businesses when you have outgrown your original goals. Having your own coaching practise is an ongoing journey. When you grow on a personal level, it has to reflect professionally as well. You simply can’t stick to your initial business vision when it no longer challenges you. If you do that, it will result only in one thing: becoming your own roadblock that’s holding you back from growth.
In the same way, you help your clients set bigger and more ambitious goals, you’ll end up doing the same. It could mean that you’ll be drawn to a different niche, a new location or feeling the urge to extend your services.
Forgetting about offline marketing
In our digital-first world, it’s easy to forget about the offline ways to grow your coaching business. While online marketing brings amazing results, you should not ignore some traditional methods.
Word of mouth marketing is still one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to bring you new clients. What are you doing now to utilise that? What incentives and referral programs do you offer to your existing customers?
Depending on your niche, you could also look into events, summits, conferences that you could either attend or sponsor. In addition to partnering up with relevant organisations who could send potential customers your way. There are so many other ways that can open doors for your business so try not to forget about the non-digital world when you want to scale your coaching practice.
The burnout avoider solution
There are many great solutions that help you take your coaching business to the next level, however, not many of these will focus on your mental state while you do that. I realised that I’m not the only one who came to this conclusion. As a previous Head of Strategy of a leading coaching company in London, I got to know many skilled coaches. They shared countless stories of overwhelmed coaches within their professional networks. When I started my business mentoring service, suddenly many confused coaches wanted my soulful strategic support.
Eventually, I decided to partner up with a Mindfulness & Vitality Coach to create a group program designed for coaches, blending together business mentoring and mindfulness exercises. Over a 12-week curriculum, coaches can learn the practical essentials of scaling their business while every other week they are working with a Mindfulness & Vitality Coach to help them stay focused and avoid getting overwhelmed.
When we collaborate within our niche, we can create valuable solutions together that multiply our impact. As a coach, you can find myriad ways to unite with other changemakers without burning yourself out.
Go out there and start making meaningful connections.
Timi Orosz, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Timi Orosz, spiritual business mentor, is on a mission to arm professionals within the spiritual industry with essential business and marketing knowledge. She mentors coaches, healers and energy workers and teaches them authentic marketing methods and soulful strategies to grow their spiritual businesses.
CEO at the age of 30, burnt out at 32. After quitting her CEO job she spent a few months living in a jungle in Sri Lanka to find a more authentic business path. She started Connect One Marketing in January 2020 to help impact-driven entrepreneurs make a bigger impact by scaling their businesses.
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