Who’s Sarah Short And Why Is She Making Waves In The Coaching Industry?

Me! I’m Sarah Short.

I’m Sarah Short and I started The Coaching Revolution in 2017 to help qualified coaches to learn how to market their coaching comfortably, confidently and competently, so that they could make a living from coaching.

I have a background in both education and sales. I have owned and run a drama school (in the UK and in Botswana) and an English Language School on the south coast of England. In both roles, my job was not just that of principal, it was also that of sales and marketer.

I found coaching in 2009 and realised what a transformational skill it is. It literally changes lives — I know, it changed mine.

The Years Pass….

Since that day in 2017, when I was raging in my kitchen about the incredibly high failure rate of coaches in business, I have been on a continuous learning journey.

What I now know to be true is that the ICF statistic that says that 82% of coaching businesses fail in their first two years is not quite accurate. Specifically, the ‘first two years’ part is a red herring. It’s not that coaches thrive for 20+ months and then something bad happens, it’s that 2 years is about as long as a coach can work hard for without ever engaging a client.

Or probably more likely, having engaged one or two, but charged ‘mates rates’.

I also know that coaches believe that if their coaching skills are good enough, their clients will find them. This is just not true.

It’s Not About Coaching Skills!

It’s not coaching skills that are lacking in coaches, it’s marketing skills. Add a lack of sales skills in there too and what you have is a talented coach who cannot find clients.

‘Hope’ is not a marketing strategy. No matter how much you want your clients to find you, if you’re not making yourself visible to exactly the kind of clients you want to work with, they won’t find you. Sitting nicely and hoping to be noticed is for wallflowers, not coaches.

Your business is like a weighing scale. 50% of the necessary skills sit on either side of the scales.

Delivery Skills

On one side of the scales are your coaching skills. On this side sits every single qualification, practitioner or facilitator certificate you might have and every workshop or webinar about coaching skills you’ve ever attended.

These are the skills you use for delivering your service. They are the client-facing skills that we all love.

Creating The Opportunities To DO The Delivery

On the other side of the scale sit the skills you need to create opportunities to actually do that delivery. These are an utterly different set of skills.

They are marketing and sales skills.

These two skills are almost always something at which the coach believes they are poor at. They feel that selling coaching is pushy and salesy and worst of all, that people will judge them negatively for having to stoop as low as marketing their coaching. After all, if your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you — right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

No One Wants To Buy Coaching

There are precious few people out there looking for a coach. If you don’t believe me, then go to the Google keyword tool and see how few searches there are around coaching.

People don’t buy processes, they buy outcomes. Specifically they buy solutions to problems that they have that keep them awake at 3am.

We teach coaches how to figure out what’s keeping their ideal client awake at 3am, and how to articulate a solution to that problem. A solution that includes their coaching.

The Problem With Marketing Coaching Specifically

If the professional service you want to marketing is, law, or accounting, or architecture, or therapy or literally any other professional service you have a head start on marketing a coaching business. That head start is that the potential client already knows what those professional services are.

With coaching there are two problems 1) no one understands what coaching is and 2) they think they do and they’re wrong.

In order to market a professional service that no one understands, you need to market the outcome and not the process. Talking to people about the coaching process never attracts clients (other than other coaches of course!).

This is where we help. We teach coaches how to describe the outcome that their clients can expect from coaching.

It’s A Revolution?

The Coaching Revolution is so much more than a training organisation. It is a movement towards access to coaching for all. The more coaches who understand how to market themselves, the more people get coached. The more people who get coached, the better the world is.

And, as an added bonus, our mentoring programme is ICF accredited.

It truly is a revolution.