by Suzanne Hazelton In order to raise your coaching game, I’d like to offer you a tool to ensure you’re focused on higher value activities in your business. This will free up more of your time and give you space and energy to attract the clients you want to work with. Most newbie coaches will work with anyone, but as your skills and experience develop you can refine and offer a premium service to a specific target group, attracting the type of clients that you want to work with. The idea for this article came from working recently with an established author and coach who works broadly with the teaching profession. She was just beginning to return to work after a period of illness. She needed more clients and felt that she needed to do more “marketing” in addition to her coaching work. She was concerned that with her returning levels of health, additional marketing activities might be too much. Rather than “do more”, we agreed that she could “work smarter”, but first she had to take a look at the activities that she really enjoyed and where she added value. She had to understand which activities weren’t in her “flow”, identify activities that weighed her down, so that she could begin the process of stopping or outsourcing. As part of this process we also began to get clear on who she really wanted to be working with, so that she could begin attracting this type of client. Getting you more time First list the activities you currently do in your coaching business – activities that you don’t currently outsource – perhaps even include activities that you’d like to do, but don’t have the time or inclination. Once you have the list, you can use the skills / fun matrix (figure 1). It’s a deceptively simple tool: a three by three grid, with skills on the vertical axis and fun across the horizontal axis. This is how much fun they are FOR YOU, against a relative measure of skill level, which is also related to the external monetary value of obtaining the skill. For example, in some smaller businesses, the owner cleans their own office. Where I live, I can hire a cleaner for £10 per hour whereas hourly fees of a coach are significantly higher. Thus if you do the cleaning – even if you find it fun – the task would go in a lower skill level box.
Aim to get to a more granular (detailed) level of the tasks … not just “marketing”, but list the sub-tasks. Begin to think of the tasks that only you can do. The goal is to “outsource” some of the low fun, low skill work, thus freeing up your time and energy to work on the things that are high value AND that you enjoy. Getting clear on who your ideal client is Of course before you attract lots of new clients – you have to have the space in your diary to handle them, hence the first step of understanding what you can and want to get done by someone else – or outsource. This may not happen overnight – but having a clear idea of what you want to outsource, will ensure that when you do the task for what might be the last time, you document it – with a view to being able to give it to someone else. The more specific you are about your “ideal client”, the easier it is to create your marketing message.
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